Quote:
Originally Posted by GrannyGrump
I must move from Win8 to a new Win10 laptop in the next few days, and hoping that goes smoothly. I have never had contact yet with Win10 -- our (government entity) office is still using Win7.
Any gotcha's I should be watching for?
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Depends.
The biggest gotcha for most folks is that once again, MS has changed around the interface. They brought back the Start Menu that was in Win7, but in an exercise in fixing what
wasn't broken, changed it around. The solution to that was to install the open source
Classic Shell application, which brought back the Win7 Start Menu.
An annoyance here is multiple places to configure things, and needing to remember where a particular configuration needs to be made. There is still the Control Panel for most things, but various common tasks like specifying default programs now get done from a PC Settings screen. Gee, MS. Is it too much to ask to have all configuration done from
one place?
Another issue is that Win10 has telemetry you
can't turn off, and will push critical updates you can't decline. At best, you can specify when updates will be processed. (You can remove an update after installation, but can't prevent it from being applied in the first place.)
These moves make sense in terms of MS's current notion that their customer is the Enterprise, and the core of the user base is corporations with many copies of Windows on the desktop. Windows phones home to to report on its condition so MS can determine what problems are and apply fixes, and critical updates are pushed to insure machine are at current patch levels with current security fixes. I'm actually in favor of that, but I'm a corporate IT type who once worked into the wee hours of the morning helping to remediate a virus infestation on the corporate network. The security hole that allowed it to get in had been patched months previously, but the company had not been enforcing critical updates and the machine that was the entry vector had never gotten the patch.
People had privacy concerns over Windows phoning home, but nothing in the base telemetry gave me privacy heartburn. It was all related to the state of Windows, and didn't identify
me. Windows will also ask you to approve certain default settings when first run. Just say no to all of them. If you discover you actually want one, it can be applied after the fact.
I
do recommend you spend the extra money to get Win10 Pro, not Home, as it provides more control over what Win10 can do. And you might want to install
O&O Shutup, a freeware anti-spying tool from the makers of the O&O Defrag utility that will further control what Win10 phones home.
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Dennis