Beware Windows 10 upgrade — may be worse than people are saying

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When Windows 10 was offered as a free upgrade to my Window 7 home desktop, I looked to tech writers for advice, especially the Windows Secrets columnists, and I did what they suggested was the sensible thing by waiting until the 2nd week of October to do the upgrade, giving Microsoft a chance to iron out some wrinkles. I’ll get to my problems in a moment, but the main point I want to make is this —

Yesterday, having reached the limit of my frustration, I went into my local computer shop to see what could be done. I’d hardly opened my mouth to say that I’d bought my computer from his shop and did an upgrade to Windows 10 than he cut me off and said, “You don’t have Internet and sound, right?” That’s not exactly my problem, but I was surprised that his response was so quick and certain. As we talked, he told me that Windows 10 in his experience has been the worst upgrade ever, worse than Windows 8, that it affects differently configured machines differently, and creates a multitude of problems all over the system. He says his shop is full of machines suffering various problems caused by the upgrade.

Since I’d spent just over a month trying to find a fix for my problem, going past the cutoff date, I was no longer able to follow his first advice, namely, to roll back to Windows 7. If I wanted to, he could do a backup of all my data and re-install Windows 7. If, a few years down the road I decide I want Windows 10 (perhaps because 7 is no longer supported), then I’ll have to buy a new copy.

I feel let down by my online tech advisers. My main guides, the Windows Secrets crew, lulled me into thinking things were pretty smooth overall, with just the odd hitch here and there. That trust led me not to roll back to Win7 as soon as problems cropped up, so I lost my main opportunity to get a fully functioning system. Now I have what appears to be a permanently crippled system. My only hope is that a Microsoft service pack will fix the drivers I need. Or I’ll have to pay the money and inconvenience of re-installing Windows 7.

So what were my specific problems? I had two. The first is something of an annoyance. Win10 will not Sleep, only Hibernate (power down after saving the current state of affairs). It’s not devastating, but I’m not real happy about it. I gather it has to do with the driver for my motherboard. I did search for and installed a driver update, but that did not help. But the killer for me is about sound. I use Audacity all the time to record and edit sound. When I launched Audacity, it told me it could not detect any audio device and could not record. I searched for and installed a driver for Realtek HD Audio Device (I think it was called), but it didn’t help. The discussion forums for Audacity show that many people have this problem. In my case, sound playback was OK. I found a couple of other free audio programs to see if they would work better than Audacity, and although they are able to (record sort of), the quality is terrible and quite unusable.

So I am warning my friends that things might be much worse with the Win10 update than some people are saying and suggesting they stick with the OS they now have. I am very disappointed that Windows Secrets did not give sufficient warning for me to benefit from the same advice. I was certainly shocked to learn that my local computer shop is having a much different experience of upgrades than is hinted at in Windows Secrets.

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I’ve seen plenty advice in the WSL to warn people to create a full external image before upgrading and even if you have an older system image of Win 7, you could still restore with that but would lose recently downloaded material unless you backed that up separately beforehand.

If you are using an OEM machine you would have had the provision to create recovery disks which is a copy of what is in the Recovery partition, but you can buy a Recovery disk for your make and model of computer from the vendor.

It just means that you will have to reinstall any programs along with product keys for the Pro ones and Office can be troublesome when it comes to the count of licence keys, updating the likes of Adobe and Java and then the dreaded Windows updates which you could leave downloading/installing over night – but that would need to be done anyway with a clean install of Win 7 – just may be a cheaper option than having a tech doing it.

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I can’t say I saw the warnings to create a full external image. I do have my data backed up. Image backups have always been a problem for me, so I don’t have one. Mine is not an OEM machine, so Recovery disks are not an option.

Curses on that nagging message popping up every day reminding me to upgrade!

Could we blame Microsoft rather than the user, please?

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I can thoroughly empathise – on one of my trashed machines, the ‘upgrade’ rendered the OEM recovery partition inaccessible. My recovery disc also didn’t work (I found out later that was because I had a genuine MS wireless mouse connected while trying to do the recovery…). Consequently I had to start off with a basic Win 7 iso, find & download all the drivers, install the OS & drivers, install all the OS updates (excluding those related to Win 10), reinstall all my applications, install all the application updates, reconfigure various applications, restore all my data files, etc., etc. All the OS downloads & updates, plus the application updates had to be done at public libraries, etc., because the unwanted Win 10 upgrades had already blown my monthly download limit (hence me being out of pocket hundreds of dollars).

Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

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Windows 10 upgrade nightmares are well documented here and on many other forums, and have been reported for months.

Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

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Windows 10 upgrade nightmares are well documented here and on many other forums, and have been reported for months.

But without knowing how many have not had issues, knowing how many have is useless. There might be a million people having trouble, but if 100 million have updated, the problem is only 1%. I’d be pretty happy if only 1% needed assistance. Particularly when most have no experience upgrading their OS.

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Even 1% demonstrates incompetence in rolling out the upgrade. Taking your 100 million figure, that might mean 1 million people have had their systems broken in one way or another. I find it strange you think that’s acceptable. Plus, 1 million people taking a class action against MS over the damage done and losses incurred would put MS out of business. In my own case, I’m out-of-pocket hundreds of dollars and lost countless hours rebuilding two Win 7 systems because of how MS rolled out the ‘upgrade’ and thoroughly trashed both systems. And I’m far from being one who fits your “most have no experience upgrading their OS” description. I’ve also helped out others who’ve had problems with Win 10 upgrades.

Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

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Let’s see, what did they say?

Your 1st link: “Conclusion: So far, this is turning out to be an almost painless upgrade. Not perfect, but very, very good!”

Your 2nd link: “My experience was likely worse than most. But you should nevertheless take it as a warning — be prepared for unexpected consequences. If you’re ready — with either experience or time — to tackle the potential problems following a migration to Windows 10, put the upgrade off for a few months.” [Which I did.}

Your 3rd link: [Closer to my experience] “It was no surprise that many callers wanted to return to Win7 or 8.1. But I was surprised that reverting to the previous OS didn’t always work — even within the 30-day grace period.”

I don’t think this adds up to fair warning. My system seems to be permanently crippled. It looks like drivers will never be available for my aging, yet nevertheless perfectly good machine (before the upgrade). That warrants more than a “Wait a few months” or “Overall very, very good!”

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Frankly, if other third party companies produced software that caused so many problems, they would soon be out of business. Even if the problems are only 1% of 110 million installations, that is 1.1 million users experiencing problems. That is not a drop in the bucket, it is a deluge.

My personal experiences with Windows 10 are dreadful and required a downgrade to the previous OS via a system image (because not even a revert was successful).

User results may vary, because I know people with much older systems that upgraded successfully; my systems did not, even though they are less than 2 years old.

People that upgraded successfully are usually very pleased with the upgrade, but the 1.1 million people that could not upgrade successfully are not.

I absolutely won’t upgrade to a marginal system from a fully functioning system. This is supposed to be an Operating System. If it doesn’t Operate, then it is a bust. Somebody at Microsoft needs to be fired without a golden parachute.

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to expect an operating system to upgrade seamlessly, is out of proportion to what happens on a regular basis in the IT world.

Hardly. MS is no newcomer to the upgrade party and has managed to do quite well in that area for many years. In its rush to roll out Win 10, though, it’s quite plain that what turns out to be a work in progress was far from properly tested. Why, one might ask, did the Win 7 upgrade installer insist on upgrading systems with software than MS says is not compatible with Win 10? And why were these upgrades inflicted on people who hadn’t reserved them?

Suggesting people create a disk image before upgrading when they had no intention of doing an upgrade in the first place misses the point entirely. In any event, as I have already said, my attempts to restore from a disk image failed for no other reason than having a wireless mouse connected. The restore would start off fine, allowing me to use the mouse to set various options, then go into a shutdown/restart loop with error messages mentioning nothing about the mouse. It was only after I encountered similar results when re-installing from a Win 7 iso that I worked out what had been going on.

Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

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I guess the key lesson to withdraw from here is that you should not take anyone else’s experience for granted, especially because your hardware will be different and any OS upgrade can bring drivers issues. Drivers are one of the thorniest of issues to deal with, and that is only partially Microsoft’s fault. Drivers are supposed to be provided by hardware manufacturers, even if Microsoft provides default drivers in many cases… but not all.

