Windows 10 Upgrade and Downgrade

[ark_ader]

I recently upgraded a Windows 8.1 machine to the latest Windows 10.  After a week or so my PC started locking up with Chrome and Firefox being a big culprit.  After reinstalls the programs failed to load up properly, as did some games and applications.  This continued to get much worse until today when I rolled back to Windows 8.1.  The PC is a fast AMD Quad with 8gb memory and dual graphic display.  What went wrong I did not know, but everything just crawled after a few days.

Who has upgraded to Windows 10 and found it working perfect?

Just a note:  If you did upgrade to Windows 10 and want to go back to Windows 8 or 7, you have less than 30 days to do it. 

[Wired203]

I upgraded 3 of my PC's to Win10 without issue,  laptop sped up with games.  Your symptoms sounds a lot like spyware on your PC,  I would give Malwarebytes a run and see what pops up.

[vwalbridge]

I've NEVER been a fan of windows upgrades. I have always wiped the computer and done a fresh clean install of each new version of windows.

Then again, I work in IT and aint got time for games.

[Slippyblade]

I've NEVER been a fan of windows upgrades. I have always wiped the computer and done a fresh clean install of each new version of windows.

This.  Right here.  Start fresh each time.

[knave]

I upgraded one of my laptops. Upgrade process was easy, PC works ok. Not as snappy as win 7 there are just small delays here and there.
Biggest issue I ran into is that there is no current video card drivers for older mobile GPUs nor are there likely to be, and my framerates took a hit. Granted this is an older laptop w 4gb ram.

After 24 hours I set the PC to performance which turns off all the windows fancy stuff. and frame rates improved to good enough. I lost probably 10%.
I will keep it windows 10 for a while. I had just reimaged this PC to a fresh win 7 install in MAY so I can always go back. I might take an win 10 image or look into dual boot.

I want at least one win 10 pc to play around with. All my others are staying win 7 for the time being. I'm torn about my win 8.1 tablet. So I'm going to think about it.

[Malenko]

I have random freezes and slowdown on my Win10 experiment laptop.  I dont like the start menu and will probably revert back to Win7

[dkersten]

Unless you have windows updates completely disabled, at some point in the next few weeks (if not already) MS will push a 6.5 gigabyte file through windows updater that you have no control over.  This is the files to move to windows 10.  If you are on dial up, cell data, or set up somewhere where you have little bandwidth or it costs money, sorry, you are screwed.  Once the download starts, the only thing that stops it is unplugging from the internet or stopping the update service completely.  Soon as you plug in or restart, it kicks back in.  So far this is happening even on computers that were not supposed to get the option to update at all. 

Not a big deal if you have 30-120mbps at home, but when you are on a 1.5mbps T1 at work with 10 other computers and 4 of them are trying to download 6.5 gigs, it causes problems.  Even worse when you connect your cell phone to your laptop to get online only to find you used 6.5 gigs of data without knowing it.

The one computer I want to try win 10 on is my home machine and it has not started the download yet.  My other 135 computers are going crazy downloading.  Bad time to be an IT manager..

FYI, windows 10 will force downloads of updates and you can't turn off the update service (yet, fix might come after complaints).   Also many apps will be ridden with ads (like solitaire for example) unless you want to pay for a subscription.  Media player was removed, but I have heard they shipped the final release of win10 with software that will play a dvd.  If you have a picture in your My Pictures folder, no matter if it is in a hidden folder, the default background and screensaver will cycle those images, so get rid of your porn before installing or you might boot up and have a surprise waiting on your screen (not good if your wife or kids will be using your computer).  Unless you opt out, all your Outlook and Skype contacts will have shared access to your wifi connections.  This is a big security hole.  There's a few other things I read while searching for solutions to the forced 6.5 gig download that are being screamed about since the big release, but I don't recall the rest.

[Malenko]

Bad time to be an IT manager.

I disabled that through the upstream WSUS server. My network didnt miss a beat.

[dkersten]

Bad time to be an IT manager.

I disabled that through the upstream WSUS server. My network didnt miss a beat.

Yeah, don't have that luxury, lol.  13 of my 135 computers are on my domain server and I don't even have the ability to set group policy outside of those machines.  Technically your computers should never even get the option nor the files, even if you didn't have a WSUS server, but I talked to a guy with 500 computers on a full blown AD domain and dozens of them were downloading the file even though MS said they wouldn't get it.   

[Ond]

I didnt get a 6.5 gb download more like 3Gb but anyway Ive both upgraded and done  a few fresh installs, all good here.  Maybe they' ll all crap themselves next week......

[DaOld Man]

There is also a thread discussing Win 10 over at Software forum.

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/topic,146597.0.html

[Xiaou2]

I didnt get a 6.5 gb download more like 3Gb but anyway Ive both upgraded and done  a few fresh installs, all good here.  Maybe they' ll all crap themselves next week......

 Unless you disabled the NSA Spybot stuff... it probably uploaded 3.5 GB of your data back to them.              

[dkersten]

I didnt get a 6.5 gb download more like 3Gb but anyway Ive both upgraded and done  a few fresh installs, all good here.  Maybe they' ll all crap themselves next week......

 Unless you disabled the NSA Spybot stuff... it probably uploaded 3.5 GB of your data back to them.              

Oh, that's another win10 "feature".. unless you disable it, MS will add your computer to the torrent-like update system and you will be using your upload bandwidth to update other people's computers.

In my case, win7 doesn't do that, the 6.5 gb file is just a download.  It looks like MS did indeed start to throttle them, I am seeing some of my branches start up in the morning and the bandwidth usage spikes to 100%, then throttles back to about half.  It still sucks but since I still can't find a way to stop this from happening, at least these computers are only using half my total bandwidth and not all of it, and I can still get other updates (I don't have to block the update servers, throttle the BITS service on each computer, or shut off updates completely on each computer).

[Ken Layton]

I'm running 10 on my backup laptop (old Compaq Presario from 2007 which was originally Vista Home Premium then updated to 7 because of a hard drive crash). The "upgrade" caused me to lose all sound. The problem was traced to 10 loading the wrong audio driver (Conexant Audio old driver) instead of the Microsoft provided one. Once the correct audio driver was installed, all sound was restored.

Then came the crashes, lockups, and excessive battery consumption. The crashes and battery troubles were fixed in a couple of the Windows updates. The lockup problem which I thought was being caused by Firefox, was actually caused by Avast Anti-Virus. I had been reading about lots of other people also having problems with Avast lately causing lockups and excessive CPU use. Avast was not listening to the complaints and people dropped Avast and switched to Avira instead. That's exactly what I did and guess what? No more lockups! Computer is running smoothly now.

One thing though is 10 removes the ability to play DVD movies. However, I installed the free "VLC Media Player" and can now watch DVD's again on this machine. Surprisingly, this old 2007 machine works fine now with 10.

I don't like how Windows 10 has moved around everything and changed the names of stuff I was familiar with. I'm going to install the "Classic Shell" free program and make this machine look like an XP install.

A couple of things did surprise me though. The free Paperport Viewer utility I use to view/print my .MAX files from my old Visioneer scanner works perfectly fine in 10. So does my old vintage 1998 HP Deskjet 882c printer. I had to use the original installation cd to add the printer, but by golly it works!  Something else that works is the "Cute PDF Writer" program.

I decided to NOT install the latest Adobe Reader DC program because it has become so bloated. I installed PDF X-change PDF Viewer (the free version not the paid Pro version) instead and am very happy with it.