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#1
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?