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Right-click Start and select Task Manager. (Yes, you no longer need to press Ctrl + Alt + Del with Win10.) Next, click the More details option and select the Startup tab.That opens a list of applications that launch during the boot process. Click the Startup impact column, and the apps will sort from High impact to None (or vise versa). Right-click a particular app and select Expand to see the impact of related processes. You can also disable loading the app at startup (see Figure 3

25 items are listed in my Start tab and all of them say Not measured for Start impact. What use can be made of that?

I bought my Windows 7 Home Edition Acer Aspire laptop in the October when 7 first came out so I was looking at maybe a replacement once 10 was released. So with reassurances that 10 would not require a larger footprint than my existing 7 system I went ahead and upgraded as soona s it was offered to me. My wife also acquired an Asus 7 Home Edition laptop shortly afterwards but she cannot upgrade as her graphics card uses Sis Mirage 3 which is not supported by 10 – at least not yet!

My upgrade went without issue. As I use Classic Shell Start menu I don’t see the split desktop with tabbed apps – instead my start screen is exactly the same other than different icons in the taskbar. But on one occasion I hit start button before Classic start ahd started and got that desktop but was then totally unable to get my normal start without rebooting!

I need Internet Explorer as I use online banking and have software (are all programs referred to now as apps????) that uses Activex controls to bring in all my accounts from multiple banks etc on one screen. Pinning explorer to start menu and taskbar was straightforward so I don’t see why anyone is making that sound difficult!!

My Onedrive app is all over the place. Firstly it duplicated in my User Account folder with the new one empty and the original apparently no longer connected to OneDrive – it was originally set up as SkyDrive so that may be why. But since filling the new folder from the old and wiping out the old I get the odd funny at reboot where the new OneDrive folder appears to resurrect old files or folders dropped from my system years ago r older versions of files thankfully as duplicates with funny renames on the end rather than overwriting the real ones but its still a tad disconcerting when once I booted and was told I was not connected to a Onedrive account and invited to re-register as happened once.

Niggles:

When I boot my laptop I first get a very attractive beach scene with some cliff formations with a large hole through – very scenic! But sometimes that is far as the boot will go. Only by clicking where the start button should appear do I get my user login screen. At elast now I know that happens its a very minor issue but still why?

My biggest issue though is there is no shutdown screen – there is a red screen with shutting down appears for a few seconds then a black screen which does not change. after about a minute there is an audible click which I presume is shut down because the disc flashing light ceases then but the power light never goes off unless I disconnect form the power supply completely. And if I incorrectly assume that the black screen means the system has stopped and don’t wait for the click I then find my next boot takes over 5 minutes and that is almost totally with a plain black screen. I consider this user-unfriendly!

I have had a few issues where software I have used for years on 7 requires to be run as administrator since but that’s no great problem.

After installing 10 my spare disc space was worryingly low. But after 48 hours on 10 I was happy enough to remove the means of reverting to 7 by using Disk cleanup to remove previous windows versions. Just by removing the redundant 7 files this way got me back 30gb so as soon as you are happy with your upgraded system I recommend removing these and not waiting the 30 days.

Hope this answers a few readers worries re upgrading.

I still use WEA and my roter is quite old so may not be able to use WPA2. I do know that I can use WPA however.

How straightforward is it to change router to WPA or WPA2?
How would I go about it – from a alptop using Windows 7 fully updated.
Can i retain the current password key used to grant access to devices?
Would devices autiomatically pick up the change if the passkey is unchanged?

Or would I have to start all over again from fresh- reluctant as it took me ages to get it set up in the first place.

NB Devices attached are 2 laptops both using Windows 7, IPAD, Iphone and a HP all-in-one printer/scanner
The router is Linksys and is about 10 years old and the first devices using it were on Windows XP.

At the last Patch tuesday mass Windows Update there was an update which was reported as leading to several BSoDs and we were all advised not to update with that one by Windows Secrets column (cant recall the number now). I already had updated with that one and was not having an issue. But I went ahead and uninstalled it anyway.

Since then my IE10 has consistently failed to remember signons etc and its spread to other browsers I use.

Also the Calendar and Weather gadgets no longer work.

And last but not least IE10 regularly having kernel failures leading to restoring websites. Like about every 10 mintues or so of browsing.

I have tried all the major browsers and have no specific favourite.
I do have a growse with chrome though. Whenever i upgrade to the latest version it wipes out all my installed extensions so i have to go through the process of adding them all again. This doesnt happen with firefox etc so shouldnt happen with Chrome either. Not very professional.

Unless someone here knows a way round that?

My comment refers to the final section of this article and is about Soluto which is referenced about the boot process.

I have been a satisfied user of Soluto for a number of years but have now ditched it.

Partly that has been down to its expansion into other areas of my laptop’s operation but the main reason happened in the last month.

My boot process lengthened to over 9 minutes. Soluto told me that 1 item was taking up 333 seconds and another 67. I looked at these and Soluto told me they were to do with Microsoft .Net 3.5 and were dangerous to remove. I found a service running that used .NET 3.5 although my Add/Remove programs told me I only have .NET 4 on my system. I used remove windows components to remove that .NET 3.5 service which wiped out those 2 entries from my boot process bringing it down to under 2 minutes.

In the process I wiped out an irritating niggle that has plagued me for the best part of this year to do with Aero themes – namely that during boot I get a message about a service failing to start and the usual icon for the start button being replaced by the word Start like older versions of windows (I am on 7 Home Premium), and blank for the extreme right hand side of the taskbar that you used to get back to the desktop being replaced by a solid block button and various other visual changes and font changes to error message boxes and program start and end texts. To solve this I had to restart the Themes service every time I boot up – irritating but not in itself a major issue. This no longer occurs.

