thanks nick.

upgrade is sort of debatable at the moment. shoot mp4 (ex1), trans mxf and am happy enough with my i7/4770 ability to play back what i need. i'm waiting to read reports of skylake, but it'd have to be really worthwhile for me to bother upgrading. i'm actually teched out so to speak - there seems much more hype than actual benefit to be gained nowadays.

what's driving my10 thinking (and this would have to be the first time i've upped a nle os prior to a service pack) is the various programs and plugins (incl oxf) that seem to be built round 10 rather than 7. since you were already running 8.1 i presume any differences wouldn't have been THAT noticeable?

I've upgraded a few win 7 & 8 systems to 10 but not my NLE system yet. So far my experience has been really positive. My 7 y/o laptop which had Win 7.1 now whizzes along and boots much faster. I've not had any driver problems so far and all my apps, including VP 11 and Adobe CS4 still work well on the laptop. The upgrade went smoothly and apart from having to reinstall my Epson scanner, printers and other devices updated fine. Win10 does seem snappier and if you don't mind auto-updates then it's worth upgrading. Cortana and other privacy concerns can be switched off. I'm using Freedome VPN to connect to public wifi while out and about. Unless you have old tech which is not supported beyond Win 7 or 8 then I definitely recommend Win10. I haven't had to go back to the old OS so can't comment on how easy this is to do though.

"My 7 y/o laptop which had Win 7.1 now whizzes along and boots much faster."

Whenever I reinstall Windows XP I find that it whizzes along much faster too (for a while).

I wonder whether those who say that Win 10 is faster are merely experiencing the effect of no accumulated crud.

3 laptops, 1 desktop upped to Win10, 2 have Vegas on them, everything runs perfectly fine for me.

The year I had Win 8.1 it always booted faster then XP did on the same system, even with a fresh XP install.

Win 10 takes longer to boot vs 8 but faster then XP & 7. Haven't had any issue so far. I didn't like the new start menu so reverted back to the 8.1 Metro screen (when an app took focus the new start screen would go away, just like the old Start menu). The only complaint is that the keyboard/mouse awaking my system from hibernate by default was enabled even though I installed it on a desktop. Also, no more tablet mode with multiple monitors like win 8.1. It's either desktop mode & apps in windows or a single monitor, but that doesn't bother me that much.

since you were already running 8.1 i presume any differences wouldn't have been THAT noticeable?

Correct. Effectively Win 10 = Win 8.2. I couldn't even tell you what the differences are from Win 8.1. I haven't really noticed any apart from a few cosmetic differences. I have nothing to do with the Metro stuff apart from once in a blue moon a simplistic purple screen pops up.

I never could tell the difference between ME & 7! It's like ME makes all odd # released similar & even one similar! :)

I think you mean Vista, not ME.

I've installed on all my machines hoping to end networking issues with different OS previously...i still have one machine that doesn't want to talk to the others but they can talk to it. my biggest complaint is that it appears to put my many hard drives to rest when not being used which then takes a while to wake back up when going into file explorer...haven't had time to research it yet to see if there is a setting for this. with multiple drives on most of my machines, it gets annoying. programs are all working great so far including all my Sony programs. they all seem to load and work a little more responsively, but that may be wishful thinking or it just isn't loaded up with jis & putz yet! So far, i'm sticking with it...like it much better than the Win8. the switchover was rally painless as well.

I currently have 8 on my main machine with an overlay that makes it work like 7, since 8 seemed impossible for business type use. Did Microsoft relent with 10 and give it an option to have a standard desktop appearance and convenience like 7?

Win 10 has a start menu of sorts but not quite like the Win 7 one. I find it usable. The desktop is easy to set up as the default screen. It's a lot more like Win 7 than Win 8 now but not completely the same. I think MS has managed to combine the best of both worlds at last. A future update will allow programs to be install on any drive including an SD card which will remove the primary drive limitation on mobile devices.

Win8/10 menu.

Try www.classicshell.net for replacement menu configurable backwards even as far as Win95 style !

geoff

I have just upgraded Win 7 to 10. The programs and data seem to be intact, and the appearance very similar to what I had before, except that I had to wrestle with the short date format to get what we use in Australia rather than US.

I haven't timed it, but boot up time seems to be a bit longer. The few programs I have run so far seem to run about the same.

I don't have any really old software on this machine. It is on my XP machine which I will keep to run hardware that has no drivers for later versions of Windows, and to do internet surfing because it has more thorough but more problematic antivirus software.

i seem to have had endless problems with upping 'pro' versions, 'home' go as smooth as silk.

anyone had any similar experience?

As I said in my thread, the media creation tool upgraded Win 7 Pro without a hitch except for the date format, which was easy to fix once you know how. I started it before going to bed and it was done by next morning.

@Geoff_Wood: Thanks! I’ve been looking for a Windows-7-type shell for my Windows 8.1 laptop for a long time. Now you have finally helped me find it!