Ask HN: Experience with Windows 10 upgrade | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Experience with Windows 10 upgrade

4 pointscodegeek20 comments

I am always scared to update anything when it just comes out. Still on Win 8.1 but would love to hear your experiences with Windows 10 "free" upgrade. I know it had some privacy controversies but what about functionality and bugs ? Does it break anything critical that one should worry about ?

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The upgrade itself was pretty painless. Other than some weird "windows 10 does things differently" I have had no OS issues.

The only thing that didn't seem to be compatible was Steam, which required me to re-download and re-install; that fixed it up.

Also I believe virtualbox is currently not compatible with windows 10, but I don't use it anymore so it wasn't a deal breaker for me.

I didn't have any OS specific issues either. I, also, had to re-install steam (though all the data files were fine) but after the re-install things seemed fine.

good that you mentioned VirtualBox. I am actually using Vagrant and VirtualBox currently. So I guess I should keep this in mind.

Oh wow, they released an update!

The 5.0 release supports the latest guest or host operating systems including: Mac OS X Yosemite, Windows 10, Oracle Linux, Oracle Solaris, other Linux operating systems, and legacy operating systems.

So you should be good to go.

I have VirtualBox v5.0.4 and can confirm that VirtualBox works perfectly. I currently has 3 VMs:

Debian 8.2.0

Ubuntu 14.04.03

Xubuntu 14.04

All are running x64 and Ubuntu/Xubuntu has 3D acceleration activated.

Guest drivers also works as expected.

It took me ~20 minutes overall for the download and install. All I had to do was press "start" really, and let it do it's thing.

I only had to re-install BitDefender, everything else worked right away.

I'm only just annoyed that the Charms menu is gone. I had used Windows 8 since the developer preview so I was used to that in my workflow. Not a huge issue though.

~20 minutes for a complete upgrade is impressive to say at least if that's true.

I upgraded at a 500 Mbps line with i7-4930k CPU and a OCZ Revodrive 3 x2 PCI SSD. I didn't pay full attention to it but my download/installation took about 2 hours IIRC. I do have two other HDDs though, so Windows 10 may have spent some time indexing files which increased the installation time.

Also did the upgrade at a clients computer, typical low-end consumer Toshiba laptop at a 15 Mbps line, it took about 6-7 hours.

Pretty good. Can't really complain and I have upgraded both my old laptop (HP, ~5 years old) and new one (Dell, ~2 months). Both have been running smoothly. Main complaint is the new touch features on the mouse since they remind me of the Mac version and was never a fan of that but you can disable those. Other than that it was smooth sailing for the most part.

Biggest issue I have heard is a small learning curve using Cortana. It's useful but disable her unless you have a surface or a computer built for Windows 10. If you run a Google-based system you should be okay without her.

Overall, not bad. It runs pretty fast and before I was using a Gen 2 AMD quad core. It has a slight learning curve to the new features but otherwise no issues. I've used it with the HDMI port, VGA output to a dual screen, LAN, etc and so far have not had any issues on both computers.

I think Windows 10 in general is fine, but the upgrade process does a poor job. For 2 of my machines, performing an update (not full wipe/install) resulted in an extremely slow system. Doing the full wipe/install corrected the problem.

Unfortunately, if one is coming from 7 or 8 (using the free update), you need to do the update to register your machine before you can reinstall cleanly. I don't know why Microsoft didn't just provide a Win10 product key via the update tool if your 7/8 install was properly licensed. They could always link it back to your machine to prevent sharing the key and not using it.

Are you still able to see the Upgrade notification? Didn't they have a timeline during which you could upgrade?

I just checked my Windows Laptop with Win8.1, I can't see any upgrade notification :(

You can just use the downloader to upgrade: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10

"You will need a product key.."

Isn't the update feee if you have bought Win8.1?

On the same page:

"To upgrade for free, select Upgrade this PC now in the tool. You should NOT be asked for a product key during the upgrade process. "

I have upgraded a couple of machines myself, and the key thing here is to choose the "Upgrade this PC" option on the downloader instead of having it create the installation media. By having it Upgrade using the automated procedure, there is no worry (as long as the host machine's Windows is already activated). Nevertheless, you will need to activate Windows 10 after install, which can be done Online or over the phone (talking to a computer). Also, be sure to choose the bit-depth that corresponds to your current Windows -- unfortunately there is no up-bitting (that I am aware of).

