TO UPGRADE OR NOT TO UPGRADE: THAT IS THE QUESTION

If you still have Windows 7 or 8/8.1 on your computer, you have just a few weeks to get a free upgrade to Windows 10. You will still be able to upgrade after the July 29, but it will cost you $110. I bought my laptop with Windows 8. Like almost everyone else, I hated it, and I upgraded it to Windows 10 as soon as it became available last summer. I have Windows 7 on my desktop, and I am keeping it.

Windows 8 is a monstrosity. When it came out, Microsoft was seeing a decline in PC sales. More and more people were connecting to the internet with smart phones and tablets. That was the wave of the future, and the geniuses at Redmond, WA, decided to grab the future by the tail and created a new system that would combine PCs with mobile devices. Their new system (Windows 8) would have tiles that you could touch and move around the screen to open programs, just like the icons on your smart phone. Neat, huh?

No, it wasn’t. People were used to operating their computers through a mouse and keyboard. Further, most new computers did not have a touch screen, so the touch feature was useless to most users. Not only that, but a lot of familiar features were gone. There was no start button. How do you shut the damned thing off except by holding the power button, something we had been told not to do? While, we’re at it, where’s the control panel? A lot of features once reached through the control panel were now done through the control button, more like a smart phone.

Experienced computer users suddenly didn’t know how to do some of the most basic things on their new computers. It was like getting into a new car and finding all the controls had been moved or modified or both.

Computer users were very unhappy. A week after Windows 8 came out in October 2012, Steve Sinofsky, head of the Windows Division at Microsoft, was gone. Early in 2013 Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced that he too was leaving as soon as they found a new CEO, which they did the following summer.

The new boss, Satya Nadella, was faced with a mess. The first improvement that came out was a new version of the operating system, Windows 8.1. This came out a year after the original Windows 8. The new version fixed some of the problems with Windows 8, like restoring the start button that people had been used to for two decades. Also Microsoft started right away on a new system. The new system, Windows 10, came out July 2015, less than three years after Windows 8’s disastrous debut.

Windows 10 is not a terrible operating system. It moved back closer to Windows 7. It also had a couple of entirely new features, the Edge browser and the Cortana, the digital assistant. Using Edge is not like using Chrome or Firefox for the first time. An experienced computer user could just go to Chrome or Firefox and start using them. With Edge you have to figure some things out before you use it, like: Where are my favorites? Edge has some new features. For example, you can write on a web page and save it that way. However, when I use my Windows 10 laptop, if I go on the internet, I use
Chrome rather than Edge. I don’t use Cortana much. However, I do use another digital assistant, Google Now, on my Android phone.

Windows 10 is not and could not be a well-designed system. That is because it had to be build on top of Windows 8.  Otherwise people who had Windows 8 or 8.1 would be shut out. Some people like 8.1 and don’t want to upgrade to 10. If Windows 8 had been an extention/improvement on 7, instead of an attempt to redesign the whole thing, it would have been much better. One thing I don’t like about Windows 10 is that it still has the tiles from Windows 8. That is not a big problem, though, because you can get rid of them if you want.

Shortly after I loaded Windows 10 onto my laptop, I downloaded a program called Start 10. This program makes the user interface in Windows 10 function very much like that of Windows 7. I am happy with that.

Ironically the Windows 10/Windows phone thing didn’t work out for Microsoft. A year after Windows 8’s debut Microsoft bought cell phone maker Nokia for $7.2 billion. Part of the plan was for Microsoft to emulate Apple and make its own mobile devices. Nokia was to make Windows phones. Windows phones never really got off the ground. They had to compete with iPhones and Android phones, which together hold about 95 percent of the smart phone market. Last year Microsoft wrote off a loss of $7.6 billion on its investment in Nokia.