Tim, Mike... I hear you. Last week was the first time I installed Win 10 on a personal machine and started using it, as opposed to encountering it on a work machine where someone else had installed it. I so disliked Win 8.1 on a 10" Lenovo Yoga 2 I use for travel that I wanted to replace it with Win 10 . The back story to this is that I'm always seeking to travel lighter so I was looking for the very smallest, lightest device I could find that had a usable keyboard, ran real Windows and would last at least 8 hours on a charge, the overall objective being to have enough charge for 11+ hour flights after allotting some time for takeoff and landing, meals, etc., and ideally without needing to drag along a heavy charger. In theory the Lenovo gadget equipped with a big memory card fits that spec, especially considering that it charges through the single mini-USB port it has so you don't need to bring along an extra charger besides the one you will have for your phone. It can be used as a tablet or as an ultraportable with the detachable, slim keyboard. In practice the Yoga 2 was a mistake. If you like Windows-based tablets (I don't for many reasons, for example because they tend to support use of a SIM card only for a data connection and not as a voice phone as well, as do Android tablets) it is OK as a touch-interface tablet with a good screen and fine audio. But for use as an ultraportable it is a terrible choice, mainly because of two problems with the keyboard: the magnetic hinge does not suffice to keep tablet and keyboard attached when using it on your knees in an airport and the Bluetooth drivers are so incompetently implemented (the device communicates with its own keyboard through BT) that every ten minutes or so it loses contact and the BT has to be cycled on/off. The problem appears to be that to save power the keyboard sleeps if no key is pressed for a while and that kills the connection. But for all that I'm reluctant to toss it, as it really is the smallest and lightest, full keyboard, usable Windows computer I've found. I had hoped that an upgrade to Win 10, which Lenovo supports with a supported upgrade and Win 10 specific drivers for the device, would provide an opportunity for a smooth introduction to Win 10 in my personal life as well as possibly improved BT drivers. Experienced people are already thinking... "Ah... the triumph of hope over experience..." Over the weekend I spent nearly two days struggling to load Win 10. After first carefully upgrading everything and making a restore USB I tried the upgrade to Windows 10 path invited by the taskbar button installed by one of the recent 8.1 updates. That seemed to work until it was time for the system to reboot and run Win 10, at which point the combined Lenovo / Windows 10 system put all of its energy into achieving a perfect emulation of a very light, thin, long-battery-life, expensive brick, neither booting into Windows 10 nor rolling back to 8.1. I should note, by the way, that the system was absolutely completely stock Microsoft and Lenovo before the upgrade, with nothing tricky in it of any kind. For some unknown reason, some machines like this upgrade fine on the first try and others don't. Mine didn't. What followed was endless trial and error with consumer-proofed hardware and software where no documentation of any kind exists. It is not trivial to decode entry points into something as simple as launching what limited BIOS exists on such consumer-proofed devices, but where there is a will there is a way. I spent the next 12 hours or so trying a wide variety of strategies using downloaded Win 10 images on bootable USB devices, trying various combinations of the repair and troubleshooting tools when said images didn't work and so on. At the end I found a Windows 10 image on the Microsoft tech builder website that installed and allowed the device to reliably boot up Win 10 and be loaded with various Win 10 specific drivers from Lenovo. Clear sailing from then on... Some notes: None of the Win 10 images I tried in a fresh install from a bootable USB recognized the Windows key pre-installed in the BIOS of the device so I ended up having to provide a fresh Windows 10 license key. That's costly if you don't get keys for free as a special friend of Microsoft. As with the case of Tim's report earlier in this thread, my device, like his, had only a single mini USB port for connectivity and power. Like his device my Lenovo also needed an external keyboard and mouse to get far enough past BIOS and installation to where either touch screen drivers could be loaded or Bluetooth drivers to use the device's own keyboard could be loaded. I got around that by first charging the device to full and then using a USB port expander connected to a mini-USB to USB adapter to get four standard USB ports from the one mini USB. That allowed connecting a USB keyboard, USB mouse, bootable flash and a spare flash with drivers on it. After all that effort I have to admit I like the looks and superficial appeal of Windows 10 on the tiny Lenovo much better than Windows 8.1. But I agree with Tim that the glib Win 10 style is unpleasant, much in the way that Apple's "Think Different" campaign was deeply insulting to educated people for its glib acceptance of such a vulgarly ungrammatical construction as a slogan, especially for a campaign they intended to use in schools. I mention Apple's example from years ago to remind everyone that this dumbing down and profound infantilism is not something Microsoft invented. Instead, it is all part of the same cultural phenomenon