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So...
...after all the bitching and complaining and moaning and kvetching and ranting and so on and so forth...
...I've gone and done the thing that I swore up and down, on multiple occasions, that I was never going to do...
...I've fucking installed Windows 10 on my main PC.
Yep, I'm a huge fucking hypocrite, at least in this particular situation. I'll completely own up to that. It sucks. Feels bad man, and all that.
After thinking about it for a long while leading up to the Windows 7 EOL bullshit, I simply decided that I would rather be able to still play my Steam/GOG games without as much fuss and bother, than I would rather have a less shitty operating system. Also, I've seen a few too many games lately that have required you to have Windows 10, and I figured a day would come when there'd be a game I actually wanted to play that did so as well. So, that's another reason I went ahead and bit the bullet. For what it's worth, I'm still open to looking into Linux at some point, maybe for dual boot purposes or some shit, I dunno. It's not a priority at this point in time, though.
Yeah...
Oh, I should mention, I didn't pay a dime to install it. It's still available for free, despite the "free period" having long since passed, if you know where to look. And by that, I mean a simple Google search. It's even legit, direct from Microsoft, and not something scuzzy. (Well, I mean, not any more scuzzy than anything Microsoft has ever done, of course.) The gist: get the Media Creation Tool from Microsoft, run it and save the installation stuff to a USB drive (needs at least 8GB free, so lucky for me that I'd bought a 32GB USB drive a few months ago), and boot into that and run the installer. (There's also an option to get an ISO to burn to a DVD.) I tried the "just run it from within Windows 7" method first, and it did a bunch of shit, but then undid all that shit, booted back into Windows 7, and threw up an error message saying it could not install Windows 10. But the "boot into a USB drive" method worked fine for me.
It's only if you upgrade that you can still get it for free, though, from what I understand. If you try to do a clean install or something, you'd need a legit, new, Windows 10 key, which would require buying one from Microsoft as usual. With upgrade, you can just use your old Windows 7 license key.
Speaking of the license key, if you don't have access to your old install CDs or whatever (as was the case with me), there are ways to extract the key from the operating system. All I did was copy/paste that vb script down in the "Find the Windows Key Without Any Software (Advanced Users Only)" section into a text file (renamed to a .vbs file), got the key from that, wrote it down on some paper, and used it when prompted by the Windows 10 installer thing. Gave me no hiccups.
Now, I'm not saying that you should necessarily follow my wishy-washy, hypocritical steps and install Windows 10 as well. I'm just saying that if you do, those are the steps I took.
Anyway...
As far as Windows 10 itself is concerned, my computer has not immediately caught on fire or exploded yet, so that's a good start, at least. It seems a lot like Windows 8.1, what little I've used of that (more so than it seems like Windows 7, that's for damn sure, anyway). I've disabled all of the spyware that I can, so far, and I'll be looking into the nuts and bolts more closely over the coming days and weeks to disable and delete more, if and when I find it. I needed to reinstall all my shit (which I'm still working on), but that has been relatively painless so far, since the installer saved the old Windows 7 stuff in a "Windows.old" folder, which contained all the old stuff like Firefox/Thunderbird profiles and all that, so I haven't lost anything so far, except for the time it has taken (and is taking) to manually reinstall all that stuff.
I'm not particularly happy about installing this shit, especially since I previously said I'd never do it, and the reasons I said I'd never do it haven't magically gone away or anything, but despite all of that, so far, I haven't (yet) had cause to directly regret installing it, either.
...after all the bitching and complaining and moaning and kvetching and ranting and so on and so forth...
...I've gone and done the thing that I swore up and down, on multiple occasions, that I was never going to do...
...I've fucking installed Windows 10 on my main PC.
Yep, I'm a huge fucking hypocrite, at least in this particular situation. I'll completely own up to that. It sucks. Feels bad man, and all that.
After thinking about it for a long while leading up to the Windows 7 EOL bullshit, I simply decided that I would rather be able to still play my Steam/GOG games without as much fuss and bother, than I would rather have a less shitty operating system. Also, I've seen a few too many games lately that have required you to have Windows 10, and I figured a day would come when there'd be a game I actually wanted to play that did so as well. So, that's another reason I went ahead and bit the bullet. For what it's worth, I'm still open to looking into Linux at some point, maybe for dual boot purposes or some shit, I dunno. It's not a priority at this point in time, though.
Yeah...
Oh, I should mention, I didn't pay a dime to install it. It's still available for free, despite the "free period" having long since passed, if you know where to look. And by that, I mean a simple Google search. It's even legit, direct from Microsoft, and not something scuzzy. (Well, I mean, not any more scuzzy than anything Microsoft has ever done, of course.) The gist: get the Media Creation Tool from Microsoft, run it and save the installation stuff to a USB drive (needs at least 8GB free, so lucky for me that I'd bought a 32GB USB drive a few months ago), and boot into that and run the installer. (There's also an option to get an ISO to burn to a DVD.) I tried the "just run it from within Windows 7" method first, and it did a bunch of shit, but then undid all that shit, booted back into Windows 7, and threw up an error message saying it could not install Windows 10. But the "boot into a USB drive" method worked fine for me.
It's only if you upgrade that you can still get it for free, though, from what I understand. If you try to do a clean install or something, you'd need a legit, new, Windows 10 key, which would require buying one from Microsoft as usual. With upgrade, you can just use your old Windows 7 license key.
Speaking of the license key, if you don't have access to your old install CDs or whatever (as was the case with me), there are ways to extract the key from the operating system. All I did was copy/paste that vb script down in the "Find the Windows Key Without Any Software (Advanced Users Only)" section into a text file (renamed to a .vbs file), got the key from that, wrote it down on some paper, and used it when prompted by the Windows 10 installer thing. Gave me no hiccups.
Now, I'm not saying that you should necessarily follow my wishy-washy, hypocritical steps and install Windows 10 as well. I'm just saying that if you do, those are the steps I took.
Anyway...
As far as Windows 10 itself is concerned, my computer has not immediately caught on fire or exploded yet, so that's a good start, at least. It seems a lot like Windows 8.1, what little I've used of that (more so than it seems like Windows 7, that's for damn sure, anyway). I've disabled all of the spyware that I can, so far, and I'll be looking into the nuts and bolts more closely over the coming days and weeks to disable and delete more, if and when I find it. I needed to reinstall all my shit (which I'm still working on), but that has been relatively painless so far, since the installer saved the old Windows 7 stuff in a "Windows.old" folder, which contained all the old stuff like Firefox/Thunderbird profiles and all that, so I haven't lost anything so far, except for the time it has taken (and is taking) to manually reinstall all that stuff.
I'm not particularly happy about installing this shit, especially since I previously said I'd never do it, and the reasons I said I'd never do it haven't magically gone away or anything, but despite all of that, so far, I haven't (yet) had cause to directly regret installing it, either.
