Windows 10 to be Released July 29 2015

[ZLoth]

FYI: I'm posting this across multiple forums. I'm also making this link rich.

It seems to me that when I got through technology upgrades, it goes in the cycle of long periods without any significant upgrade, followed by spurts of multiple upgrades. Last Fall, for example, I finally upgraded my dual-core E6600 which I had built in spring, 2007 to the UberBoxen - a i7-4790K beast of a machine, along with upgrading the home DSL to a 15Mb connection and changing the home phone line to a VoIP connection (sorry, folks, we still use a fax machine). Then, in the past two months, I upgraded my mothers cell phone from a five year old flip phone to a Samsung S5, while I upgraded my own cell phone from a Samsung S3 to a LG G4, plus obtaining a new color duplex printer, a Brother HLL8350CDW Wireless Color Laser Printer. And, oh yeah, upgrade from Windows 7 Home to Windows 10.

I am particularly interested in the Windows 10 upgrade. During a Black Friday sale, I had obtained a deal on some good memory to upgrade my UberBoxen from 8 GB to 32 GB. It wasn't until the day after I placed the order that I realized that Windows 7 Home Premium has a 16GB limit. Whoops. Now, I realize that, for the typical user, there are diminishing returns once you get beyond 8 GB... unless you plan on running a virtualization platform like Virtualbox or Lightworks video editing. Until very recently, games were compiled for 32bits as well, so they did not even exceed 4GB. If I were to advise someone building a computer, I would suggest doing a price comparison between 8 GB and 16 GB. Plus, RAM is always easy to expand later.

I did not receive the Windows 10 upgrade for the UberBoxen until just before I went on a 10 day vacation. As I am a big believer in both Murphy's Law and Chaos Theory, I figured I would wait until I get back from vacation. Boy, was I glad I did that. While I did make a full drive image just in case I have to go back, that was not needed. However, I had a few stumblesteps along the way.

First time I initiated the Windows 7 upgrade, I got.... "We couldn't update the system reserved partition" error message. Well, that's just great. Pull up Google, and I found this message thread pointing to this Windows 7 Forum post about moving the boot partition to the C: drive using EasyBCD. Quick fix, but now I have a 100MB partition that is not being used. This isn't 1990. I can't worry too much about 100MB on a 500GB SSD drive.

Time to try Windows update again, and yet another error message: "Windows Update Error Code 80070103". Aaarrrgghhhh.... and it's related to drivers. I figured I would remove the the AntiVirus and visit my motherboard support page to download updated drivers. Because I had no anti-virus installed, Windows insisted that I install Windows Security. This will turn out to be a bad idea.

Third time attempting updates.... and it WORKS! But, it's too early to celebrate. Another error message pops up: "Error This device can't release to failure!". Seriously, who writes up these error messages? Another Google search shows this forum post relating to the GigaByte apps. Sigh. Time to remove and reinstall those applications. I won't get into the mess of trying to remove Microsoft Security Essentials in order to reinstall Kapersky's Anti-Virus. (But, it's FREE!)

And, the end result? To me, it feels like Windows 10 is running faster than my Windows 7. The Start menu takes a little getting used to, but it's not the travesty that Windows 8 Metro (or is it TETRIS) that marred Windows 8 and doomed an otherwise good release. I'm still having to tweak a few things in the background, like resetting Notepad++ to be the default editor instead of Windows Notepad. And, I downloaded Ultimate Windows Tweaker for Windows 10, so I want to explore that too. Unfortunately, Windows Edge isn't exactly done yet, so I'm still using Chrome and Firefox. I have integrated my Google Calendar and Google Mail account into Windows 10, and it seems to work.... just not well.

Inevitably, someone is going to post their list of must have applications for Windows. Not to be left out, here is my list:

• KeePass and LastPass Password Managers - Yes, I use both! Keepass is my master password list, but it is also handy for holding my registration keys for products. LastPass contains a subset of my passwords, and is cloud based. Both have strong encryption for keeping the passwords secure.
  
• FreeFileSync - If you are like me, you probably carry a USB stick of files with you. With me, it's two USB sticks.... one containing my personal files, and one containing a set of utilities "just in case". FreeFileSync is an excellent utility to back up those files to a hard drive.
  
• ShareX - As part of my job in technical support, screen shots are essential when diagnosing an issue. I had been using PicPick, but just stumbled upon a free yet more powerful screen capturing tool. Want your screen shot to be automatically saved with a time stamp? No problem. Timed screen shots? No problem. MP4 video of what is occurring? No problem.
  
• Paint.net - Want a powerful yet free photo editing program? Paint.net should be one of the first programs to look at. I often use it to annotate screen shots in my work.
  
• VLC - Another "Free yet powerful" video player that plays multiple formats. It's worth mentioning that is can also play back DVDs... something that Microsoft wants you to pay for!
  
• Notepad++ - Did I mention that I hate Windows Notepad? This notepad replacement is multi-tabbed, and extremely powerful. Now, they need to fix and re-enable spell-checking.
  

Next up on my list.... upgrading my Windows 7 laptop. As for my mothers Windows 8 system.... somehow, she managed to initiate the upgrade, and it worked!