Like millions of others, I’ve been running Windows 10 in a non-production environment for months and months. Mostly on virtual machines, the experience has been… pretty good!

But all the playing in the world is no substitute for a live update to a production OS running a production application load. Here are my experiences with Porky, my work-a-day desktop. Porky’s no slouch in the performance department. As we like to say sometimes, your mileage may vary.

Getting Ready
For those wanting to jump right in Microsoft has provided a Media Creation Tool. The tool handles the download for your chosen Windows 10 version and produces either an ISO file or a bootable USB thumb drive. I initially chose both 32-bit and 64-bit Windows 10 Pro versions and elected to produce an ISO file. To my dismay, the result was a file that’s too big to burn to DVD. Bummer, intermediate files are cleared when you finish with the tool so I couldn’t simply make the bootable USB stick without another lengthy download. The moral is that unless you enjoy a blazing, unmetered Internet connection, choose carefully when running the tool.

Use the resulting ISO or USB stick to either upgrade OR do a clean install. This is important: to upgrade your license key and activate Windows 10 you must UPGRADE your already installed, qualified Windows version FIRST. Do that by running Setup from the media. After you’ve upgraded and activated, if you wish, you can use the same media to do a clean install by booting it. Activate your clean install using your upgraded license key.

The remain preparation was simple. Over the past week or so I’ve reviewed applications, drivers, and so on, and upgrading/updating where necessary. And just before I imaged the boot drive. I verified and tested the image. Then I backed up Porky’s data drive array to an external drive. If Windows 10 left a smoking hole in my floor my data would still be safe.

Upgrade Duration
The upgrade took a while, which was a surprise. Not counting the download over my coffee-stirrer of an Internet pipe, upgrading my test environments – and the releases came hot-and-heavy toward the end – took only tens of minutes. Porky, by contrast, took well over an hour to complete. What’s more, there were a few periods of inactivity where progress appeared to stop altogether. If I had less patience I might have bailed. Instead I rode it out. Eventually a desktop appeared, sorta.

What’s this? VGA?
Porky settled into its first Windows 10 desktop in VGA mode, using only one monitor! The screaming fan of the mid-range Nvidia card was the clue and Device Manager confirmed that Microsoft had inserted their own generic display driver. A 280+ MB download from Nvidia plus a bit of fiddling fixed that.

Sleep
It was getting pretty late; the sun would be up soon. Even though Porky’s cold starts are lightning fast I use S3 sleep for a week or so at a time, which makes starts near instantaneous. Bump the mouse and it’s ready to work by the time my ass hits the chair. So that’s what I did in Windows 10.

When I returned to the office, coffee in hand, Porky was awake. Fans were screaming (not a good sign), the keyboard backlight was dark, and both keyboard and mouse were unresponsive. I leaned on the power button and Porky went down hard. I counted ten and powered up.

What the??? It was almost as though S3 sleep had worked after all!

Something’s flakey with recovering from the S3 low-power state. I’m not sure what. But I’ll be cold starting Porky until I get it sorted.

Start
I’m already used to the new Start menu, but that didn’t prepare me for the devastation the upgrade would bring. I’ve used the non-desktop, tiled interface in windows 8.1 as nothing more than an application launcher. I grouped my typical application loads together and my scroll finger had learned to horizontally move to the correct group. Finding things was easy!

The new Start menu seemed to have been filled by madmen on drugs. Finding stuff will be a pain in the ass until I could get organized. And sometimes, stuff just seemed to be missing altogether…

Missing Applications?
SmartFTP was the first of the missing. After confirming that it was still installed I ran a Repair sequence with its installer to bring it back. The installer complained, leaving a blank desktop in its wake. Via Task Manager I ran explorer.exe to get it back. The SmartFTP client runs, but it’s got some visual artifacts and the interface has some glitches. I guess the vendor will be updating that sucker pretty soon.

Have other applications fallen off the Start menu? Dunno, time will tell.

email
It’s no secret that I’m a heavy user of the venerable Eudora email client. It worked great in my test environments so I expected no problems. One click and the mail flowed.

Eudora hasn’t been maintained in nearly a decade. Kudos to its development team. The old girl lives on!

The first email check of the day usually brings me a bunch of stuff to do so I busied myself with that.

Performance
Microsoft has managed to do it again. I said before: Porky’s no slouch. Yet every (modern) Windows upgrade - 7 to 7SP1 to 8 to 8.1 to 8.1 Upgrade 1 to (now) 10 – has brought a noticeable performance boost. I’ll take it.

Other Weirdnesses
I’m only mentioning  odd stuff I notice. If I don’t mention it here then either I don’t use it or it seems okay.

SmartFTP I covered earlier.

Microsoft Word put itself through a series of gyrations with dialogues popping up and going away faster than they could be read. But that was just once. Thereafter it launched just fine. This was version 2010, by the way. I’ve seen no compelling reason to upgrade Office.

Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro Extended requested a Repair process when first launched. It took a while and asked for a reboot afterward. This is version 9, by the way. Acrobat’s expensive and this one works for me. The Repair sequence, available from the Help menu, took care of it. I can remember needing to do this before but can’t remember when or why, and I’m too lazy to search the system notebooks.

Cold starts will sometimes fail to load the driver for the Ethernet hardware on my motherboard. Porky’s cabled directly to my router through 1 of 2 available Ethernet ports on my motherboard. The port in use identifies itself as an Intel I210. The driver identifies itself as an Intel driver version 12.12.50.6. Near as I can tell, this is the latest and greatest, the Intel site shows nothing newer for Windows 10. The problem shows as a ‘no network’ condition, in Network Connections the adapter shows as Disabled and won’t Enable. In Device Manager, Update Driver Software finds a local driver, loads it, and the connection sets itself up straight away.

Conclusion
So far, this is less than a half day of experience following my Windows 10 upgrade. A few inconveniences, no showstoppers. I have yet to exercise the new stuff. This article is basically in the name of remaining productive, to help you decide whether to go ahead with your upgrade or wait it out a little.

Typos, bad grammar, and all that crap are my own. In the interest of speed, hey, you get what you pay for.