Are you aware that if you click on the white Windows logo in the bottom right of your screen beside the clock you can order a free advance copy of Windows 10 (worth £100)? It’s for a limited time only.
If someone hadn’t told me I wouldn’t know about it as I ignored the thing when it popped up about three weeks ago.
I’m signed up for both my laptops. One Win8.1, one Win7. End of next month, I believe.
Sadly my emergency reserve laptop decided to turn it’s toes up just as I was registering it for the offer.
http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/windows-10-upgrade?&SEMID=1&WT.srch=1&ocid=win10-61launch_SEM_GOO_MSBranded_ACT-UPG_en-GB_windows%2010%20free%20upgrade&wt.mc_id=win10-61launch_SEM_GOO_MSBranded_ACT-UPG_en-GB_windows%2010%20free%20upgrade
I registered.
And then in a fit of paranoia registered again about two weeks later (on the same PC)
I think I might break the internet at the end of July
AIUI we’ll all have a year from the release date to decide if we want to “upgrade”. Even after signing up you can change your mind. The main reason they want you to say yes at the earliest opportunity is that the download is likely to be in teh order of 3G and they don’t want everybody to shout at once so it’ll appear on your hard drive in dribs and drabs ready for installation.
I don’t think the figure of £100 really ever comes into the reckoning. Upgrades to Windows 8 were a lot less than that when it first came out and a lot of people now have Windows 8 (with Bing) versions installed (well people with cheap fondleslabs and £200 laptops probably do) and that version was free anyway.
Be very careful when seeing the word upgrade. A lot of people didn’t consider that to be the right description when Windows 8 came out. Some programs will fail to work and so may some peripherals. I’m not trying to put you off, I’m very likely to go for it myself but that will only be once I’ve convinced myself I can do everything I do now as least as well. It’ll mean that all my home PCs will be at the same software standard (which is a good thing) and, as MS claim that this will be the last version of Windows (it will just be constantly updated from now on), any new PCs will have the same OS.
If you only use your PC for internet browsing/email/Office it should be fine but I also use mine for DJ-ing and music production and I have external hardware associated with that so I can’t really upgrade until I know everything will work…that day may never come as I use a quite old fashioned Native Instruments audio interface which is built like a tank and has never let me down but I bet they won’t release Win10 drivers for it…we shall see.
I don’t think, from what I’ve read, that the differences between Win7/Win8.1 and Win10 are going to be that great, under the hood. If your musical gear already works with your current hardware and that hardware is Win10-compatible, then I don’t think new drivers will be needed for what already works on 7 or 8.
Everything I used on my old 32-bit machine worked absolutely fine when I upgraded from Vista to Win7. The only problem I had was when moving stuff over from that machine to a newer 64-bit laptop. My email program that I’d been using for years and years wouldn’t work at all on 64-bit hardware and was no longer supported.
I’ve been trialing preview versions of Windows 10 via Microsoft’s Windows Insider scheme.
The latest build was released about a month ago, and has a few issues, but these are expected to be fixed this week with the release of another build.
I’ve only had one serious issue running other applications, and that has since been fixed.
If you are planning to upgrade, it will take a couple of hours to install once downloaded. The installation process itself is fairly straightforward, just sit back and wait for the progress meter to reach 100%.
I’m now running build 10240 of Windows 10, which is supposedly going to be the version released to the public in just over a week.
My only major concern is OneDrive, Microsoft’s cloud storage facility. The version in Windows 10 behaves differently to that in 8.1, and will sync absolutely everything from the word go, as they’ve removed the placeholder files. More worrying is that it’s managed to lose some of my files completely after editing them – thankfully I can re-create them.
Just updated my Windows 8.1 machine and my main Windows 7 machine without problems. The graphics card on my reserve Win7 machine (which I thought had died, but mysteriously resurrected itself last week almost unnoticed) is apparently unsupported in Win10 by NVidia, so it looks like it’ll have to remain on “7” for now.
No issues thus far.
Updated yesterday. All fine here