Last night I installed 10 on my main desktop PC (HP Intel i7 Extreme 4960X, Intel 730 SSD, 32 GB RAM, Nvidia 770), tried to do a clean install but like the Lifehacker post Dfergie linked to said, you can’t do a clean install, without first doing an upgrade. Found that out the hard way. Thanks a million for the link! It really helped out!
As soon as I got home from work, did a system image to my NAS, downloaded the Windows 10 Pro 64 ISO, burned it, booted off the Windows 10 CD, formatted and deleted all of the partition, and proceeded to install 10, skipping over all of the prompts asking for a serial key. When it finished, I could not activate Windows so I restored the system image from the NAS, then proceeded to do an upgrade install keeping all of my files and settings, after that completed, booted off the CD reformatted again and do another install. I skipped over the prompts for serial keys again, and when all was said and done, I was now activated with a clean, pristine version of Windows 10 Pro.
I played around with it before I went to bed. Here's what I noticed:
1) The new Start Menu, I find totally annoying and obnoxious. It’s basically just a smaller version of the Windows 8 Start Screen. Like I’ve done with everything I’ve ever used since Windows 7 in 2009, I installed Classic Shell, and imported the XML file with all of my configuration settings. I will never use the default start menu in Windows ever again.
2) It’s been months since I downloaded the last preview of 10, but I was under the impression Internet Explorer was dead and completely removed. Turns out I was wrong. To me it seems like Edge is just the replacement for the Metro IE. While I don’t care for Metro apps, Edge does render pages a lot faster than IE. IE 11 in Windows 10 seems very sloooooooooooow. I use Chrome most of the time so I don’t care, but Edge seems just like the Windows 8.1 Metro IE with an expanded settings menu.
3) I cannot figure out how to have two different wallpapers on my two displays. With Windows 8/8.1 it was real easy, just place a check mark on the wallpapers you want to use. Can’t do that in Windows 10. I know they didn’t remove that feature since after I did my upgrade install, both of the wallpapers I was using with 8.1 were retained under 10.
4) I cannot change the Lock Screen background. I changed it in the PC Settings but it doesn’t actually change. One of the first things I do after installing Classic Shell after a new install of Windows is go into secpol and enable secure logon. Maybe that may be causing me issues, who knows.
5) The only metro app I had any use for was the Weather app and having the current weather info display on the lock screen was nice. Not only can’t I change the lock screen background, even after enabling the weather info to display on it, it won’t show up.
6) I don’t care for the PC Settings screen, and the settings it houses (like Windows Update) that were removed from the Control Panel.
7) In Device Manager I had a TON of unrecognized device entries, most of them were for the same thing, the name escapes me at the moment and one was for the PCI Controller. HP sticks all of their software and drivers in a folder in the root of the C: drive called SWSETUP, so since I was anticipating issues I copied that whole folder to a flash drive and just updated chipset drivers via those files and everything seems to work fine
8) Start up and shut down are still blazing fast. With both 8.1 it took one revolution of the spinning circle before I got to my lock screen. With 10, with no software installed other than drivers and Classic Shell it takes a half a revolution. I’m expecting it to get a slower after I install all of my software tonight.
