Windows 10: Improvement or Nightmare?

Microsoft is allowing free upgrades to Windows 10, and it may not be what you want if you are already used to how PCs have operated for a couple decades. The changeover requires some retraining, so be prepared.  If you get it on a mobile device, like a tablet, I’m sure it’s fine.  Desktop, not so much.   

Here are the lowlights:   

1. The apps you have may have to be reinstalled to work.   Microsoft tutorial says they appear on the start menu, but they don’t.  At least some of mine didn’t. 

2.  Windows 10 wants to use Microsoft applications to open up your documents and photos, even if you want something else to do it.  I could not figure out how to make Photoshop automatically open photos instead of the Microsoft web page app.  I finally gave up.  I saved the photo to where I wanted it, opened Photoshop, opened the photo.  However, I had to reinstall Photoshop.  That’s several steps I didn’t want to have to take and ones I didn’t need to take with Windows 7.   

3. When you try to select a default program that is different from the one Windows wants, it doesn’t let you.  None of the non-Microsoft choices appear on their list.  You can't get any result at all when you search for default programs.  

4. It has a mail choice, and since none of my mail choices were there, I was afraid to select it because after a couple bad experiences with the new system, I had no idea what it was going to do to my email.  I can’t afford  to have my email blow up. 

5. I couldn’t get google maps to be a default map choice.  I got used to working with that after mapquest got awful and yahoo maps seemed to disappear.  If you can’t choose your default map choice, well, why have an operating system that only does what it wants to do, not what you want it to do.  If I wanted Bing maps I’d use Bing maps.   

6.  Your bookmarks vanish from the new Microsoft browser, which they call edge, but still exist on other browsers you have.  They say they are there on edge, but I could not been able to find them.  When it’s hard to find something as simple as your bookmarked browser pages, it’s easy to want to go back to what you had before. I don’t want to work that hard to find pages on the web I already had marked.  Of course, I don’t like Chrome either because I have no idea how to find my favorite web pages on that either.    

7. The control panel feature is hidden so far away that you can’t find it.  You can search your computer for it and it doesn’t show up.  You can search remove programs, and you won’t find it.   The reason I was looking is that I wanted to uninstall Windows 10, and of course it doesn’t want to be uninstalled so naturally it makes it hard for you to find that.    It’s a little like HAL in the movie 2001.   It doesn't cooperate.  To remove the program, google search removal of Windows 10 and you'll find several ways to do it.  I did.

-- Kathy Bissell