Advantages over Windows 7?

I have a 4 year old laptop that was updated from Windows 7 to Windows 10 last Wednesday. The recovery screen says that I have 1 month to decide whether to switch back to Windows 7 (I guess I could do it later too, but that would mean a clean install which is rather time consuming). My general impression of Windows 10 is that it is not terrible, but not particularly great either. That is, it does not inspire the reaction of "Why, oh why in the world would you do this?" that I had in response to the changes introduced in Windows 8 or in Gnome 3, but there are some fairly serious problems and no notable advantages. The problems I have are:

1) Boot time went up from under 30 seconds to over 2 minutes due the "black screen" problem (see, for example, this thread). I've seen the problem mentioned in many different places, but there is no universal solution to it.

2) Everything is a little bit slower. Applications in Windows 7 opened practically instantaneously (I have an SSD). With Windows 10, there is a noticeable delay in opening some programs (e.g. Thunderbird, VLC).

3) The fan seems to on a little bit more often.

There's also a bunch of other annoying stuff (e.g. the built-in games have advertisements that you have to pay to get rid of, the interface is slightly uglier, etc.) that I mostly don't care about. The advantages I know of or have noticed are:

1) Task Manager is much nicer than it was in Windows 7. On the other hand, in Windows 7 I haven't actually had to look at the Task Manager so often.

2) Direct X 12. This is nice to have, but given that the laptop is so old, I rather doubt I will be get much use out of it -- laptop GPUs aren't that powerful to begin with and my GPU was mid-range 4 years ago.

So, are there any features that I'm missing? Should I let this laptop live out its life using Windows 7 and move on to Windows 10 with my next machine?

The choice to retain Win10 or go back to Win7 is purely a personal one. Having been in the Insider program since the beginning, and having participated in numerous actual beta testing programs over the decades, I personal was very disappointed by the lack of real improvements in Win10. I tried to upgrade two Win7 laptops to Win10 just to try it out on them, and in both cases, the upgrades failed -- miserably. If I had experienced the performance degradations you have (and I probably would have, if the upgrades had succeeded), the machines' lives on Win10 would have been very short.

Since, like you, I have older hardware, and was never a fan of the "live tiles" UI, to me, there is no compelling reason to switch over to Win10 other than the curiosity of seeing how well it works on specific machines. A free trial is all I was interested in doing.

I'm sure that now that MS is offering the free Win10 upgrades to Win7 machines, it's only a matter of time before they phase out support for Win7, but by then (my guess is that's at least a year away), Win10 might finally have matured and I will just purchase new machines with Win10 already on them.

There's nothing wrong with staying with something that you like, and does what you need it to do!

Althernai said:

I have a 4 year old laptop that was updated from Windows 7 to Windows 10 last Wednesday. The recovery screen says that I have 1 month to decide whether to switch back to Windows 7 (I guess I could do it later too, but that would mean a clean install which is rather time consuming). My general impression of Windows 10 is that it is not terrible, but not particularly great either.

Should I let this laptop live out its life using Windows 7 and move on to Windows 10 with my next machine?

"In place" upgrades often produce varying results. I did an in place upgrade on my desktop and my laptop (both Windows 7) and it went well. By that I mean everything worked fine afterward and the systems are actually a bit more responsive; boot time and resume from hibernation are a bit faster.

As for the "look" I liked aero better, but the flat, minimalist style is growing on me.

Regarding your performance problems I would troubleshoot and give it some time. Also keep in mind that another big update is coming - supposedly at the end of this month - to address many issues. Last there is the option to do a clean install now that you've done the upgrade; you can just reset the OS from the advanced boot tools option (there's the matter of backing up and reinstalling applications of course). Hope this helps.

Mark Phelps said:

I'm sure that now that MS is offering the free Win10 upgrades to Win7 machines, it's only a matter of time before they phase out support for Win7, but by then (my guess is that's at least a year away), Win10 might finally have matured and I will just purchase new machines with Win10 already on them.

Thanks, this was my thought as well. I don't think this laptop will outlast Windows 7 support. It's a Hewlett-Packard model and not one of the business-oriented ones. I've already had to replace the hard drive, the battery lasts two hours tops and I'm making pretty heavy use of it.

Victek said:

Regarding your performance problems I would troubleshoot and give it some time. Also keep in mind that another big update is coming - supposedly at the end of this month - to address many issues. Last there is the option to do a clean install now that you've done the upgrade; you can just reset the OS from the advanced boot tools option (there's the matter of backing up and reinstalling applications of course). Hope this helps.

I heard about the big update; if it comes before the deadline for reverting to Windows 7, I will give it a try. I'm not so confident that it will fix things that I would stick with Windows 10 past the deadline though.

Regarding the clean install: I thought about it, but aside from reinstalling everything being a pain in the neck, I'm not sure that I wouldn't end up installing the Windows 7 drivers anyway. This laptop is rather idiosyncratic: when my hard drive died and I had to reinstall Windows 7 from scratch, most basic devices simply did not work. Not even the Ethernet! I had to boot Linux on a USB to download them from HP's website before I got it into shape... but HP has no Windows 10 drivers for this laptop.

ktalley said:

My 4-year old Toshiba laptop fan has run non-stop since upgrading to Windows 10. I just discovered a post on another site that said to turn off "Show me tips about Windows" (under Settings/System/Notifications & actions). Voila!! I can basically turn my laptop fan on and off by sliding this toggle switch -- too funny!. I would have never believed it until I tried it. It is spiking the CPU utilization, which is obviously affecting battery life and overall performance as well. Hopefully this will be resolved in a build soon. HTH...

Thanks. I've turned this switch to OFF. Hopefully it will help, though my problem was not quite as severe as yours -- my fan did occasionally turn off even with the switch ON.

Althernai said:

Regarding the clean install: I thought about it, but aside from reinstalling everything being a pain in the neck, I'm not sure that I wouldn't end up installing the Windows 7 drivers anyway. This laptop is rather idiosyncratic: when my hard drive died and I had to reinstall Windows 7 from scratch, most basic devices simply did not work. Not even the Ethernet! I had to boot Linux on a USB to download them from HP's website before I got it into shape... but HP has no Windows 10 drivers for this laptop.

If you do a "reset" using the built in recovery feature I believe the OS will retain the existing drivers (maybe double check that given your situation). See here:

How to refresh, reset, or restore your PC - Windows Help


In "10" go to Settings/Update & Security/Recovery and you will see the "Reset this PC" option. Click "get started" and you will see the choices (you can still cancel at that point).

Since Windows 8, the upgrade only benefits to Microsoft, not to the user.

Today I went back to W8.1 and I have my windows with colors again and my big start menu again. The rest is basically identical.

I am not having any issues with Win 10 Pro, true the task manager looks like crap but I use Procexp to see what processes are running. I am sure someone will come up with a mod for it, they did with 7.