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Windows 10 - Do I upgrade? If you read the article or watched the video about the 8 reasons to upgrade to Win 10 they start off by saying it is easy to upgrade and go back if you don't like it. It might be easy but it will waste hours of your time (or at least your PC's time). Firstly, if you don't have a legal version of Windows, press the back key on this page and don't consider this move. In my opinion, there is no reason anymore not to run a PC without a legal copy. Again in my opinion, without having updates regularly from Microsoft for their operating systems you are asking for trouble as half of updates have something to do with security. If you bought your computer at a reputable dealer then you are probably running a legal and registered version of Windows. If someone built the computer especially for you, they might have cut costs by using a copy of the Windows OS which is not registered with Microsoft. I won't into the moral issues of pirated software here as I am no saint but when software is under 100 bucks and I absolutely need it, I will usually dish out the money to have support and updates. #1 tip - The process of upgrading takes a lot of
time. So make sure you don't need your computer for a few hours.
This is especially true if you have an older computer. If your
computer didn't originally come Windows 7 or 8 it's probably too old
to have enough power to run Win 10. I have programs that run well in
Windows Vista and stopped working in Windows 8 and Windows 10. If
your a using software that you bought years ago and is critical to
you and is working, there is no guarantee that it will still work,
especially if the software was designed for a 32-bit Windows system. #2 tip - If you have the luxury of having more than one PC upgrade only one of them and play around with Win10 for a while to see if everything works as it did before. This will also give you some time to get acquainted with the new way things work. #3 tip - One of the perks of using Windows 10 is Cortana. She is the competition for Apple's Siri. Siri is the voice activated assistant for iPhones and iPads. You can ask a question and she will respond usually vocally or send you to the right place on the internet to get your answers. With Windows 10, when you have a question for example, you just say Hey Cortana, what's the temperature? She will say: It is minus 10 Celcius!. Unlike Siri, she won't say Brrrr! It is minus 10. There is currently a lot of debate on who is the better voice assistant, Siri, Cortana or even Alexa on Amazon Echo. There is a new voice assistant from Google called Google Now, so everyone is getting into the action. If you have a kitchen PC like we have it is fun to have Cortana settle our arguments really fast. Like when you are arguing about how old Robert De Niro is all you say is Hey Cortana, How old is Robert De Niro? And the result come in fast to settle the argument. Unfortunately, she will not settle domestic disputes but that coming in Windows 13. #4 tip - Not sure if this has changed yet but when you setup Win 10, if you say that your region is Canada, Cortana cannot be turned on in the settings. You must specify that your region is the US. Warning - Like Siri, when you use either voice assistant you are agreeing to send a lot of usage data to Apple or Microsoft. If you are into privacy issues, neither of these features will get you excited. If you would have asked me about upgrading to Windows in December my answer would probably be to wait as I was still having some issues with the only PC that I have upgraded. But a few weeks ago, there was a major update released by Microsoft. I have my options to automatically do updates however this one seemed to require my asking for it. It was almost like an upgrade as it took almost an hour to complete. Usually these are done within 10 minutes. I have a feeling that this update fixed a lot of things with the originally release of Windows 10. I have enough confidence to try upgrading my travel laptop. So if you ask me now if you should upgrade, my answer would be a qualified yes. If you read articles or watch (negative) videos on Windows 10 made before January 1st, they reflect the reality of the last update. Just remember, It's a fairly lengthy process. There will be a learning curve when you get there. If you are running an old computer make sure it's fast enough to do it. If you buy a new computer, it will (probably) be preloaded with Windows 10 but it won't have that major patch that was done a few weeks ago, so that will probably done when you first connect to the internet. I do have a few other points regarding Windows 10 like the new browser called Edge that they are trying to push instead of Internet Explorer. They also are trying to get you to use Bing instead of Google. I might write more about that if I get feedback from people reading this. Hope this helps a bit but do some more Google searches to get other opinions. Update: 2016-01-17 As pointed out by one of my readers, the built in Mail application in Windows 10 does not work properly. In Windows 7 and 8, the mail application would seamlessly synchronize with whatever mail you were using. Whether you were using webmail based systems like Yahoo, Hotmail or Gmail or ISP based email like Videotron, Bell or Shaw, the mail program would work like a charm. You could easily combine more than one email address much like you can on an iPad or any other good mail application. Unfortunately, Windows 10 fails horribly with it's new mail application. It was to the point where I stopped using it and just went to the web browser to access my Yahoo email. There are many problems with it including not putting things in the Sent folder to filling in bad info when typing part of an email address. If Windows 10 has an Achilles heel, it's the mail application. If you don't use a front end application for mail and go directly to a browser to access your Webmail this will not be an issue.
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