Which OS

[Raven]

I have been using Windows 7 64bit for ages now and now that Microsoft are pulling the plug on their support I am thinking about making the jump to Windows 10 when I get around to doing a fresh installation (which shouldnt be too long now as my system is getting really slow).

Any advice on which version on to go for or do#s and don'ts will be much appreciated.

 

[Eliton]

i have win 10 pro 64 and t works like clockwork

 

[glenwilson]

Overall I have been happy with Windows 10. I have had few crashes and those I have turned out to be hardware related.

I have Windows 10 Home and Pro (I used to use their software dev thing which meant you got a couple of licences for all of their products - was well worth the cost! But is now no longer available). The main difference is that you can bit lock under the pro version but not in the home version. There are more Pro ‘advantages’ if you are a business user but few that are of much use to normal users.

Once installed you don’t get a key as registration sends a snapshot of hardware to MS and when you (if needed) do a reinstall it will automatically activate.

The upgrade process has worked fine for me and I haven’t had to do a clean install for ages. Worth backing up files of course before starting the process. For a while now I have kept the boot drive for the OS and software with data on separate disks. And another older HDD with all the software install files on to save downloading everything again. When upgrading or reinstalling Windows does keep a backup that is reasonably chunky if you are using a modest SSD for the OS drive. If after a few months everything is OK then run the disk cleanup utilities and get rid of it as it can save a fair bit of space.

Win10 home does have compulsory updates. You can defer them for a short period but eventually they will get installed. From a security it is good but there have been a couple of times where an update broke some stuff.

On the whole it really has become something you install and forget about and is a lot different from Win95 etc. and a mature OS.

Hope that helps.

 

[Witcheri]

Win10 is fine but i still use Linux as my main since it's easier to control.

 

[samoz83]

Ubuntu/Centos/RHEL/Arch

Being a Linux sys admin I might be biased

But you can prob just do with Home, unless you wanna mess with some of the group policy stuff/ don't want hyper-v bitlocker etc

 

[glenwilson]

I currently have two Windows PCs - game and back-up server/streamer.

Also have a 2012 Mac Mini Server for video editing with Final Cut and Music with Logic Pro. I had thought suggesting my Mum got a Mini to replace her ageing Dell PC but MacOS can be baffling at times. The ‘It just works’ is , took me a long time to get used to it and I have used all versions of Windows from 3.1, DOS, OS/2 Warp, Unix. My favourite was GEM that we used to run Elixir electronic form design software as we couldn’t upgrade because latest version was £1k and the printers we had needed a 5 1/4” floppy disk as input. Those were the days, FPS weren’t even a dream.