No idea No idea Thats why I'm asking. Initialliy when windows 10 came out all I heard was horror stories so I stayed away from it, but maybe things have change and its improved. I will upgrade if its free and its considerable better than when it first came out. Also will I have to pay in the future if I don't upgrade now and for any future upgrades?
I bought a new laptop in Manila recently which was almost as cheap as if I'd been in the UK. A Dell Inspiron i7 with 16 GB memory, 15.3" display and 1 TB hard drive with Windows 10 Home SL (single language). As soon as I got it home, I swapped-out the hard drive for a SSD onto which I installed Windows 7 and that machine is now super-fast. I don't know about new PCs in the UK but here they are all sold with Windows 10 Home SL, the most basic version available. There's no networking capability and you are forced to accept updates from Microsoft when it's convenient for them (and your PC) to do them; such time may not be convenient to you and your internet connection is, for all practical purposes, unavailable to you. And then there's push advertising and the fact that it takes quite some effort to prevent Windows from calling home. The other major disadvantage (as far as I'm concerned) is that if you buy a new machine with Windows 10 pre-installed, you will find that its Bios is set to UEFI and that the PC will either boot into Windows 10 or the Recovery Partition only. The PC will not boot from an optical drive, USB device or the network - UEFI prevents that. That's great for many end-users who will never need to boot their PCs to any other operating system but a real limiting factor for software developers. The only way I see around this is to buy a physical copy of Windows 10 (on a DVD), reset the BIOS to "Legacy", set the Boot Sequence to (1) Optical (2)USB (3)Hard Drive and then re-install Windows. But then Charon, the Stygian boatman, will have to find his boat ice-bound before I install Windows 10!
The horror stories were exaggerated Stu, after the version 1511 update around October / November speed of the browser improved dramatically, at no point was the OS actually unstable or unusable, some people with NVidia graphics adapters had problems because of the forced updates but generally people have taken to it quite well. I've updated the following 4 ThinkPad X220 laptops one of them the Tablet version in the picture I posted earlier 1 ThinkPad W500 (5 years old) 1 ThinkPad T61 (6 or 7 years old) 1 Dell E6500 7 years old all ran more smoothly than they had before and all upgraded without any problem. They all had existing Windows 7 licences so all are now effectively free for the lifetime of the computers. The licences are not transferrable so you won't be able to move them to another machine in the future. And when I get back to the Phils I have 1 more ThinkPad X220 to update (my son's) 1 more ThinkPad T61 and an old ThinkPad T43
Have you bought a new PC with Windows 10 pre-installed? I looked at Lenovo, Acer, HP and Dell here and they're all the same - only boot through Windows Boot Manager (ie hard drive or Rescue Partition).
I have all the usual options that I have ever had. Having the OS preinstalled is not going to affect activating the BIOS manager and choosing some settings.
What I found was that with Windows 10 installed, even if there was a bootable DVD in the drive, the BIOS did not even look at that drive and simply booted off the hard disk into Windows. Looking at the BIOS boot order settings, all that was "active" was Windows Boot Manager. No option for DVD drive - or any of the other usual options. I could change the BIOS type to Legacy but if I did so, an error message appears on booting saying that there is no OS installed.