The RSAT tool situation is still a mess. No DHCP snap-in was included and I get some funny behavior with the other tools.

Tried it on my GF's laptop (mine runs linux), which has a first gen core i5 from 2008ish. Everything was fine, except the HDMI port wouldn't work anymore. Apparently a bug in Intel's driver and they have aanounced that they will not be supporting it.

The rollback to win7 was rather quick and painless.

[I guess I'll chat up Microsoft on the computer]

[SWEET MOTHER OF JESUS]: One of the updates was for the NVidia card. Now my screens are blank. No idea what is going on, since I can't see the chat application.

[Live update] More optional updates. Hour mark 3 today.

[Live update] Looks like Skype is one of the required optional updates. Now we're checking for more updates.

[Live update] Twenty minutes and the optional updates have completed downloading. Is hoping a technical approach?

[Live update] Apparently there are "optional updates" that needed to be installed. Their download has been stalled at 97% for fifteen minutes.

I probably should mention here that the machine also has two monitors. When the tech opens a new tool. Sometimes it shows up on the other monitor. Then I have to move it.

The techs also like to open Windows update in full screen. This obscures the chat dialog.

[Live update] New tech is running upgrade via windows update. Another 2.8 gigs. Almost three hours today. Five or six hours overall.

[Live update] Something else didn't work. Required reboot. Now with a different tech...or maybe it's the first.

[Live update] The second pass at installation failed with the same error code. The tech is going to try something else.

---

The Black Beast is a Dell Precision T7400 with 2x E5405's and four hard disks [0] It boots via Grub2 [1]. For Windows, it then boots to the Windows Bootloader and to Windows 8.1 or XP Professional x64 [2]. I'm upgrading as I type this on my laptop, for some definition of "upgrading".

I've been fooling with the upgrade off and on since Sunday. Right now, Microsoft is remoted in and rerunning the update...something I've done more than half a dozen times already. They did some mild Powershell fu first.

And it failed with the helpful 80070002 "Windows Update ran into a problem". Now the tech has restarted the install...it's 2.8 gigs of download every time because the installer doesn't cache the files.

I will say that Microsoft is trying. We're already into an hour and a half of tech support today plus a half an hour or so yesterday. And that machine is certainly a corner case.

[0]: Two are hardware mirrored via the motherboard.

[1]: There's Ubuntu Studio 15.04 and CentOS 6 on their own partitions.

[2]: The Windows 8.1 was an upgrade over an existing 8.0 upgrade to OEM Windows 7.

[5:15] "Why don't you try installing it again?"

[5:00] Fourth tech support agent. "Something Happened" error message.

[4:15 with Microsoft] Update failed again with 80070002 "Windows Update Ran into a Problem". Looks like we're going the create installation media route. That's the one I tried originally since it allows a clean install...I did a little homework before I started this thing.

This means...you guessed it downloading Windows 10 again.

[4:00 hours] Well it rebooted and the tech is back. Tried installing Windows 10 and we got a new Error message 80200056. They did something and now we're downloading 2.8 gigs of Windowstenagain.

I got to type my password in while someone was remoted. That's always heart warming.

[We've hit four hours and I can't edit my original post.]

Eight hours. Fifth Tech Support person. There seems to be magical thinking..."if I just try this link instead". I mean the pointers point to the same executable.

My guess is that there's a call to disk that doesn't run through the appropriate API [or my computer is p'owned] based on some assumption that is almost always correct but not in this edge case. Windows reports correct free space on the install partition.

Maybe it's because the Windows partion is on Disk 2 (the third disk).

Anyway, it's probably approaching more than a dozen downloads of the installer today and I was able to take a small perverse pleasure in watching the tech open Windows Task Manager and see that everything in the startup tab was already disabled. Took the fifth tech to look, unfortunately.

Microsoft Tech Support pretty much gave up and suggested I move Windows to a different partition. Googling up new error messages looks like the problem is because Windows is installed on a mirrored and the installer wants to control the hardware directly...instead of, you know, through a standard interface.

I guess it's the world's way of telling me not to use Windows.

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