Yesterday I upgraded two of machines:-
a) Surface Pro 3
b) Acer Aspire V5 Laptop
This is how it went!
a) Surface Pro 3 – the install was a dream! – clicked on the link provided by the desktop item and within minutes I was downloaded Windows 10. 20 mins later my machine was running Windows 10 and I explored all the new tools and features. Cortana wasn’t that impressive on first try but using the speech setup in settings helped to improve a little. Maybe the surface on board microphone is not that good!
b) Acer Aspire V5 Laptop – as I didn’t have the update loaded onto the taskbar I had to manual search and find a way. A useful PCWorld article led me to the Media Creation Tool whihc requires a USB drive with 4 Gb spare. This I started to do. The process was long – VERY long! Not only did the stick have to download the ISO file but also wanted updates! Also, it then proceeded to take over 6 hours to install on my laptop. On first look a few things needed tweaking but I am pleased to say that all my programs work and the data I have is secure as well.
Conclusion
1. By far the easiest is to use the windows update icon rather than the Media Creation Tool. The only advantage is downloading when you want to. I need to say that the 6 hours was on a 150Gb broadband connection!
2. Surface Pro 3 can make more use of Windows 10 features but the Cortana isn’t as good as I thought it was at the moment. This may improve as I keep using it . Using Tablet Mode is going to be the most useful for this device as the look and feel are quite intuitive and easy to use I have to say.
3. Acer Aspire V5 Laptop – took an excessive amount of time and a few hairy moments to see if was going to work! Just having the % scale and not time does not give you any indication how long the download will take. On first impressions the results are good. The taskbar doesn’t store programs in the same way , instead their is a 3-square icon that shows a desktop view of what is running on the machine instead. Press the Windows Key and you will see the icons listed and although I couldn’t see the new browser ” The Edge” and “Cortana” they are listed in the Tiled view. Of course its great to have the Start menu back and to be able to access the laptop in that way.
4. On the whole its looking good but let’s see what comes down the road! – How many updates! How seamless they are or do we still have the waiting for updates shutdown problem we had in Windows 7. I will feed back on that one in due course!
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