Upgrade to Windows 10? Maybe, Maybe Not.
I upgraded my laptop to Windows 10 a few days ago. It was a slow process, but aside from that, I had no problems. I just had to ignore my laptop while it went through the upgrade. However, many of my friends and colleagues have had issues. So the question is, should you upgrade?
Maybe Not…
The answer is, it seems a bit risky. But there is no consistency, that I can see, between the people who have problems and the people who don’t. My upgrade was done on a laptop I bought in December. A very inexpensive Dell. One person bought her laptop about two months ago, and she keeps getting errors. Her computer wasn’t disabled, she just cannot seem to perform the upgrade. Still another friend, who is very tech savvy, ended up with a disabled computer and had to spend hours on the phone with Microsoft. I warned another person that I felt she should wait, and she called me today to tell me she had performed the upgrade, but now was having some issues, mainly with the browser Chrome (which is very important to her work.) So of these people, only one didn’t have trouble of some kind. One had a disaster, one cannot upgrade and one had an inconvenience. Not great odds.
Special Software? Special Considerations.
If you have any specialized software that has not yet been tested on Windows 10, wait until it is updated to upgrade. If you aren’t sure if that software has been updated, call tech support or customer service for that software and find out. I mention this because I know a lot of lawyers use specialized software that was coded by smaller companies. Those companies may not yet have had a chance to test their software on Windows 10, and they may need to make some changes. If you require a certain piece of software to do your work, be very careful before you upgrade.
The Bottom Line
I knew that there were some risks to upgrading, but I have a couple of computers that I can use, so I wasn’t too concerned about dealing with a disabled laptop. But, if you only have access to one machine and you are not comfortable with having to spend some time on the phone with Microsoft, I would wait a bit before you upgrade. This will give Microsoft a chance to figure out why people are having issues and hopefully, resolve them. Also, this will give Microsoft a chance to create a support book for its tech service people that will allow them to identify most problems and help you resolve yours relatively quickly. This is how tech support generally works. The people look through a book, find your problem and go to the recommended solution. If that solution doesn’t work, they go to the next recommended solution. If they cannot solve your problem, they escalate it to someone who can work on the fly or has an even better book. When this happens, it takes much longer to resolve problems, often requiring many hours or several calls.
As an aside, I am not the only one who is a bit concerned about the upgrade. Computerworld has written (at least) two articles on the subject: Windows 10 is for suckers and 9 reasons not to upgrade to Windows 10 — yet. Silicon beat reported on an upgrade bug in: Windows 10 upgrade bug makes some PCs unusable.