David, sorry if this sounds blunt, but if you are a Windows Secrets reader, imaging should already be on your tools arsenal and you should have taken an image before the upgrade. That would allow you a rollback to your previous OS without any troubles.

It’s never too late to get on the imaging bandwagon. It was of no use for these migration issues, it can be of use for you next problem, whatever it may be. Start doing it now.

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David, sorry if this sounds blunt, but if you are a Windows Secrets reader, imaging should already be on your tools arsenal and you should have taken an image before the upgrade. That would allow you a rollback to your previous OS without any troubles.

It’s never too late to get on the imaging bandwagon. It was of no use for these migration issues, it can be of use for you next problem, whatever it may be. Start doing it now.

I couldn’t agree more.
Look, if you’re going to upgrade, then you had better have your sh*t together beforehand.
Be prepared to do the work as if you had to start all over again or don’t undertake the effort at all until which time you are ready.

I think there ought to be more focus on why some upgrades fail, but unfortunately that would require
a considerable amount of searching and digging. That is something for which very few will ever do gratis.

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I agree. Mea culpa. Still, I wasn’t just lazy. I used to keep regular backups until I began having trouble with them, first because I didn’t have hard drive space, then because I had trouble saving them to an external drive, and I think more, too. I spent quite a bit of time trying to fix the problem and eventually gave up when I just couldn’t get them to work.

And I’d like to say, too, that while far from being a computer expert, my skills are well above the average user. So what about the zillions of Windows users who are being prodded to update to Windows 10? Is it realistic to expect all them to do an image backup, or should they be given a very severe warning of all the pitfalls possible from an upgrade (like those mandatory warnings pharmaceutical companies have to give in their TV ads) and told not to do anything if they can’t first do an image backup?

I wish I weren’t committed so much to Windows. Apple is looking very good these days. I may buy one some day. Imagine the ease of working with a Macbook (sigh).

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Perhaps you should open a new thread and then we can see what sort of problems you are having in creating a system image.

I use Windows Create a system image onto an external HDD and once one is created, any subsequent ones just overwrite the old one, so not sure where the lack of free space is coming from, unless you’ve loaded up in between images that you could do with a larger external HDD ?

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I wish I weren’t committed so much to Windows. Apple is looking very good these days. I may buy one some day. Imagine the ease of working with a Macbook (sigh).

Have you ever used a Mac? It’s not the same as Windows. I would spend some time on a Mac before you decide to make the leap.

Some other things to consider before switching to a Mac:
* I suspect you won’t find nearly as many people who can help you with a Mac as can help you with Windows.
* You’ll have to get all new software, because Windows software won’t work on a Mac.
* Compare prices — it wasn’t that long ago (just a few years) that you would pay about twice as much for a Mac as for a Windows computer with the same capacity/power.

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

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Have you ever used a Mac? It’s not the same as Windows. I would spend some time on a Mac before you decide to make the leap.

Some other things to consider before switching to a Mac:
* I suspect you won’t find nearly as many people who can help you with a Mac as can help you with Windows.
* You’ll have to get all new software, because Windows software won’t work on a Mac.
* Compare prices — it wasn’t that long ago (just a few years) that you would pay about twice as much for a Mac as for a Windows computer with the same capacity/power.

I use Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. An important program people will be interested in is Microsoft Office. I got Office 2008 when I bought my MacBook Pro in 2010 which included a free Upgrade to Office 2011, the files created are also usable on in the Windows version. Several other Free programs are available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux such as Firefox, SeaMonkey, LibreOffice, OpenOffice and some graphics editors. It’s harder to find free programs as Apple is more controlling with their source code for the OS.

Where cost is a concern I can certainly recommend the free LibreOffice as it is mostly compatible with Microsoft Office documents, just haven’t gotten into the ‘fanciest’ or more complex functions in either program. The only application in Microsoft Office not available in LibreOffice or OpenOffice is Outlook but there’s other good ones available. A feature of LibreOffice that is missing in OpenOffice is support for Microsoft Works files.

Before you wonder "Am I doing things right," ask "Am I doing the right things?"

