After backing up my laptop, I decided to try out Windows 10. The installation was a little dark at times, nothing being displayed on screen. After successfully completing that I come away with a much better feeling than I did when I tried Windows 8.
The installation seemed to go well, the first login resulted in a black screen with a mouse cursor. After trying a few things I found, a hard reset brought up a working system. The VPN might be a little broken. When copying the Select Client over the VPN, the transfer rates dropped to zero. To fix it, pausing the copy in Windows 10 and resetting the VPN and resuming the copy got it going. That I found a bit weird, but I liked the pause and resume on a copy.
The system itself looks pretty decent. There is still a learning curve from Windows 7, but the UI makes a lot more sense for the typical desktop computer user. Java doesn’t run on the new browser, so IE 11 is still there to run Java apps which are all over the recording world.
A couple days after looking at Windows 10 on the laptop, I tossed it on another 3 machines and I have to say I like it so far. No need to rush out and install it, but there also doesn’t seem to be a reason to avoid it in the near term. The VPN issue I ran into seems to be fixed by a patch, the newly installed machines ran VPN session’s just fine. SoftPro Select didn’t seem to mind, it ran fine. I’ve not tried Classic yet but expect it to work just fine.
What about my main workstation? Well I’ve not installed it there yet. Translate that to I’m not ready to say it’s ready for business critical applications. The jump from Windows 7 to Windows 10 is much more palatable than from 7 to 8. I was never able to see 8 in the workplace, some people enjoyed it, but it would never reach the mainstream business desktop. It caused the mind to twist with dead ends or queer ways of doing things.
Windows 10 cleans much of that up. Of course there are still a few odd things about how some things work, on the whole so far, it’s going to be a good OS. It’s just a smarter OS. For Windows 8 or 8.1 users, I’d probably update right away after checking compatibility issues.
