So who's looking to upgrade when the full product is released in the near-future? It looks to me like they've put a lot of work into this one, and most importantly the Start menu makes a welcome return.
I'd like to upgrade, but I'm not sure why it doesn't seem to like my laptop's bluetooth, anyone know how easy is will be to upgrade then roll back to 8.1 if it doesn't work?
I'm not trying to be a smart-arse, but a free windows OS is a gift horse that very much should be looked in the mouth, considering how ubiquitously easy it already was and always has been to get for free.
Piracy and license breaking means nothing to the sort of people who grew up copying game cassettes on their parent's hi-fi. You only had to know that one lad who worked behind the desk at PC World to come over and install Windows 95 for you. Disc-burning was already a thing by the time Windows 98 came about. Then torrents happened.
I'm surprised it's taken them this long to yield considering they've always known this to be the case, and make their real money from business clients.
It's only a free upgrade for a year, so they can encourage the migration of their userbase from Win 7 and 8 versions, because supporting that many operating systems is a drain on resources.
Everyone else has to pay £99. The OS is on sale right now, you can buy it from PC World.
A moron who plays PC games, one would assume, since they mostly come out on Windows OS and they're skintthey don't want to give Microsoft their hard earned giros.
Although, with this free upgrade thing, if you are a filthy pirate, you can get in on the ground floor with your very own legit copy of Win 10 (first time for everything, right?) by exploiting volume licensing.
OK lads, let's say there is someone still running XP until he has the money to build a new gaming PC. What OS should this completely hypothetical person install? 7? 8.1? 10?
Anecdotes about performance aside, this is bloody unlikely. DX11 isn't even mandatory in most games and it's 2015. DX12 wont be a regular occurrence for at least another 3 years and even then It's not going to be mandatory unless it is a Microsoft game and it's been specifically built using DX12.
I'd recommend upgrading, because it's a good OS. Waiting, if you have privacy concerns to see how it plays out. For gaming, 7/8.1 will be more than fine for the foreseeable future. You have a year to decide whether you want Win 10, you might as well wait it out.
If you're on XP and you don't want to pay £80 or whatever it cost for a Win 7 OEM(I'm sure you can get them cheaper than this now), I would tentatively suggest downloading a Win 7 Pro ISO, skipping all the activation gubbins, and popping in a memory stick with your Ethernet driver and a (not riddled with AIDs) copy of KMSPico. Upgrading from Win 7 Pro to Win 10 gives you Win 10 Pro which has far more customisation with regards to your privacy. I was able to turn every bit of intrusive bollocks off, apart from telemetry which I was only allowed to change to basic.
Once it is activated, download all the updates. If the Win 10 reservation box doesn't appear there after an hour from the last restart after upgrading, then follow the guides available online to make it appear in legit copies of windows, which yours now is. You might have to delete your update folder and download the appropriate updates manually, as well as having to change some settings in Windows Update in the services menu. It's easy
Or, buy a Win 7 OEM you filthy pirate. Now you have a copy of legit Win 10 to upgrade to at your leisure.
>>24534 The kind that knows how to pirate Windows properly.
>>24546 Why not go for the Enterprise version, if you're sort of pirating it anyway?
EP offers even more customisation (and, allegedly, ability to turn Telemetry off).
Just downgraded to 8.1. I really liked some of the features of Win 10 - in particular the virtual desktops and Win+Tab application overview thing (basically the things Unity has done for ages). However the performance was noticeably slower on a lot of basic things like web browsing and booting/waking from sleep (gaming performance seemed broadly similar though).
I might go back when Microsoft has updated it more and/or better drivers get released for my laptop (the 'get windows 10' thing hasn't disappeared), but for now 8.1 is a far more complete product to me.
Decided to try it for a few days on my laptop, didn't particularly like it, so last night I rolled it back to Windows 7. And now my trackpad won't work, and neither will the USB mouse, so I can't log in to 7. I'm guessing it's a driver issue that will be fixed as soon as it's logged in and can download the ones it lost, but I have no way of doing that now - anyone know how to log into an account on a Windows 7 machine without using the mouse?
>>24611 >>24612 Balls. Neither Tab nor Enter do anything - there are two accounts, which may be the problem, or the upgrade-downgrade process may have buggered the keyboard as well as the mouse, it seems. Any other suggestions from anyone? I'm reluctant to dig out the install disc and try repairing it from there as it's a multi-boot machine, and when I stuck the disc in last night it seemed to want to do a fresh install rather than detecting and offering to fix what's already there, though it was late and my brain was fuzzy so I may not have been paying enough attention.
>>24615 You're right, I have tried this, and it looks like it's back to the install disc and the possibility of having to start all over again with the partition, and possibly the whole laptop. Balls, and thank god I backed everything up. Cheers for the suggestions anyway though gents.
>>24616 I think you probably knew this was coming, but have you tried turning it off and on again? In particular, try hitting the BIOS to make sure it knows the keyboard is actually there. It's very, very rare, even on a laptop, for Windows to not cotton on to the presence of a keyboard. FWIW, on my desktop at work, the Tab button gets me to my picture, Space or Return gets me to the password prompt, and Enter accepts the password.
>>24617 I have, and although it certainly recognises the keyboard in BIOS, GRUB, and even in Windows Error Recovery when it asks if I want to boot into Safe Mode, no combination of the keys you mentioned (or indeed any others) seems to work. Caps lock doesn't even trigger the warning light. It's bloody odd, frankly - like you, I've never seen Windows refuse to acknowledge a laptop keyboard this way, and I wonder what in the rollback process caused this fuck up.
>>24697 If you think hard drive space or internet usage is something to huff and puff over in 2015, you don't deserve desktop computing. If you think this is a matter of principle where you ought to have freedom over your own device, you're a moron. Most users don't understand Windows Update and their convenience outweighs your silly and contradictory ideals where you cherish an illusory sense control.
That's a valid point. I just find it slightly cuntish that when I bought my laptop with Windows 8 pre-installed I had no idea how fucking sneaky they'd be trying to get me to upgrade to windows 10 - an operating system that seems designed to pilfer my user data for the benifit of MS and its preferred partners.
>>24707 It's not very nice but frankly you agreed to it when you bought the machine with that OS as part of the bundle. MS get away with what they can but the onus is on the consumer to not just blindly take whatever their favourite technology company releases next. I'm not meaning to insult, it's not like I didn't do the same, it's just complacency on the consumer's part. Apple could release a phone tomorrow that explicitly said to its users what it was doing and a myriad more, say, inbuilt DNA sampler directly uploaded to the police and Apple's own profiling database, but people would buy it in their millions because nobody cares.
>>24708 Again, you are completely correct. I tried out Ubuntu the other day thinking a user friendly Linux distro would be less invasive, how wrong I was. Any sage advice for someone not wanting to be tracked and monitored on a PC?
>>24710 >Any sage advice for someone not wanting to be tracked and monitored on a PC?
Not from me, I actually know bugger all about computers and tracking. Just a tad about commercial operations.
>>24710 Debian works well if your not scared of Linux. The only subversive tracking there is what you install yourself (popularity contest, tracking package installation being about as close as it gets to monitoring — but if course its opt-in).
>>24716 Debian popcon is pretty honest about what's collected. You are usually prompted to install it during a new installation but it is an active choice rather than sneaking in through the back door, and if you do install it opting out is as simple as removing the package.