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Ease? I’m not sure learning a new interface and new programs is easy. Everything has its foibles.

cheers, Paul

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I just went ZERO out of 4 on Win10 upgrades, this time the official channel update-upgrade…I’m starting to wonder if I’ll get a successful upgrade in the one year time limit for the free offer.

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So what about the zillions of Windows users who are being prodded to update to Windows 10? Is it realistic to expect all them to do an image backup, or should they be given a very severe warning of all the pitfalls possible from an upgrade (like those mandatory warnings pharmaceutical companies have to give in their TV ads) and told not to do anything if they can’t first do an image backup?

Good point, but obviously that can’t apply to them. Only to those of us who at least know where to go to get our
own self help, those of us who ought to know better.
The rest of the headache belongs to MS & the PC vendors.

For those with especially stubborn issues a total OS and app clean install will be the solution.

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First and foremost, I am 100% against MS pushing out this upgrade they way they have. Making it available on a wide basis is one thing but this approach is a completely different thing. I fully expect that there will be at least one class action lawsuit over this.

That said… For those who willingly chose to upgrade, many tech experts, here and elsewhere, have recommended that anyone using Win7 skip the upgrade completely. And the older the computer the greater the risk of problems, particularly with drivers.

Given that no two computers are exactly alike, it’s possible that some computers are going to be more prone to problems than others. Drivers have always been the biggest problem with patches and updates because there are thousands of them out there and the driver maker is the one responsible for seeing to the upkeep of the drivers. “Local computer shops” often build their own PC’s using boards from China and Taiwan. There is nothing wrong with that and they usually work very well, but it can be nearly impossible to get updated drivers for them. That may or may not be the issue here, but the fact that your local store has seen a lot of similar problems makes that seem like a possibility.

In the old days, a lot of stuff was on plug in boards and if you had a network problem, you could swap out the board. Today, everything’s on the motherboard and you are pretty much stuck with what you have.

As to the issue of imaging before an upgrade, that’s pretty much standard advice. It almost goes without saying that if you are going to be making any major change to a computer, hardware or software, you should have a reliable, tested, method of restoring that computer.

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Greetings from the Great Country of TEXAS,

Does it make any difference if the system is built by some organization like Dell? Will things go any smoother? Just having an IMAGE backup be AOK? I know all of these questions are exactly the same, just wondering as I am NOT any sort of a special type person, IT, GEEK, et cetera

Also am wondering if there will ever be any ebooks out like “The Windows7 Guide Vol 1&2” for Win10?

"Infinite CREATOR" cast "Loving Light" upon thee
TIA, CU L8R, 'd' "LoneWanderer"
"Only you can control your future." Dr. Seuss
NOT a leader,
NOT a BLIND follower,
Join US and LIVE this LIFE as ONE!
Original author Unknown

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Does it make any difference if the system is built by some organization like Dell? Will things go any smoother? Just having an IMAGE backup be AOK? I know all of these questions are exactly the same, just wondering as I am NOT any sort of a special type person, IT, GEEK, et cetera

If you have verified your image so you know it works I’d say you’re AOK. No it won’t make any difference, but, it’s an in-place upgrade right? Which means any system that has been customized further from the original install, the more bumps and glitches the upgrade process has to try and deal with, therefore probably the greater chance for failure. The good news in my instance is the rollback has gone very quickly and smoothly, but I imagine there’s some sort of “quick image” taken of the system before the upgrade begins that is being used for the reversion.

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F.U.N. downtown,

Greetings from the Great Country of TEXAS,

Just was HOPING to receive a good report, as most of my settings go along the line with Windows nothing special. Have done all my own installs, except for the very first one that was already installed. Windows 95 first version, only Home installations. Very curious about my system’s oporation. Have even corrected an issue that Microsoft told me the only solution is ‘Reformat reinstall starting all over agin.’ Never happened ! ! !

"Infinite CREATOR" cast "Loving Light" upon thee
TIA, CU L8R, 'd' "LoneWanderer"
"Only you can control your future." Dr. Seuss
NOT a leader,
NOT a BLIND follower,
Join US and LIVE this LIFE as ONE!
Original author Unknown

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