I updated a couple of laptops yesterday and worked on a third. First was a Toshiba with an i3 processor and Intel Graphics which had been supplied with Win 8.1. This was a breeze to update via the update icon and everything currently works properly except for the new browser, which has issues and limitations. The second laptop was a low spec HP Netbook which had startling poor performance using Windows 7 Starter, despite the RAM being upgraded to the maximum possible of 2 Gig. To say that I had the runaround trying to update this machine would be the understatement of the year. Moving to Win 10 via the update manager was impossible, despite a clean install of Win 7 followed by about a million updates. I could never get to the point where the update icon appeared. Eventually I did suceed in updating by using the Microsoft Media Creation Tool on a USB stick. Has the upgrade helped with performance? Sadly the answer is no, there is little point upgrading anything with an Intel Atom or perhaps even such as a Celeron processor. The third laptop is a 64 Bit AMD with Radeon Graphics. I couldn't see the upgrade icon on this either until I saw online that it sometimes appears in the taskbar menu but switched off by default as in my case, really not very useful. I will wait much longer to upgrade this and my Desktop as I use both these for photo editing.
So, ease of upgrading is a lottery, likely the newer the computer, the simpler it is. There seems to be a large number of Win 7 machines that have corrupted updates that stop the normal upgrade path, using Windows Update Manager, dead in it's tracks. Windows 10 is better than Windows 8.1, but then again, virtually anything would be better than the 8.1 slow motion train crash. My impession of Windows 10, potentially it's a good operating system but clearly very unfinished at the moment. The icons, such as battery charge, wireless connection are poor compared to those on Windows 7. The calculator looks to have been designed by a YTS student, best ditched and replaced with the old one. The new browser has issues with navigation. On some pages the keyboard up and down arrows work just fine. Go to another page on the same site and they stop working partway down the page until the page is clicked. Click on a new link to open in a new page, the browser stays on the old page, and quite often the new tab did not successfully load and gives an error message. I use tabs a lot and if I tell the computer to open a link in a new tab, why on earth would I not want to go straight to it. Currently, no Ad Blocker works with Edge either. Best to install Firefox and Ad Blocker Plus which both work perfectly in Windows 10.
Updates will always break some computers leaving them inoperable or impaired. The requirement for compulsory updates is a serious stategic error by Microsoft that will have to be amended at some point in the face of reality. It is worth updating a non critical PC just to gain an understanding of the new system. Those with only one PC running Win 7 quite happily would, in my view, be far better to wait some time yet.
