Neighbourhood Windows 10

Many IT Professionals are the resident tech expert for their friends, family and neighbours and in the past month many of us have probably been asked about the Windows 10 upgrade. Questions can range from the simple is it free and is it any good (Yes and Yes), to a plea for help with obtaining the upgrade. With this is in mind, I thought I would share what I have learnt the hard way whilst out on my rounds.

Snail’s pace

Chris, who lives opposite me, loves to tinker, so when his machine upgraded it ran like a snail and Cortana was missing. Ed Baker has an infallible guide on setting up Cortana so I won’t steal the show except to say that if you get the response that ‘Cortana is blocked by company policy’ that is misleading - in Chris’s case the machine isn’t even domain joined (top tip: never muck about with your mates work machine! ). Chris’s machine was slow for the same reason Windows is always slow – it’s nothing to do with Windows – it’s the add-ons, add-ins and spurious software that some of our friends seem to always end up with.

Task Manager

Fortunately Windows 8 and now 10 have a much better Task Manager…

…which features a Start-up tab amongst other things, so I can see what’s impacting start-up performance and disable the unnecessary without even uninstalling it. Compare this to Windows 7 where you could see what processes where running but not their impact, and you have an obvious improvement.

Infections

Roy’s machine was so badly infected with malware that he couldn’t start the install process at all. He wasn’t worried about any of the data on his old laptop, so the best way to go was to perform a clean install – but how do you do that for free? There are two ways:

1.  At the start of the windows 10 install process you elect not to keep anything...

…select change what to keep and then select nothing..

2.  You can always clean up post install and having done all the relevant updates by going to  All Settings –> Update & Security –> Recovery –> Reset this PC  and select what to keep

For Roy I went for option 1, but in order to do that I had to stop all of the malware processes on his laptop just to get the installation to start properly.

Positive feedback

Finally my ballroom dance teacher Teddy simply told me she had upgraded her PC and laptop and really liked the new interface; and she’s... well she’s older than me… so make no assumptions about who you might have to help!

Resources

Getting started with Windows 10 for IT Pros Best of Build and Windows 10

Comments

• Anonymous
  December 09, 2015
  W10 is good but I have had trouble with the audio system since downloading W10. Asus motherboard M4A87TD USB 3.0 but Asus say it is not compatible with W10, only W7. Also will not recognize internal DVD/CD drive although it is a standard optical drive. All diagnostic attempts have failed to fix the problem. Also fails to run USB 3.0. Most other apps work OK. W10 drivers do not seem to match W7 audio hardware,
• Anonymous
  December 10, 2015
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  December 27, 2015
  Having upgraded to Win10 how do I go about doing a clean reinstall of the software?