Windows 10 – review or why you should upgrade…

A few months ago everyone started getting the new windows 10 as the free upgrade started being available throughout the world. As soon as possible (even a bit forced) I've also done my upgrade and only now after a few months I can really say it was a good choice.

Let me give you my personal experience so that you may choose if you want to go through it yourselves:

windows10

After making sure my system was supported and that I won't get into any issues, drivers wise I've started the update. Immediately post update I could start and see that it was a good idea, but I wasn't yet sure. My games frame rate was improved, the file manager seemed to be faster due to increase I/O communication (file copies, process file access etc). Cortana was funny enough and apps generally were faster.

I was almost ready to high praise the new windows as the best OS ever, but I choose to wait a few weeks for an objective review. The speed started to drop and furthermore Cortana seemed to start not being accessible at all in some cases without a full system restart. In another week things started going even worse. I started getting memory dumps and absolutely no high consumption process on my GPU could run. I started freaking out and being almost ready to go back to Windows 8.1, but I really wanted to give it another chance so I started following the logs and solving the issues one by one.

I must say that this was done on my laptop which has a switchable graphics setup between the Intel Graphics chipset and an AMD 8600M chipset for 3D applications. The problem this created was actually the reason for my memory dumps and generally for all the issues I had. What changed to cause it? Well Windows Update, choose to update my graphic drivers disrupting the communication between my graphic chipsets when switchable graphics was involved. So a video card was writing data in the memory reserved by the other generating memory issues and the blue screen I was very close to forget.

This is in my opinion the biggest issue with Windows 10. The Windows Update interface is a lot harder to review and to manage updates and leaving them being done by themselves is causing a lot of issues. Also not sure if this was wanted by Microsoft, but if an update is requesting a system restart it will slow down your computer a lot until you are actually forced to reboot it. This is a bit intrusive in my opinion.

Once this was fixed my laptop started being usable again so I decided to keep Windows 10. The major problem with Cortana not working properly was fixed with (you will never guess) the troubleshooter. It seems that Cortana's file system permissions were badly set, probably when a windows update was done. After the fix I stopped having issues with the search assistant.

Another minor performance issue was fixed by tweaking the performance system and deactivating some of the additional interface animation and by allowing the system more virtual memory. One major thing which was not a problem before, was not having 10% of free space on the system drive, which with Windows 10 is absolutely unacceptable.

performance

So after a bit of work and fixing a lot of configuration issues, I can can surely say that Windows 10 is the next best thing from Microsoft. All in all it's quite hard to make a full fledge system that works the same on every device and Microsoft is the first to actually do it.

Tweaking and waiting for any other issues to appear is what delayed this post so much, but at the same time it gave me an insight on what to do if you need help so feel free to comment with questions or issues you are having and I'll try and help you go through them.

Now for the actual review part:

  • Graphic interface (9/10)
  • File system access (10/10)
  • Memory management (8/10)
  • Cortana (7/10)
  • General performance (9/10)
  • Developer libraries support (9/10) – prerequisites for developer tools and DLL conflicts

 

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