Windows 10 upgrade

Try the 29th of JULY ...

I thought it was due out 29th July....but I might be wrong

Just checked and you are correct. I saw June 29th on one of the sites I went on a few days ago.....gggrrrhh!!

On 29 Jun 2015, Ronnie grunted:

Why on earth would you want to use a brand new Windows version on the day it's released, anyway? Let the other muppets do Micro$oft's beta testing for them, and use at least Windows 10.1 when that comes out.

You have a full 12 months to take advantage of the free upgrade offer...

In message , Lobster writes

Indeed, though I've been dual booting the preview for a while now, and am pretty much using it most of the time now

I'm not sure why anyone upgades Windows at all until it becomes unusably out of date and hardware changes actually require an upgrade. If nothing else it gives time for a gestalt knowledge of problems to build up on forums.

I used 98 until long after XP has settled down; XP until 7 had been around a bit (ie skipped the atrocious Vista altogether) and, since 8 was nothing more than a quickly released and moderately broken 7, can't see 10 is likely to offer anything worth bothering with.

In fact, I'm still far from sure why people care about the OS so much. It's only there to field mouse & keyboard requests and draw stuff on the screen. And, in Windows case, a lot of the core functionality hasn't changed for years. All they do is bolt on more processor wasting crap and ridiculous features that no-one actually needs.

On 30 Jun 2015, Scott M grunted:

That works the other way round as well though, in that you end up with old but perfectly serviceable hardware that you can no longer use simply because you can't get a driver for the latest version of Windows :(

Because its what they use every time they user the machine.

It does a lot more than just that, like the taskbar stuff that came with Win7.

And, in Windows case, a lot of the core functionality hasn't

But quite a bit of the user interface stuff has done.

All they do is bolt on more processor wasting crap

That's not right with the taskbar stuff with Win7 alone.

July surely?

Whatever date you get it though, I'd certainly not be a first adopter as its bound to be bust. Brian

BUt the OS is there to facilitate everything else, it's of no interest in its own right. It should be unobtrusive and subservient. Mind you, this is the problem with all modern s/w - more time, processing and bandwidth is put into the user "doing updates" than the user actually doing anything worthwhile.

Every iteration of Windows gets ever more unusable with more cruddy garbage cluttering things up.

Which is not a fundamental part of what an OS is about. And if you mean all that "Pin to Taskbar" crap, that's just dumped on top of the OS. Thankfully most of it can be turned off.

And this has helped who how?

No matter how hard I squint, I can't quite see the value in yet another chunk of the screen that gets lumbered with stuff I'm not currently using. We've had:

• Apps that insisted on launching at startup because They're The Most Important Thing You Will Ever Use
• Everything shoving a Me-Me-Me-Sir! icon on the desktop.
• There was the Office quick start bar, presumably for people who should have been given a typewriter rather than a computer.
• There's the system tray that fills with crap at startup - Oh If Only Adobe Reader Could Start That Bit Quicker

And you reckon having an icon showing on the taskbar when it's not even running or needed is useful?!? It'd be like having a Picture-in-Picture television that permanently showed a live feed of your DVD shelf in the top right hand corner.

Finally, if there's one thing that shows the worthlessness of Windows GUIs of late, it was the White on Light Grey colour scheme they chose for icon & window text - it's almost unreadable.

Actually, I meant that the hardware had got unusable out of date so same thing. By the time hardware is unsupported it's usually fairly ancient. I've got an EPSON TWAIN USB scanner that must be 15 years old that I haven't had the heart to try with my new Win 7 PC in case I have to bin it. Although I've also got a 9/10 YO Canon that someone gave me that I think of as brand new. The world's not short of slightly newer hardware going begging!!

Most people probably don't upgrade their windows anyway - they just get it when they buy a new machine - though I imagine that is not so common as older machines still perform fine for most tasks. What's different this time round is that MS are offering free upgrades for win 7 and 8 users - which is probably the majority of Windows installations. So i imagine we will see a lot of people upgrading.

I do think that Win 7 was a worthwile upgrade on XP

I don't like using XP anymore, things like the start menu search, pinnable things on the taskbar are useful. And firing up different GUI's on Linux show that these things do make a difference - as well as what is underneath.

Not sure that's true anymore, win 8 and 10 don't seem to be anymore demanding of resources than win7.

Yes, some of those are annoying, but not intrinsic to Windows, but rather down to choices made by developers and or users.

Yes.

That wouldn't be a great choice, but I can't think which version you would be referring to. None of my machines aher are liek that, but then I might have changed things

That isn't true with app launching.

Yes, but there is more to it than just that.

Mind you,

Easy to turn updates off if you want.

That is just plain wrong with XP and Win7.

Yes it is. App launching and switching between the apps currently running is a very fundamental part of what any OS is about.

And if you mean

That and being able to select what you want to switch to of the stuff that is running on the device etc.

It's a very fundamental part of what any OS is about.

You still have to have some way to launch apps and to switch between the stuff that is currently running.

It has helped everyone who uses the system by making it more convenient to get it to do what you want to do. When watching a series you can trivially see what you have already watched etc.

You're free to have it autohide so that doesn't happen.

Ditto.

Trivially easy to configure that with any decent OS.

Trivially easy to have nothing on the desktop at all if that's what you want.

Only a fool uses a typewriter instead of a computer.

All of that is configurable with any decent OS.

Irrelevant to what is being discussed, the OS.

Yes, if you use it much it's a convenient way to launch it.

You don't have to use it at all if you don't like it.

It'd be like having a Picture-in-Picture

Nothing like when you have enough of a clue to set it to autohide.

Trivially easy to have any config you prefer.

There are plenty of fools who use the computer as a typewriter. They want a new line, they press return. New paragraph? They press return twice. At the end of their doc, they press return 50 times, as if perhaps expecting a sheet of paper with what they've just typed to scroll up out of the top of their display. Then they come to me and ask why the printer prints out a blank page after their doc.

I've even seen multi-column PageMaker files done exclusively using the return and tab keys.

You obviously never used Vista. ;-)

In message , "Dave Plowman (News)" writes

Actually I've been fettling a lot of machines for friends recently and Vista with all the service packs and updates isn't far behind Windows 7.

I prefer it to the current (10158) build of 10, which is the first really unstable version that I've had, and at least on Vista scroll bars don't vanish from under the cursor..

I bought a laptop with Vista not long before Win7 came out - it included a free upgrade to that when it arrived. So Vista wasn't new. And I hated it with a passion, after XP. Win7 was fine after being used to XP.