I found myself with a terrible laptop I had no use for a couple weeks back (1 GHz dual-core bobcat, so really really terrible). It had a Win7 home premium sticker though, so I decided to use it to try out Win10. After all, I'll presumably be asked to repair something running Win10 at some point, so it would be good to know my way around it. Also, if I'm going to be critical of it, I'd rather know firsthand what the problematic points are. Things generally worked well enough to be useful in short order, but there was plenty of trouble to be found:
- It came with Flash installed, and it wasn't uninstallable. What?
- There are two control panels - no big deal there, but it seems some stuff is only accessible from one or the other. Who thought that was a good idea?
- Auto-adjusting visuals to match the hardware apparently means it's going to use all the eye-candy even if it's running on a toaster. Basic desktop animations were doing <5 fps and it didn't figure out to scale back on it's own.
- I'm used to starting programs in Windows by going [winkey --> [type program name] --> enter]. Apparently in Win10, if you do this faster than the internal indexing can keep up, it'll just boot up Edge and search for whatever you typed. Since this computer is garbage, this happened to me a lot.
- I told it to not automatically connect to the network I first hooked it up to, but it did anyway.
- HP said it had drivers for Win10, but the download page didn't actually have any downloads. It just said to tell Win10 to sort it out. That would be fine if it worked, but it didn't. It spent an awful lot of time churning around looking for drivers (and presumably more mundane updates), and didn't accomplish much of anything.
- In the process, it burned up all the CPU time and network capacity. This computer is borderline unusably slow to start with, and this made its performance drop all the way to death valley. Also, I spend significant time on very slow networks that I have to share with other people, and Windows deciding to hog all the bandwidth whenever it feels like it is one of the most anti-social things an OS could do there.
- Since it wasn't getting anywhere on graphics drivers, I installed some from AMD. They didn't seem to have any effect, though (basic desktop graphics were still very slow). AFAICT, Windows decided it didn't like them and that it should do its own thing instead, except that whatever it was doing wasn't working.
I gave up about there. Plenty of this stuff is well-documented, and some is definitely not. Where exactly did Flash come from, for instance? I do not want Flash. Kill it with fire. Oh wait, I can't. Why? (Geniunely curious.) To my keyboard-centric workflow, [winkey --> [program name] --> enter] seemed to be about the only sane way to do things in Windows, and now it's broken. Is there an option to fix that somewhere? Finally, how is it supposed to work if multiple people with Win10 computers try to game on rural DSL? (It works fine with Win7/Linux, but only if we're careful about downloads/streaming/whatever when anyone's gaming.) Without some kind of answer to these last two in particular, other people's computers are going to get much much more annoying to me once Win7 goes EOL.