Windows 10

[RandBlade]

Received a notification suggesting I should Get Windows 10 as a free upgrade on my Win 8 Laptop. I think from memory someone here has upgraded early already, does anyone have any feedback on 10 so far?

Win 8 was a great disappointment and never grew on me. Not sure if 10 is going to be better or worse.

I like the four window snap as an improvement, I use snap all the time but often find it frustrating to be limited to two windows.

EDIT: The reservation is for an upgrade on July 29 or after I believe.

[Khendraja'aro]

Use a VM and install the preview and you can see for yourself.

[Ominous Gamer]

Windows 10 launches 7/29, so you got the date right. Those eligible for a free upgrade should start seeing the notification icon in their task bar. In an effort to distance myself from Creative and their Audigy line I'm using some tweaked/hacked drivers to get Dolby Digital via optical out via my motherboard. That already requires to me to run Windows 8 in "test mode" so I'm going to wait a bit to see how people say its handled in Windows 10.

[Timbuk2]

Yep ...



... and this is from Vista on my machine, not 8.

Who gets this free upgrade? Anyone with a Vista / 8 licence?

Why free?

[littlelolligagged]

Because they want people to not feel screwed and upgrade.

[RandBlade]

I thought they'd said it was for Seven onwards. Interesting that yours is included. As for why free, I think they're worried about losing market share to alternatives and 8 was such a flop that it wasn't adopted and thus few decent modern apps are being written for it. Plus as Lolli wrote many 8 adaptors would feel screwed otherwise.

By making it free, Microsoft can get a large market share straight up to 10. Besides the bulk of their sales come on licences for new machines not upgrades.

Interestingly they're also saying 10 will be the "last" OS so nobody would pay for an upgrade again afterwards (upgrading the OS would come incrementally in patches not in generations).

[earthJoker]

I am pretty sure they want to get rid of all those Vista machines still out there. Microsoft currently has too many versions out they and more important - developers for their platform - have to support.

[wiggin]

Yes, I think this is a sound business decision. OSes have changed a lot recently, and switching to an evolutionary model (rather than a 'huge release' model) works from a lot of perspectives - it minimizes the need for expensive legacy support, provides developers with a more unified market to target, allows for rapid adoption of a new product - and lets Microsoft roll out (or roll back) new features quickly to a big audience in order to test them. They also won't fall into the pitfalls of people waiting to purchase new equipment until the next iteration (it's crazy how PC sales to businesses fluctuate with the Windows release schedule). I think it's very clever.

Already signed up for my upgrade - I recently bought a new laptop because I desperately needed one, but only was willing to deal with Win8 because I knew I'd be able to upgrade to Win10 rapidly. Otherwise, I would have gotten downgrade rights to Win7.

[Ominous Gamer]

A unified OS, across devices and time, also means more developer support and thus more sales in the app store which Microsoft gets its 30% cut of. Mobile developers are still butthurt over wasting their time with windows mobile 7

[Wraith]

I have this installed now, because I had heard that it was good enough for release.

It's pretty solid, but it is not good enough for release. It's still got some fairly big bugs in it, though nothing yet that would prevent me from doing what I want to on the computer, they're just annoying. The experience itself is decent though, and I like how lightweight it is.

[Khendraja'aro]

Do you actually have the latest release or merely the latest ISO?

[Wraith]

Latest release. I think. I also opted in for bleeding edge builds.

The bugs really aren't showstopping, they're things like start menu/explorer acting funny and needing to be restarted. I haven't seen anything that interferes with other applications yet.

I also took the Visual Studio 2015 RC, because why not. Haven't messed with that yet.

[RandBlade]

Would you recommend taking this over Win 8 or hold off? I can't be bothered with dual booting and am tempted to upgrade immediately. Got a Win 8 Laptop and a (newer) Win 7 PC I built. Tempted to upgrade the Laptop, wait to see if there's any major bugs then upgrade my PC.

The PC has business critical software and data on it while my Laptop is mainly for games, Firefox and Office so I'm not just being silly.

[Khendraja'aro]

Yeah, tried the latest iteration of VS as well. Haven't been able to find out how to enable Smart Unit Tests - the docs speak that I simply need to right-click on a function and it's one of the options. Yet I don't see any such options.

