Windows 10 upgrade?

[drz]

I had a horrible experience with Windows 10 upgrade and lost a lot of data in personal files. The upgrade hides your old data in new places. Some is fairly easy to find and some like data for some programs very hard or impossible to locate. I found Windows10 often froze my screen and was much slower to load or respond than windows 7. Then when it did one of its automatic updates, all the documents disappeared again. Any data I added under Windows 10 in the 20 days I used it also seems permanently gone and lost for good. The Windows 10 updates filled my hard drive to the point I could not do any roll back either so I put in a larger hard drive and reloaded Windows 7 and have to reload all my programs and try retrieve as much data as I can from my back ups to restore my computer to good functioning again.

What experience have other people had with Windows 10? I don't like windows 8 since it seems harder to use and 10 seemed a bit better but was less stable for me and performed much slower.

[PattyL]

This is great information! Thanks so much.

[Pete]

I bought a new computer a few months ago as the old one was dying. I upgraded to Window 10 from 8.1 with no difficulty. I did spend a bit of time making Windows 10 look like Windows 7 so my wife could navigate it ok. I didn't experience any data retrieval problems, probably thanks to a new machine that's not cluttered with old updates -- yet.

[Birdie]

What experience have other people had with Windows 10? I don't like windows 8 since it seems harder to use and 10 seemed a bit better but was less stable for me and performed much slower.

On the day Win10 was released I spent a couple hours in the Windows store at the local mall. I've been a software developer since long before Windows so I've got a different perspective. I look at a new version to see what they've changed behind the scenes rather than interface changes. I stuck a microSD card in one of the tablets and ran my own program off of it, while nobody was watching. It allows me to expose all the stuff Microsoft has hidden, things a user would never be interested in and couldn't look at anyway.

Windows 10 is not even close to being ready for release. Short story is: it will run slower because it's full of new junk you don't need and old junk you can no longer disable. There are a bunch of limitations like it won't run on a 7" tablet. Bigger or smaller is OK but not 7". I couldn't disable things like antivirus software, it won't let you, you have to install something else to disable Windows Defender.

They could have just put the normal start button back in Win 8.1 as an option, or reverted and added the new bios support to Win 7.

[MaxD]

Birdie, Why disable windows defender and install another AV software you may have to pay for? Despite the hype, all AV are equally good (or useless, really).

[Birdie]

Birdie, Why disable windows defender and install another AV software you may have to pay for? Despite the hype, all AV are equally good (or useless, really).

I don't want to install another one. I want none. I have never run antivirus software and I've never had a virus. But that's just one of the things you can't control in Win10. Plus there are a bunch of new "things" running that you can't identify, yet, and I don't know what they're doing other than hogging processor.

I carry a 7" Windows 8.1 tablet everywhere I go. At the Windows store I handed it to the tech guy and asked him how to disable the automatic updates, and can you do it in Win10. (It's not actually possible even tho there are settings for it, I just make certain wifi is off before turning off the tablet) He poked at my tablet for a couple minutes and declared it was off, would no longer do automatic updates, and returned the tablet to me. I immediately pressed the off button and got a blue screen telling me not to turn it off until it finished updates... installing update 1 of 89... You can't turn it off. My only option was to put it in my lap and wheel my chair out of the mall and down the road until I got out of wifi range, as fast as possible. Or sit in the mall for hours waiting which there is not enough battery to do anyway. I was ready to go home rather than sit there waiting for my computer to be messed up with updates. Once it lost wifi, and after several minutes, it gave up installing updates up and let me turn it off.

So I went back into the mall and to the store where he sincerely appologized. I let him give it another try after resetting Win8.1 to factory since it would no longer run. He still insisted it was possible but he couldn't do it. Turned it off again with wifi connected and it started updates. I got home and reset it to factory, again. I just make certain the wifi is off before I turn it off and I don't keep anything in the tablet memory, it's all on a microSD.

[Dirty Don]

Here's a 'fight': did I hear anyone say Apple????????? No problemo!

[Birdie]

Here's a 'fight': did I hear anyone say Apple????????? No problemo!

Lemme tell you... I gave up on apple years ago. It was far worse.

[mishb]

We haven't had any problems with it installed on the desktop.
I'm not keen to install it on my laptop because, for one, Ancestry and My Heritage are not compatible with Windows 10, and I'm not prepared to lose my access to these/

[drz]

We haven't had any problems with it installed on the desktop.
I'm not keen to install it on my laptop because, for one, Ancestry and My Heritage are not compatible with Windows 10, and I'm not prepared to lose my access to these/

One down side for me is having to upgrade my Legacy Genealogy program to save my genealogical records because I can't down load the version 7 anymore that i was using since they have a newer version 8 now so I will have to buy that to recover my data. Right now I am working with some rescue CD programs to see how much info I can get off the hard drive that Windows 10 messed up so badly.

I also had a lot of trouble with some malware program that kept changing my home page and search engines after re-installing my programs again. The good thing about doing a fresh re-install is getting rid of lots of old junk that accumulates on a computer just from daily use.

I also will be more diligent about data backups and ability to restore my operating system if it crashes again since this was a good lesson.