Being offered a Windows 10 upgrade? Don’t take it up yet!

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Actually my W10 test box happily ran all sorts of “legacy” XP era apps….

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Duncan

I just did some field trials using a few of my favourites golden oldies, including Office 2000.

I wasn’t attempting to put any of them to serious use, but was satisfied that they would install and run OK.

This was mostly done because I have noticed that PC World always try to upsell a new copy of Office each time they sell a new PC. One of the “hurt and rescue” strategies I’ve witnessed there was telling folk that 32-bit versions of Office would not run on 64-bit Windows versions. My personal experience is that isn’t true with such versions of W7 & W10 that I’ve used.

I know there is a lot of information “out there” on the internet. However, folk with nothing to complain about are less likely to post than those with axes to grind. Also, a lost of postings come from enthusiastic but non-expert authors – quite often these people are talking way outside the limits of their actual first hand knowledge or experience. Hence one has to consider whether or not the associated facts are likely to be correct or not.

I certainly saw several teething problems with the old-Vista machine that I first used as a W10 test bed. In that case, I think they were sufficient to confirm my existing view that the best available upgrade for an old Vista machine is LXLE (you might prefer Mint with either Mate or XFCE though…). My W7 HP laptop seemed to take W10 OK though. But so what? I’m still convinced that XP is my favourite version of Windows – and my recommended “upgrade path” is onwards and upwards to LXLE, so bye, bye Windows!

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Strangely enough, most versions of Linux are produced by commercial organisations. The software engineers who write Linux and other GPL licensed software are funny folk. You may not believe this, but they actually expect to get paid for their work, just as all other kinds of engineers do.

Most of the software in Linux is free, as in free speech, but not necessarily free, as in free beer. For example, the GPL licence conditions actually allow you to either charge for software, or give it away free, or both. So, in practice, Linux gives users the choice of either paying for software – and support for it – or not paying and supporting it themselves. Hence both Ubuntu and its “parent” Debian can be had for free – or you can choose to pay for supported versions.

The old Windows Live Mail should have been preserved during the upgrade. Mine was and it works as before and I have 30,000 emails stored in my system, going back 16 years. You should be able to do a free download of all or some of Windows Live Essentials 2012 which includes Windows Live Mail.

After the launch of OS X, which was a huge change from earlier operating systems, Apple’s approach has been to introduce more incremental changes, which don’t seem to alienate users to the same extent as Microsoft manages to do. Moving from one version of OS X to the next has never presented me with any significant issue. My big problem has been that I never know whether old paid-for software is going to continue to work. I keep getting reminders that I can upgrade from Yosemite to El Capitan (I prefer OS X 10.10 to 10.11 rather than silly names) but will my Adobe software still work? It seems that PCs offer better compatibility of old software with new operating systems. To the best of my knowledge there is no easy way to go back to an older Apple operating system.

I know several people who have installed W10 and are happy with it, though none of them are advanced users.

Yes, ‘American National Parks’ is an interesting series theme. Did it start with ‘Appalachian’ by any chance?

I always hold back from the significant OS upgrades. When Yosemite arrived, I waited until the 3rd iteration before taking the plunge. Even by them, however, Apple hadn’t sorted out iPhoto or Aperture, so neither worked with Yosemite. Finally, about four weeks ago, they did, so now I’ve upgraded across all the machines. Aperture was particularly important, as I’d spent some time getting to learn how to use it, so I didn’t want it to simply disappear.

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