Also, the Universal App SDK isn't quite there yet - it's missing a bit of boilerplate code and I'm loathe to have to program basic stuff like navigation between pages myself.

[Wraith]

Would you recommend taking this over Win 8 or hold off? I can't be bothered with dual booting and am tempted to upgrade immediately. Got a Win 8 Laptop and a (newer) Win 7 PC I built. Tempted to upgrade the Laptop, wait to see if there's any major bugs then upgrade my PC.

Hold off for now. It's less than one month from official release. The bugs I've noticed seem few enough that it's a pretty safe bet it'll be in good shape by then.

[RandBlade]

I'm not sure how you'd upgrade early, I thought you needed to be a beta tester or something? Not looked into it.

I meant from your experience so far, how confident would you be at recommending an upgrade on official release? Sorry if that wasn't clear.

[Wraith]

Not very at this point, but that's mostly because I've only played with it for one evening. Ask again a week from now, once I've had time to build up confidence.

[Steely Glint]

Got a real tricky, annoying situation with my OS.

I got a new computer, and I put Windows 7 on it. But it's an upgrade version. Before, when I installed Windows 7 to a blank system, I remember it just asking for an XP disk but it didn't this time around, and now I can't register my key because it's an upgrade version. Now, what I could do is install Windows XP, then go to 7, then go to 10. But my new computer has SATA hard drives only and the XP installer doesn't work on SATA drives because drivers blahblah. Apparently, the work around for this is to create a special version of the XP installer with the correct drivers on it but at the moment I can't be bothered so I'm stuck with Windows 7 with no background and annoying pop-ups all the time.

[Wraith]

The last time I ran into this I installed the OS, and then upgraded that OS to the exact same version, and that let my upgrade key work. Basically, upgrade Windows 7 to Windows 7

[Wraith]

Yeah, tried the latest iteration of VS as well. Haven't been able to find out how to enable Smart Unit Tests - the docs speak that I simply need to right-click on a function and it's one of the options. Yet I don't see any such options.

It seems like they only run in x86, and won't work right if you only compile in x64.

They don't seem very useful to me for generating unit tests, though doing a run on a function could be useful in identifying boundary conditions and doing quick verification.

[RandBlade]

Surely Win 10 should be aimed more at x64 than x86?

[Khendraja'aro]

This is about the development environment, Rand.

[RandBlade]

I get that. But surely they should be encouraging and enabling x64 development is the point? It's ridiculous that in 2015 most new programs still seem to get developed in x86 instead. Microsoft should be fully enabling x64 development.

[Khendraja'aro]

You can compile to x64 just fine, Rand.

[RandBlade]

I may have misunderstood but I read what Wraith wrote as saying something wasn't working with x64 that is for x86 which seems odd.

[Khendraja'aro]

The developer tools have this quirk that if you set the project to x64 only that some tools don't work. Probably something low on the priority list for rewriting as developing for Windows Phone (which is ARM) has a similar issue - you can only do XAML layouts through the UI designer if you set the project to x86 (and not ARM).

It's a legacy issue most likely and since the workaround is communicated clearly, it's not much of an issue for me.

[Steely Glint]

The last time I ran into this I installed the OS, and then upgraded that OS to the exact same version, and that let my upgrade key work. Basically, upgrade Windows 7 to Windows 7

I'll try this as soon as I can locate the part of the box with the key on it

I will probably be more surprised than I should be if it works.

[Khendraja'aro]

Such problems should stop with Windows 10, by the way. As soon as you use your Windows 7 / 8 key to upgrade to 10, this key actually becomes a Windows 10 key.

The drawback, of course, is that you can't downgrade anymore.

[Wraith]

I'll try this as soon as I can locate the part of the box with the key on it

I will probably be more surprised than I should be if it works.

I was surprised when it worked for me.

I vaguely remember hearing something about this trick no longer working, but I don't know what version it stopped working on, or if I'm even thinking of the right trick that was disabled.

If you're planning on upgrading to 10 anyways, you could just grab an ISO off the internet and install that straight out. The keys are freely available right now, but I'm not sure what that'll mean for you when Windows 10 has it's proper release.

[Flixy]

A bit off topic, but I used my win7 key from an old pc I don't use anymore on a friend's laptop to fix it. What happens if I turn the old pc back on? Will it stop working? Or just give the this copy is not genuine message?