So what programs have I screwed up by not having .NET 3.5 service running? Just 1 – Soluto. It totally failed to start. So its no longer on my system. A couple other minor things like Right Click Enhancer wanted me to reinstall .NET 3.5 but I barely used those so have ditched those as well.

So frankly my niggest boot problem was Soluto itself it would seem

Thank you WildcatRay.

Actually dealt with it before I saw your response but tis effectively what i did.

I first just tried uninstall and reinstall but without removing all profile traces that just gave me back the problem.

So i went ahead and wiped firefox off my laptop totally.

Then installed it from fresh last night and that appears to be ok.

So far I have reinstalled my personas theme and Vertical Toolbar plus a few of the important securtity add-ons I use and those are functioning properly again.

Will proceed with the rest of my addons over the next few days.

10.0.2 is driving me mental.

It opens at startup every time with that Welcome to firefox tab plus the bing tab.

It has repeatedly ignore my setting home page to one I want it to open with.

All my add-ons exist in Add-On Manager but none of them are active – at least i think they arent because they include vertical toolbar and that isnt happening plus every single one fo the add-on buttons is missing. No-Script cant be working as sites are not throwing up the usual scripts that require ok’ing messages.

All add-ons show options and the disable option suggesting they are working but if I try to access any of them then Firefox locks up entirely and I have to use Task manager to terminate it.

I will try and uninstall it completely then install Firefox from scratch but if that is no better I will ditch it for good.

10.0 was fine.

I wouldnt be too worried about these. For one thing Mozilla have been sweeping through versions lately and that process has not completed. We should be on Firefox 7 in the very enar future and who knows if that is the end of this quick-fire round of new versions.

Third party developers must be tearing their hair out as each successive version wipes out their add-ons and they have to modify them.

I would wait and take stock once the current round of updates has finished. Any decent add-on will be quickly brought up to date and maybe some will be redundant as Mozilla covers their functions.

My only bug-bear has been the number of tabs that have opened recently infiorming me that an add-on now has a new version to cope with Firefox releases. Having said that its also reassuring that the add-ons themselves are continually being developed.

I have to use IE whenever I do my Internet banking as no other browser supports the Activex controls used so I have ben able to use other browsers instead butn occasionally check this still happens.

I suspected the problem began when Windows Update applied some patches to IE around the turn of the year.

And I am now convinced that was the cause.

The problem has mysteriously gone away after last month’s Patch Tuesday included several more IE updates.

I have learnt to my cost to treat alerts from free virus scanners with some degree of mistrust.

But before I refer to that I must report I sued AVG for several eyars without problem but around the turn of this eyar a new version totally stopped my Mozy home backup from functioning. Removing AVG and it started working again immediately.

I went to MSSE instead at that point.

But i have also used and paid for Prevx for several years. But about a month ago Prevx reported 10 infected files and I stupidly allowed it to delete the infected files. This led to Opera, Superantispyware and SDExplorer all to cease operating and Mozy similarly after reporting a missing Windows dll during boot. Prevx remopved Opera.dll, 2 dlls for SDExplorer and the exe for Superantispyware. Fortunately I still had the current versions of the installs for these available but it continued to zap these every time I booted up and I subsequently found in Prevx logs that every time my laptop booted Prevx was now programmed to delte those files again. With Mozy i find I cnat reinstall it at all and even after removing all Mozy regsitry entries it still wont setup a program folder anymore and their suport line was a fat lot of use in trying to locate the cause.

The moral; of the story is when your antivirus suddenly reports a problem with a file you have had up and running for ages dont delete it. Keep it in quarantine until you either prove with other scanners (send it to those online ones and verify its infected first) that there is something wrong with it or you determine for certain that you can still run without it. then either delete it or reinstate it and add it to your antivirus ignore list until anewer version comes out.

No offence menat Joe and Roderunner but read my opriginal posting again and you will se ethat i have isolated the cause by monitoring CPU Usage using Task manager and have tried all Add-ins disabled.

I repeat the problem starts AFTER I close either tabs in an Explotrer session that is still running OR after i close Explorer altogether. Once the Explorer window has closed a new Explorer session begins on Task Manager running approx 50% CPU. if I switch to Applications window on task manager there is no explorer session running. If I close Explorer with 2 or more Tabs running then after it closes 1 new session starts per TAB each at approx 50% CPU at which point my l;aptop locks completely and I have to power it off and reboot.

I use Windows Update to keep up to date and belive the problem began around the turn of the year when there were some IE updates applied. i also stopped using sandboxie around that time and uninstalled it.

I am using other browsers now instead.

Yes Joe

Its no different will all addons disabled.

I have arrived at W7 having been through every stage of Windows from 3.11 through 95, 98, Me to XP so UAC is completely new to me.

I am a volunteer transcriber of births deaths and marriages for a free UK geanealogy website. I download a jpg of a page of registered births (for example) from the National archives GRO books and then use transcription software to enter those into a table to send back.

Having successfully installed versions of software I ran on XP and then overwritten the data folders within those applications with my backed up input and output data areas from my former laptop running XP, I now find these data folders to be read only meaning that when I download the data it doesnt go into the input folder but appears somewhere within my user documents. Similarly although the software is adamant it writes to its own output folder that is read only and the data also appears instead within my USER documents. Thats ok now that i have found where the data was ending up but if I try to change the folder to not be read only it asks me to confirm as administrator which I do but it takes not a scrap of notice.

This despite my being the only defined user of the laptop and hence automatically administrator level.

This is not the only application that is doing this. The upshot is that my data is thus scattered around but not within dfhe folder it should be – ie the one associated with the application.