Reaching New Levels with Windows 10

Ok, maybe not actually. LOL.

Conclusion (if you don’t want to read the rest of the post): Don’t upgrade. You lose the ability to control when updates occur, the interface is ugly as shit, and most of your apps will get removed during the upgrade. Oh, and there’s more of the same of MS cramming their shit down your throat only worse. Windows 10 is clearly a downgrade!

I upgraded one of my Thinkpads running Windows 8.1 Pro x64 today to Windows 10 via Windows Update and will now report some of the basic things about it. More will be coming later. I have a lot of screenshots. But for now here are the major things:

1. A LOT of apps got removed. Therefore this seems much less like a smooth upgrade and more like a total system reinstall, although the following apps are among those which remained: Firefox, Thunderbird, Office (upon the first time of opening Word it ran through a setup but then it ran regularly as before), Acrobat, MediaMonkey, Google Earth Pro, Kindle, VLC Media Player, VMWare Workstation, BleachBit, Malewarebytes, VirusTotal Uploader, Manageability Commander Tool, uTorrent.

Some of those that didn’t remain: Photoshop CC 2014, Canon MP Navigator, Canon My Printer, OpenOffice, HexChat, Vuze, Cubase, Finale, Kontakt, Audiograbber, Winamp, Premiere Pro CC, XNView MP, CPU-Z, Console, Daemon Tools Lite, Defraggler, Hard Disk Sentinel, Nero, Speccy, TCPView, Process Explorer, Ultimate Windows Tweaker, Classic Start Menu, USBDeview, CCleaner, KMSpico, PatchMyPC, 7Zip, Lenovo System Update, Revo Uninstaller Pro, Avast AntiVirus, RealVNC.

2. If you create custom shortcuts to any apps that got wiped they also will be deleted. Fortunately they are still available in the following location: C:\Windows.old\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\StartMenu so they can easily be copied back. Personally I prefer to have the dangling (pointing to non-existent apps) shortcuts present so I know what I’m missing and need to reinstall.

3. During install it will ask if you want to disable all these privacy-compromising things and you can disable them all or if its for someone like your mother or neighbor you can leave them all enabled.

4. It will install a bunch of Microsoft apps which you don’t ask for or want and there’s a customize option during the initial setup to customize the apps meaning remove or at least disable as many as possible, unless of course its for your mother or neighbor who might want or use some of them. I noticed that a lot of them seemed to not be uninstallable which I will have to investigate further.

5. If you don’t install Classic Start Menu (from Classic Shell above) the new start menu is basically like a smaller version of the Windows 8 Start screen, crammed with all those MS apps you didn’t choose to install but which they want you to have. Personally I don’t want Photos, Media, Music, Weather, Calendar, Sports, Travel, Mail, or any else of it. Get it off my system. If it was for my mother or neighbor maybe it would be convenient for them.

6. Notifications. In the settings there will be options to have all these different apps send notifications to the lock or other screens. Because I don’t want any of these apps anyways and besides it would be a total waste of time, I disabled all/removed as much as I could. I also think on a regular laptop that that would just be confusing to my mother or my neighbor.

7. The new interface looks like shit. I cannot understand how in the progression of Windows with each new version the interface gets worse and worse. Its almost like they’ve become this big, cynical, draconian company that can’t be bothered to even provide a decent and customizable interface because all the stupid masses deserve is the most basic level of shit.

8. Windows Update settings. I understand why Microsoft wants to kind of force everyone to just automatically get updates all the time, but honestly it can be a major pain in the ass if you are working on something critical on your laptop somewhere and then it just starts going through some resource-hogging update. Professionals may not want or need that.

With the Windows 10 Pro version there is an option to “defer” updates which I think is what I want but I haven’t had time to read up about this. Nonetheless, this is something that many professionals will want to enable if they don’t want their machine to bog down suddenly while working. On the other hand, for fast desktop systems such updating may not be a real problem.

9. Fingerprint login is not working. I reinstalled Lenovo Thinkvantage Fingerprint Software from Lenovo’s support site for the Thinkpad W520, the most recent version of which is for Windows 8.1, but it doesn’t run. This is a big disappointment as one of the big things promoted for Windows 10 was that it would flawlessly support fingerprint login.

10. Under File Explorer options in Control Panel there is now an option “Open File Explorer to” with the following two choices only: Quick Access or This PC. I would like to have seen an option to open to Favorites also.

Furthermore, a lot of my folder views got messed up with the upgrade and have now reverted to detail view instead of list view which I usually prefer.

11. Nice or neat new things: If you right-click on the computer icon on the desktop there’s now a Manage option. It is a fast way to get to Device Manager and computer management tasks.

That’s it for now. This was just a very quick run-through of the most salient things from a Windows 10 upgrade and I will write more in-depth later.

Basically the biggest news, something that I didn’t really see being discussed in any of the many Windows 10 upgrade-related forum posts I’ve been reading, is that it removes a lot of apps. In fact it also wiped a couple shortcuts to PDF books that I had in my custom menu.

Overall despite having to reinstall a lot of apps I guess I’m happy with the upgrade so maybe there will be new levels with Windows 10. Or maybe it will be kind of the same.

Update: Today I reverted the system back to Windows 8.1, which is an option available if the upgrade has been less than one month ago.