[9876543210]

a435843,

Have to agree with most everything you've suggested. Except, so far, for one thing:

Originally Posted by a435843

I've heard that once 10 is installed, no matter the version, there's no going back to your 7/8 version. My fear is that if you have a UEFI "BIOS", 10 might disable your UEFI from ever using 7 or 8 again. So, while I like 987...'s idea of installing it on a swapable SSD, and leaving your 7/8 copy & license on your original HD, I would be surprised if your PC boots if you swapped the old HD back in, especially once 10 is out of beta.

To this point, I have swapped hard drive's once back to Win 7 and had no problems booting up. Win 7 booted normally and I noticed no glitches. But I don't have a UEFI Bios. I'm using an older (maybe 5 or 6 years) Dell Latitude E series which has been a pretty good machine so far. So, at least to this point, someone can go back to Win 7 with no problems (at least if they have an older machine).

A couple of other things I've noticed while playing with 10 today. So far, the new Mail app sucks. Set it up and jeez is it plain jane. Sent an email to myself and it worked but it brought none of my other emails in. Still not sure why. I then downloaded the newest version of Thunderbird and it looked and worked just fine. MS has a lot of work to do here.

The new browser "Project Spartan or MS Edge" seems OK. Looks like Google's browser and seems a bit faster than Pale Moon. But I haven't really played with it much and probably won't until I better understand its security capabilities. Pale Moon (thus Firefox) seems to be working just fine. All of the security extensions went right in except for Ghostery which installed ackwardly but seems to be working OK now.

Installed Adobe CS2 with no problems at all. Which was really surprising. Only total rejection by Win 10 so far has been Zone Alarm. All the rest of my security apps, internet apps and utilities have gone in with no problem. I should say that I did download the newest versions of each so that probably helped. But also haven't found a single app which says its safe for Win 10.

It did have all my drivers except for 3. I think I know what two of them are but not sure of the third. Just haven't had time to mess with them yet.

One minor problem which is really annoying is creating shortcuts on the desktop. You can't just drag and drop an icon from the start menu to the desktop. As I understand things, you have to go into Explorer, find the executable on the C:\program files\ directories and then right click and drag the program executable onto the desktop. Then select to create a shortcut. Really a stupid and dangerous way to do things which needs to be fixed ASAP. Somebody is going to left click and drag the executable, not know what they've done, and trash their program. There may be another way to do it but thats the only way I've found so far.

Enough for now. Still finding it OK but there are problems. But no BSODs as of yet.

The loss of true file search. Evidently, there's this abomination called Cortana, which is a lame attempt at ripping off iOS's Siri. You can't search your files, or their contents anymore, you can only search on data within MS's dumbed-down apps and Bing...that's crap. Oh, and your search history is collected by MS, no opt-out. This also leaves a commensurate loss of Explorer functionality.

Haven't messed with Cortana yet although they keep offering it once in a while. I'll get to it eventually.

MS's behavior in installing adware/nagware onto Windows computers, under the guise of "Important Windows Updates", in order to sucker people into doing their beta testing for them, and get 10 on as many 7/8 PC's as possible quickly, in order to make it look like 10 is a runaway hit (since not enough people are going to go out and buy a license or a new PC at a fast enough pace). I want to decide whether I want Windows 10, and I will decide when I feel like it; this is NOT an "Important" Windows Update.

Agree about the nagware but not about beta testing. Personally, I've not had many bad experiences doing it and actually find it kind of fun. You get some idea of where things are headed and a pretty good idea of "state of the art". And with 10, MS has made it pretty simple to tell them what you like and don't.

I guess I should explain at this point that as a BETA tester, telling MS (or some other company) how things are going is really your job. They want to know what you like and what you don't. They also carefully monitor how things are going with the machine. They need to know now what problems there are and how to fix them. At least for now, I don't mind that. But, depending on how things go, I'll probably go back to 7. But time will tell.