that has resulted in twits being mistaken for wisdom and Facebook narcissim becoming the default interface for society. Also part of that trend is the slacker sleight-of-hand which seeks to lie to people about something being so simple there is no need to RTFM by not providing an M at all. Much better to use infantile language to give the appearance of simplicity, pandering to a lazy person's idea of what is hip and easy. If that person ends up spending thousands of hours in forums getting past all the "what's a BIOS? Is that like a cat video?" responses to get answers to what should be in a good manual, well, that's all part of the social lifestyle these days, right? In all fairness to that I have to agree that one reason such pandering goes on is that it's clear to Microsoft the great mass of people in the world who formerly might have been convinced to buy Microsoft products now know they don't want them, which is very definitely a marketing problem for Microsoft. In years past there was a mistaken view of the market based on the erroneous belief that people wanted to have personal computers. Most people in the world don't want them and never have and Steve Jobs made his fortune by being one of the first to understand that. What Steve realized was that people wanted to bask in the aura of being thought smart and tech-literate without actually having to be tech-literate and without having to actually learn anything about technology. Steve understood perfectly well that what almost all of his customers wanted was to use computers, whether packaged as a telephone or as a tablet, as appliances to look at videos, play games, and in later years most of all, to provide flattering portrayals of themselves on social media: gossip is great, especially when it is all about you and you can ensure the image your gossip about yourself projects is totally cool. Steve knew people wanted to use computers somewhat like the previous generation used television: enjoying the pretty colors and moving pictures without wanting to have to understand the technology inside the flat screen. You can't blame them for that. When I want to watch a movie on TV I just want to pick up the remote and click a button to do so. I don't want to have to know how it works in order to get it running. The market for people who actually want to interact with an operating system, even just to launch applications like Manifold, is tiny in comparison with the seemingly infinitely larger market that just wants to post videos of their cat on YouTube or to tap out flattering gossip about themselves on the current generation's equivalent of a TV. To get the huge numbers they want, Microsoft is confronted with that reality, and the economic voting of dollars ensures that the overwhelmingly larger market is going to have its say in the form of consumer-proofed infantilism as the default personality of Windows. So don't take the infantilism or the dumbing down personally. Be happy that the lure of big numbers convinces Microsoft to invest into a new Windows that, inside, is a genuinely improved technology compared to prior Windows and that the cost of such improvements can be amortized over the billions of people who don't give a hoot about "using a computer" but just want to gossip about themselves and post endless videos about their cat on YouTube. I agree that even that lure is not enough to produce a system that can be bought as opposed to one that can only be leased at the cost of selling yourself as grist for the User as a Service mill. But unless you are willing to never use a big search engine online, never buy anything online, never participate in social networks, never use a mobile phone, only pay with cash everywhere and so on, well, more likely than not you are already deeply compromised on the anti-privacy, grist for the advertising Leviathan front and Win 10 is likely going to be the least of it. Microsoft has a very, very long way to go before they are remotely as good as Google, or even Apple, at data mining you. Yes, the patronizing advice to use a troubleshooting page that refers back to the same patronizing advice in an endless loop can be annoying, as can be the various schizophrenic relics of a mobile GUI when you want to work in a more "classic" mode. But then you have DirectX 12 and other advances, what appear to be genuinely better drivers for many machines as various manufacturers make an effort to refresh their support, elimination of some bugs from better generations of software used throughout and so on. And, I have admit the spending of hundreds of millions with an eye to achieving hipster, slacker coolness for a hoped-for bigger market as a side effect does indeed pay for graphic designers and stylists who have achieved a very visually appealing, more modern look. So I guess for now I'm not going to hold their feet too much to the fire for trying to appeal to a mass market, I'll cut them some slack on the patronizing tone, and I'll go for the good stuff inside Windows 10. But for all that I doubt that I'll upgrade my other personal systems from Windows 7, at least not for now. :-) Almost forgot: about that slowness: in the case of some laptops and portables there are various software settings / options that can cause it. For example, in Lenovo's case there is a switcher program service that if enabled causes Windows 10 to run slow. Stop the service from starting (it is totally unnecessary bloatware) and Windows 10 runs fine. I don't see any such slowness on my Lenovo.
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