Too good for a number scheme, Windows 10 announced for 2015

[isiolia]

It might just work without messing with it. The newer update system they have in 10 seems to be far, far better about going out and grabbing working hardware drivers all on its own.

One way to do it would be to get another HDD (or SSD), clone your current drive to it, and then do the free upgrade. Secures you the free copy, and you can entirely reformat and set up 10 from scratch later once you've done that. Or, if it's problematic, put the old drive back in (the old key remains valid anyway).

10, as a product, isn't bad. It's the pushing people to upgrade that's been less than ideal, even if it's logical for MS to really want folks to upgrade.

[Sarge]

Ha. Ha ha ha. Don't make me upgrade...

My laptop is an Alienware M11x R2. Same graphics chipset.

[ExedExes]

Today MS announced that they will play a little nicer with their upgrade prompt.
I guess losing $10K to someone who had the worst upgrade experience ever helped.

GWX Control Panel and Never10 still rock though.

[Tanooki]

If Windows 10 isn't so bad, I guess they fixed the problems with it from earlier in its life? It crippled this new laptop horribly so. Just decided one day probably after some stealth update to run one of the cores on my CPU in overdrive (100%) and it throttled the crap out of the speed of my machine to a crawl when it would do it. I was forced within 3 days of being unable to reset back to 8.1 to downgrade to this junk OS. I tolerate 8 because I installed classicshell so it runs like and looks like Windows 7.

I liked 10, it was pretty slick but that blow out forced my hand, wasn't a fan of its snooping either but that you can disable at the cost of Cortana.

[Xeogred]

Today MS announced that they will play a little nicer with their upgrade prompt.
I guess losing $10K to someone who had the worst upgrade experience ever helped.

GWX Control Panel and Never10 still rock though.

Never10 is new to me, I'll have to grab that. But I sincerely hope these forced upgrades truly go away by the end of the month. I'm not holding my breath though.

As I've said in this thread, I'm all for the inevitable future of Windows 10 for my NEXT PC build. But this Win7 machine has rocked and I plan to keep it that way.

[ExedExes]

I liked 10, it was pretty slick but that blow out forced my hand, wasn't a fan of its snooping either but that you can disable at the cost of Cortana.

There's something I found today that gives you the ability to stop all the Windows 10 "snooping" in one place, as well as other useful on/off features.

ShutUp10

Since I don't have 10 on any of my computers, I can't vouch for its effectiveness but the screenshots are very convincing. If I had that much fine control over all those spying features, I'd probably not hate 10 all that much. But as it stands, 8.1 is rock solid on all my machines, and I created a 64-bit DVD of 10 from here (scroll down to "download tool now") so if I ever decide to upgrade it'll be on my terms.

[Tanooki]

I think I'll do that right now, forgot about that little gem of a back door to 10, throwing it on a USB or DVD. I'm going USB, got a couple pointless sticks, one being 4GB and it needs 3GB so that's damn convenient if I remember where I put the thing.

One concern, it talked about entering (ie buying) a windows 10 product key, can't say I have one and don't plan to buy one. How's this going to work out before the cut off?

[Sarge]

That is an excellent idea. I think I will do that. Probably easier than doing it through MSAA at the university.

[samsonlonghair]

We have one month remaining for the free upgrade. I'm going to reformat all my old computers with Win7, and then upgrade to Win10. It's a fantastic operating system as far as I'm concerned - Maybe the best version of Windows ever.

[Ack]

I went ahead and took the plunge on both my desktop and laptop. The experiences of both have been very different. The desktop has for the most part run swimmingly, with only a couple of oddities such as booting taking a bit and hanging on shut downs because a program refuses to close(though I've seen this in Windows 7 too). The laptop however is a nightmare. Apparently it just doesn't have the memory to keep up, so it chugs to the point that simply clicking the icon to bring up the start menu may take minutes before it works. I'm not happy about this.