Windows 7 more reliable than 10 if you want to avoid hangs & crashes

I haven't had any problems with Windows 10, aside from annoyances which are inexplicably by design, e.g., the crappy Start menu, no Windows Classic theme, inflexibility in general, the "Microsoft thinks they own my computer" vibe that I get from practically everything, the non-critical pre-installed "apps" which have the defining characteristics of malware, wizard-like interfaces everywhere instead of direct access to standard tabbed settings windows.

Everything is so dumbed-down and non-configurable. The "Mail" "app" is a joke, for example. It is so dumbed down that it makes the old Outlook Express look like a full-featured email client. It doesn't even have a "send/receive" button. Worse still, it doesn't even work right. The settings for my POP3 email account from my ISP, which are currently working fine in Outlook, and have worked fine in Outlook Express, Thunderbird, and any other email client I've ever tried, don't work in Windows 10 Mail; well, they work, but only halfway, i.e., it will send email, but it won't receive any.

In any event, I suggest a clean installation of Windows 10. Upgrade installations are a crap shoot, and they always have been. Of course, in the case of Windows 10, if you want it free, an upgrade installation is the only option, at least at first. But once you've done the upgrade installation and activated it, you can then do a clean installation, which is what I did. My initial upgrade installation (from Windows 7 Ultimate x64) worked okay, but there was constant hard drive activity going on; not intense activity, but just the constant sound of something puttering around in there, which was driving me nuts. I had already turned off indexing on all my partitions (which I always do first thing), and I disabled the Windows Search service, but it didn't help. I had intended to do a clean installation after the prerequisite upgrade installation anyway, so I went ahead and did that, and all is well.

For the 'Human' condition, adaptation and change is mostly uneasy. :)

damocles said:

For the 'Human' condition, adaptation and change is mostly uneasy. :)

Hi there

actually there's MINIMAL change in operating W7 to W10. W8 was a bigger change --and to remind yourself go back through early posts on W8 Forums to see how people HATED W8 initially. W8.1 was a bit better but even that was too "Mobile" orientated.

Cheers
jimbo

jimbo45 said:

XP at introduction was also beset with complaints -- the activation system and the PRICE (Windows expensive it was labelled - XP in expensive being the operative words). It tool THREE complete service packs to fix properly and its life cycle lasted well beyond Ms had even dreamt about. Not bad at all for an OS that was initially received with probably MORE hostility than W7 / W8 or even VISTA.

That's not the way I remember it at all. Yes, there were complaints about the activation (complaints which are still valid today, for XP and all versions of Windows since), and the price, but those things have nothing to do with the performance of the OS. I started using XP in early 2002 (pre-service pack), and it worked beautifully from day one. I don't remember a lot of performance-related complaints from people, certainly nothing like with Windows Me and Vista. The main early complaints were with regard to incompatibility with certain older hardware peripherals at the time (printers, scanners, etc.)

I stayed with XP as my main OS until about a week ago (I eventually added Windows 7 along with it in a dual boot configuration, but I rarely used it), so I used it daily for 13 years (I didn't look forward to downgrading to a newer version of Windows, and I'd still much rather be running XP than anything else, but my new hardware has no XP drivers, and I also now have 8 GB of RAM, half of which would be ignored by XP).

I never noticed any performance differences whatsoever in any of the service packs, aside from the "TCP/IP Limit" thing that came along with SP2 that ruined the performance of peer-to-peer file sharing applications at the time (they triggered an EventID 4226 due to exceeding the new limit of 10 for half-open connections), which was promptly and perfectly patched by "LvlLord", allowing you to set the limit as high as you wanted.