My Windows 10 update story

Yes, even I have one. My Windows 10 update story is long, boring and mostly consists of spending hours downloading install media and waiting for post-install updates, so I’ll be as brief as possible.

tl;dr: it’s nice enough. Would upgrade again if it were not for the anachronism and annoyance that product keys entail.

I was on the Insiders program, so I had a VM running for a few unremarkable weeks and have little (if anything) to say about the OS itself besides THANK $DIVINITY NO MORE TILES.

The only other thing I was really looking forward to was Edge, but that turned out to be rather less exciting than I expected – it is nice, but surfing the web without an ad blocker is nigh on impossible these days, so until it supports extensions of some sort Chrome and uBlock effectively removed any need I might have for it besides testing, and that’s it.

There are a few sore points regarding typography¹ and profoundly ancient legacy stuff that is still lurking beneath the new UI, but they’re largely offset by the entire experience actually being cohesive for a change. It’s a nice enough desktop. I can move windows about (just like I do on all my other machines and OSes) using sane hotkeys. It serves its main purpose, which is to get out of the way and let me use the applications I need (mostly remote) with as little attrition as possible, and that’s pretty much it.

So far I’ve upgraded 3 machines: My office Dell, which is where I ran Visual Studio (I nuked and paved, so there’ll be plenty more to set up later), an ancient Samsung NC10 (which I keep around at home for re-flashing phones and other sundry stuff) and an Aspire E11 that we got for the kids to use last Xmas².

That last one was hell on toast. First off, since it comes with a recovery partition that takes up 10GB out of 32 and the disk was too full, the upgrade failed in various interesting ways. Then I couldn’t nuke and pave it because it shipped with Windows 8 pre-activated and without a printed product key in the packaging – so unlike my other machines there was no way to install everything from scratch in one go.

I had to factory restore the machine and remove all the Acer crapware to free up enough disk space for the upgrade to run once, extract the post-upgrade product key using a third-party utility and then reinstall everything again to get rid of the recovery partition – which, altogether, took most of last Saturday.

The product key bit was the really annoying part. I’ve always hated the entire notion of product keys – as a consumer, I feel like I’m being treated as a criminal for legitimately upgrading a product I own, and decades of Mac use (and paying for software that is licensed in saner ways) have eroded away any regard I had for copy protection schemes.

Performance-wise, there’s nothing to report. Everything is about as zippy as it used to be (even on the NC10, which I used to generate the various USB boot disks required for upgrading the E11), and most of the cognitive overload that came with having two entirely different environments in Windows 8 is thankfully gone – in comparison, the Modern-style settings windows are a vast improvement, even if they still don’t fully replace all the legacy UI that’s lurking just underneath.