Windows 10 Installation

I have completed installation of Windows 10 on four machines. Two computers had Windows 7 and two had Windows 8.1 operating systems. On three systems, I chose not to wait on the Microsoft notification. I did so by downloading Microsoft's Media Creation Tool. On the fourth system, I installed from the notification received as a result of the reservation made about a month ago. I chose not do a clean install on any of the machines. I did perform a complete system backup onto a DVD disk and a complete file backup onto a large external drive using the free Macrium Reflect application. One of the machines was not linked to a Microsoft account.

The installations were smooth, taking between two and three hours including performing the backups. The Windows 7 computers required additional reboots before the new start button and Cortana would function properly. And on one of the Windows 7 machines the owner wanted her gadgets back so I downloaded and installed a free desktop gadget. WARNING: Microsoft ceased including gadgets with the operating system with Windows 8 due to security concerns.

On my Windows 8.1 computer back when it was just Windows 8, I decided to start using Classic Shell so as to have a familiar Windows 7-like Start button. I hate using the Metro tiles on a laptop or desktop. Maybe I would tolerate them on a windows tablet but I doubt it. I probably would just default to searching for the app I wanted if I could remember the name. I have decided to try out the Windows 10 Start button, however, without the tiles portion. I removed the tiles portion simply by unpinning all the items from Start and resizing. So far so good. I don't much like the All apps design. The alphabet separators and icons are completely unnecessary and take up space. It would have been better to produce a columnar listing of all apps in alphabetic order (without the separators). And strangely, apps belonging to a category are listed separately. For example, the Microsoft Office applications are listed separately instead of as sub-apps: Access 2016 under 'A', Excel 2016 under 'E', OneNote 2016 under 'O', and so on. Annoying! But of course, you can just search for the program you want to use by tapping the windows key and start typing the name of the program.



Windows 10 defaults to Microsoft Edge as the default browser. I thought I would try it out but quickly reverted to Chrome once I discovered that there were no extensions in Edge. Otherwise, I found it clean and fast.