Windows 10 - One Person's Experience

I logged into the internet last Saturday morning to see a heavy data download coming through to my laptop. Family photos, I assumed. After breakfast and the morning paper, it was still going on but there was nothing new in my email inbox.

My first reaction was to assume that I was the victim of a viral attack although my anti-viral software hadn't detected a problem. I shut everything down and restarted my laptop. Immediately the data started streaming again. I repeated the exercise and again the pesky stuff kept coming in.

Eventually and in a state of mild panic, I rang my internet service provider and she told me it was Microsoft pushing out Windows 10.

Did I ask for Windows 10? Not on your life. Not after a massive fight with Windows 8 (W8) a year ago when I persuaded my sister-in-law (a contented Apple user) in Melbourne to buy a new laptop with the W8 operating system. It was so bad that we took the machine back to the retailer for a refund. He said that Microsoft was running free W8 lessons around the city because the public response was awful.

In fact, I understand that since W8, Microsoft sales have been in such decline that they decided to call this latest operating system W10 and not W9 in case users thought it was a rehash of W8.

So this W10 download continued all last Saturday till late afternoon. It used up 2.35 Gigabyte of my modest and valuable monthly allowance. (Yes, I actually paid for something I didn't want or order.)

Now I'm not really up on the latest bells and whistles in operating systems. For my part, most of what's on offer is superfluous - I don't use one tenth of what I already have. I have used XP, Millennium, Vista, W7 and W8 and it seems that Microsoft gets about 1 in 3 right. So the odds are not stacked in favour of W10. But I did decide to check out the blog sphere on W10 and it was generally quite favourable. So I pushed the "install" button so my grandkids would think I was cool and up there (although I suspect they don't even know what a PC is these days).

One hour later and my life changed. Nothing that I was familiar with appeared on the screen that had taken me so many years of W7 usage to get familiar with and set to my liking. No Google search bar (they arrogantly impose their own search engine on you), my favourites had disappeared, the program menu system took an age to find and, no matter what I tried, I couldn't connect with the internet, even after eventually finding the Control Panel.  The Start button's been replaced by a Search button which immediately brings up a panel containing all sorts of rubbishy links that I didn't want or know how to eliminate.

No doubt all this can be changed, as it can on a tablet or iPhone, but who wants to go through a complete reconstruct?  And of course all the useful Help stuff is online these days, which I couldn't access. The desktop display was there, but the backdrop was a dirty brown and broken with horizontal lines.

Now you would think, that after so many, many years of development, Microsoft of all companies would have learnt how people react if you change everything in one go. You'd think that they might say to themselves, "This is a fairly radical. Let's start off by showing them what they're used to - what they've seen before. Then we can give them the option of changing from A to B. Then we can show them how to change, step by step. What a good idea!"

Instead they expect us to read inside their nerdish heads and see everything as clear as day.

At this point I'm thinking,  My God, I've lost everything. But then I found part of the system that did work for me - quickly and well. I found the button which said, "Reinstall Windows 7".

As it is, they've lost me. I just don't need the hassle caused by arrogance and ignorance. But then I'm not in their target demographic. Just another old guy who was happy with XP and W7! A no-hoper.