My primary desktop is still running Win7 Pro (64-bit). I had intended to wait until now to take advantage of the free Win10 upgrade. My thinking was to let most of the first year bugs and other issues get sorted before jumping to the new OS. In the interim, I disabled all the nagware/trickware updates MS has been pushing out for the past year. Now that the expiration of the free upgrade offer is quickly approaching, it's time to decide whether to proceed or stick with Win7.
My experience with Win8 and then 8.1 have not been good. My wife bought a new laptop that had 8 on it. While getting it setup for my home network I was quickly frustrated by all the unneeded changes made to do simple tasks, and the completely unintuitive interface. It was eventually upgraded to 8.1 but the restored "Start menu" seems mostly cosmetic. And recently it again upgraded itself to Win10, without asking permission and without her knowledge. Once day it was running 8.1, then the next morning it was running 10. I don't spend a lot of time on her laptop, but everything continued to work although there was some funkiness getting the scanner to work again.
Meanwhile I've been reading this and other sources about some the intrusive "spyware" and other questionable practices from Microsoft. My understanding is most of this can be disabled, but they don't make it straightforward to do.
My other big concern is the limited control over patching and accepting updates. With Win7 I've had to resort to researching individual patches, and I wait for a week or two before installing to see if the userbase is finding issues.
Of all the new features I would care about in Win10, there are really only two that sounded good: Cortana and DirectX 12. Cortana sounded cool, but my understanding is it requires the aforementioned questionable privacy features to be enabled to work. And DirectX 12 so far has not resulted in any must-have games.
So... my mindset has gone from happy about getting a free OS, to deep suspicion and mistrust. I know Win7 will continue to get security patches until 2020.
My quandaries:
• I don't want to run Windows (any version) without current security patches.
• I don't want to have to pay for Win1x later if I can get it now for free.
• If I go with Win10, I will disable all the "spyware" and configure for maximum privacy. Not sure how much that breaks actual functionality, other than Cortana.
(And no I'm not getting into Linux as a desktop replacement, so don't suggest that. I use Linux all the time, on servers. But for my personal desktop I need to run Windows software.)
To summarize, right now about the only motivation I have for upgrading to Win10 is the end of security patches in 2020 for Win7.
Thoughts? For those that have made the jump from Win7 to Win10, how has your experience been? How much have the privacy concerns affected you, and how much effort have you put into remediating them?
If you've read this far, thanks! :)
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