Ok, Windows 10 came out the 29th of July, and of course I had reserved it to get the free upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10, and thought I could wait for my download until god knows whenever MS would get to it, but I have never been one to be patient. My laptop is a Dell M6400 Core 2 Duo with 16GB of ram and a 700Gb SSD and a 1TB regular HD and was manufactured in Late 2008. So I set off to grab the ISO from MS and then proceed to install it. Which actually went quite flawlessly. I just set it and left the house, when I came back home it was sitting at the log in screen. I logged in with my Windows 7 user and password and then after a few long minutes of it “Setting things up” it went to my desktop, which pretty much looked the same as it did in Windows 7. I then linked my MS account and then started to look around a bit. I made sure the essentials worked, since I am a developer included Visual Studio 2015 and SQL Server, which actually needed a change to the permissions in the service screen since my MS user had no right to launch that service.
I then thought I had read something about multiple monitors having task bar support, and low and behold it did, of course I had bought “Actual Multiple Monitors” a while back to make up for this shortcoming, so I needed to shut it off since it didn’t work as good as it should anyway with Windows 10. Then I went to toolbar properties, and at the bottom was an area called “Multiple Displays”, I placed a check in Show taskbar on all displays and changed the other two settings to match what I liked and it is so much nicer having the toolbars being built in to the OS!
Then I started to mess with actually trying to work, which requires me to connect via VPN using NCP secure entry client (version 9), which of course seemed like it worked until I tried to connect to a server, it seemed like it was working but the settings were off. I rebooted, but still noticed the same issues. I then reinstalled NCP and BAM it connected and I was able to connect to a server with no problem, so it seems NCP Version 9 works with Windows 10 as long as you reinstall, which I guess makes sense.
Next thing I noticed, Windows 10 was complaining that I had no Virus Protection installed. We have an IT company that manages that using Kaseya and Kaspersky, it seems Kaspersky had been sitting on their hands while Windows 10 was going through beta, instead of actually using the preview to create a new AV program for Windows 10, so now my OS is running without an AV, which I guess would have been nice to know. It seems kaspersky will take up to 60 days to create a working version for Windows 10, that is just crap! So I installed Qihoo 360 Total Security, not the greatest but for free it isn’t bad, and it works for Windows 10 and the free version can do scheduled tests, although I may go back to AVG free if I can do a scheduled scan. At least until kaspersky gets it together.
All in all I really like Windows 10 and am starting to get used to the new stuff with it, like quick access and some other things like Metro Apps etc. Hopefully this is a little warning to those that are in a development position or that relies on Kaspersky, think wisely if you want to or even if you can upgrade to Windows 10. And by the way, Windows 10 runs just wonderfully on this laptop, although it is beefy enough to run it anyway. I have noticed that Groove music causes a Runtime Broker process to ramp up the CPU and it keeps doing it after Groove Music has closed down, so it may be a good idea to use some other app to play music for now.
Aug 052015