Windows 10 Free Upgrade Available in 190 Countries Today

Let's hope Windows 10 is a big hit with PC users. Consumers trade in those old XP boxes and hundreds of millions take the free upgrade. Then maybe within 24 months lots of old IE's will fade away.

https://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qpr...

Edge appears to be a much better browser: https://html5test.com/results/desktop.html

Any news on how to get a free 'reserved' copy? The Verge seems to suggest that you just have to wait, and it might take weeks, since Microsoft wants to do a gradual rollout...

Note that the upgrade will remove your Windows built-in DVD player. The right to play DVDs must be paid for every computer. You paid it when you bought the Windows 7 or 8 that you'll maybe upgrade to 10. Now the upgrade to Windows 10 takes that feature away from you.

They apparently (the twitter message isn't actually the company statement) plan to return it "sometime in the future" and "if it might be free or if it will cost" is TBA:

http://www.windowscentral.com/windows-10-will-include-option...

The Media Player capabilities, if you have them in your Windows edition, will be for ever deleted. Just so.

Moreover, note that the upgrade can reduce the functionality of your notebook: Microsoft made the deal with the hardware producers about integrating hidden partitions to allow the recovery from the hard disk, but the upgrade process will just make sure that the Windows runs, not that your recovery from the hard disk functionality, managed by each hardware vendor independently (based on the recommendations from Microsoft) would be preserved.

I don't use the recovery mechanism, but I do use backup. When the recovery partitions aren't right, the built in backup (which was kept from Windows 7) doesn't work on Windows 8.1.

The same story happened with the transition from Windows 8 to Windows 8.1 (I have such a notebook).

Anybody knows if the "Windows 7" style full disk backup survived in Windows 10?

The update only froze once for me (had to hard reset). No side effects from that. This was the smoothest windows update process I've ever had.

Had some trouble with Asus touchpad drivers, but after fixing that, everything is running well and nothing was lost. All previously installed software seems to be running fine.