If you’re curious about using windows 10 on a PC (e.g. laptop or desktop), I have to give it a pretty strong thumbs-up. I still like Windows 7 a lot, but Win10 does a lot to add features and usability, and it also returns the start menu and helps shake off the awfulness of Windows 8. (What on earth were they thinking?) Why would you upgrade from Windows 7? Well, Cortana’s good; the new MS browser, Edge, shows some promise if you really don’t want to use Chrome or Firefox; and they’ve put some speed improvements in.
Oh, and if you’re using Windows 7, you’re going to get nagged every couple days to switch. Man, that’s obnoxious.
Anyway, the big drawback is privacy. When you’re installing Windows 10, you’ll have an option that you may have missed in an “advanced” dialog somewhere along the way to turn off these tracking features. Of course you do!! What, do you think I’d want you guys to have that information? Customized ads? No, what I want is zero ads, thank you very much.
Anyway, as an IT consultant, I’m always telling everyone that Windows 10 is a good piece of software, but it’s an absolute necessity to turn these things off. It’s a simple data grab on Microsoft’s part, and brings nothing of value to you (in my opinion. Some might think that personalized ads are a good thing, but I’m not one of them.)
There are also abilities to “let your friends share your wifi”, which seems like a great opportunity to screw something up.
Anyway, I was going to write a how-to, but I’d just be cribbing from another blog post, so I’ll just put the link here instead:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2971725/windows/how-to-reclaim-your-privacy-in-windows-10-piece-by-piece.html
It’s a good column, and I’d just say “do what this says”, so there you go.
