Windows 10 Upgrade Advice

If you’re using Windows 7 or 8 you will have noticed a little Windows 10 icon that has appeared in your system tray and is by now probably nagging you to ‘reserve’ your upgrade. We’ve received many queries from our customers about this and our standard answer has been to advise them to wait for 6 months to allow the early adopters to iron out the pain of the new operating system for them.

While this advice is conservative, so is our average customer.

We all know somebody who absolutely has to install the very latest piece of software as soon as it’s available. They want to stay at the leading edge of technology, but when things don’t go smoothly they rapidly find themselves at the bleeding edge instead, and I have to admit that we were rubbing our hands at the prospect of all these failed upgrades arriving at our service centres for resuscitation.

The reality has been quite the opposite. While we’ve seen a few problems, all the upgrades that we’ve carried out ourselves have been fault free, and the one problem we have seen has been in Eset firewall software blocking network traffic after the upgrade, which is easily fixed by reinstalling the software.

Several of these upgrades have been so that we can familiarise ourselves with the final release of the operating system, and others have been at the request of clients, but we’ve also carried out several upgrades as a quick and easy way or repairing broken operating systems, and we’ve been very impressed with what we’ve seen so far.

I’ve only been using Windows 8 on my home PC for a couple of months after breaking Windows 7, and I’ve never been a big fan of metro interface on my desktop PC, although I love it on my 8” Linx tablet. I was therefore quite happy to take the plunge this weekend, although I did take a precautionary backup of my entire system before proceeding, but in the event the upgrade was so uneventful as to be almost disappointing.

The few problems we have seen have come in to our service centres as casualties, and we’ve found the problem was down to  the original operating systems being riddled with malware.

As of today our official advice is that you can upgrade when you want to, but if you are already having problems that might indicate a virus please give us a call first. I’m going to recommend you take a full back up before you start, because you can’t have too many backups, though I don’t expect you’ll need it.

Next week I will publish our definitive list of this you need to do after you upgrade, so watch out for more…