The Windows 10 upgrade experience

as we go to print with this issue of APC, Microsoft has just started rolling out the free Windows 10 upgrade. Judging just from the numbers — Microsoft claims 14 million devices were upgraded just on the fi rst day — it’d seem to be off to a good start. Unfortunately, my own upgrade experience didn’t quite go as smoothly as I’d hoped — although, admittedly, part of that could defi nitely be my own fault. When upgrade day rolled around, I decided I’d leave my home PC (which runs an almost 2-year-old Windows 8.1 installation) switched on to see if the required 3GB of downloads would come down automatically via Windows Update — which apparently, they did… and then some, as I discovered when I got home. Windows 10’s temporary upgrade folder housed not just 3GB of fi les, but a whopping 15GB! It seems that some of the downloaded fi les had been corrupted — apparently repeatedly — and Windows Update had been trying to replace them with good ones… and, failing time and again. (Thank goodness for unlimited broadband plans.) Deducing that this problem probably wasn’t going to resolve itself cleanly, I then went about deleting all the corrupted fi les and then trying to force Windows Update to start the process again… which, after a couple of hours of downloading more fi les, once again failed. The installer was still ending up corrupted. “Screw Windows Update,” was my general feeling at this point, so I went about looking for alternatives, fi nding that Microsoft’s smartly put together a standalone tool for creating a Windows installer on a USB drive — the so-called ‘media creation tool’, which you can fi nd here: tinyurl.com/apc419-w10mct. Using this to create a USB 3.0 fl ash drive with the Windows 10 installer, the upgrade process was fast — taking around 30 minutes — and completely fl awless. (APC’s creative director, Troy Coleman, went through a similar ‘corrupted downloads’ experience, but also had a great experience with the media creation tool.) And now that it’s running, I’m pretty fond of the new OS. It’s very quick, not just for Microsoft’s own apps (like the excellent but a little under-featured Edge browser) but for using and launching third-party ones too. Not everything is working great, however. I run a dual-monitor setup, and trying to game on one screen and watch fl icks on the other results in choppy video — and this is something that worked perfectly on Windows 8.1. Hopefully, these are just driverrelated teething problems that will improve over the next few months — it still is very much early days for Windows 10. If you’ve upgraded to Windows 10 already, what was your experience? And is there anything you particularly love or hate about it?