What you need to know about Windows 10

As you may know, Windows 10 was released yesterday.  You may have also noticed for the past few weeks a new button in your notification area that would allow you to reserve your copy of Windows 10.  For this release of Windows, Microsoft announced that the upgrade would be free (for the first year) to people who owned a licensed copy of Windows 7 or 8.  After that year is up, you will have to pay for a license to upgrade.

Here at QuickFix we have been testing pre-release versions of Windows 10 for some time.  This version contains a whole host of changes.  The two that are of most interest to users are the return of the start menu and Microsoft Edge.  With Windows 8, Microsoft did away with the Start Menu in an attempt to make a more touch friendly user experience.  While this worked well on phones and tablets, it was not intuitive for use with a mouse and keyboard, and it required users to learn a whole different way of doing things.  Because of this, Windows 8 was much loathed, even if there were ‘under the hood’ improvements.  With Windows 10, the Start Menu is a bit different, but we have found fairly easy to use.  Microsoft Edge is a new browser made to replace Internet Explorer.  While it does seem faster, being a new product, the jury is still out.  This is of less importance for many users as you can still easily install Chrome or Firefox as your browser.

With all that said, it would seem like Windows 10 is a solid system out of the box.  We have one major concern though, and that is compatibility.  Even a company as large as Microsoft cannot even come close to testing a new version of Windows on every possible hardware and software combination in existence.  This means that when upgrading to Windows 10, many users may find issues relating to their specific computing environment, where various programs will not work or worse.  We have seen this with the roll-out of Windows Vista, 7 and 8, as well as with major and minor Windows updates.

So, where does that leave you?  For most individual users and small business users, our answer would be wait.  There is no compelling reason to jump right away, especially since the upgrade is free for a year.  For individuals, wait a few months and revisit the subject.  If you like contact us and we will tell you about our current thoughts on upgrading, based off of the experience we gain in the interim.  If you are a business, you should have a trusted IT partner evaluate your network and computing needs to see if upgrading makes sense for your business, and that the roll-out is planned and staged to be as non-intrusive as possible.

As always of you have questions or would like us to help you upgrade your systems you can contact us anytime!