Win 7 or Win 10

[Tristin]

I am ordering a new laptop next week, and am curious whether I should give Win 10 a whirl.  I like Win 7, but as this new laptop will have several very recent technologies in it, I am curious if I have reason to try 10. 

The new laptop will have a screen resolution of 3840x2160 on a 15.6" screen.  Scaling issues?  I wasn't looking for such high resolution, but 100% aRGB is just too good to pass up!

Thunderbolt 3, which I will be making great use of.  Any issues with Win 7 here?

NVMe, any differences between 7/10 here?

Any other things I should know between the two?  Stability and power management are both areas I'd be interested to hear of differences in.

[Frank Fremerey]

I run the insider previews of Win10 on my production machine even in fast track.

As I do not have any interesting data on the system drives ... not even on my laptop ...
it would  be safe for me to do so even if Win10 would not be such a big leap forward
when it comes to stability and dependability. I do not look back to Win7 Win8 Win8.1

Win10 is sure the way to go IMO

[Bjørn Rørslett]

I'm running Win10 (Insider Preview) and ordinary version in virtual machines and on laptops. Win10 follows the usual Microsoft practice of dumbing down aspects of the OS, plus adding its own idiosyncrasies. Otherwise it functions fine and some of the worst glitches in the user interface have at least partially been remedied during the first year of existence. IE is gone - in principle - and replaced by Edge, which is if possible even less laudable. You can still run IE if you wish, though, although Microsoft won't help you much to find out how. There are "smart" functions such as Cortana, Windows Store etc. that the user community could do without. The Tile interface can be expanded or (nearly) eliminated according to user's taste.

All my programs running under Win7 continue to function under Win10 as far as I can ascertain. The memory footprint is equal to or smaller than a corresponding configuration in Win7, and the OS can handle larger amounts of RAM if you are inclined to RAM overindulgence. True system crashes have been remarkably few and most can be ascribed to hardware issues.

Booting is slightly quicker as well, which could be advantageous for a laptop.

[Frank Fremerey]

I am running it on

the gaming machine of my son
my production machine with 16 core double heart Xeons and 64 GB RAM
An older Core i3 laptop

[Akira]

Considering that the mainstream support has been ended in early 2015, it would not be a good idea to choose Win7 at this point of time.

I (finally) replaced my Win7 machine with the current Win10 one at the end of this January.  Word/Excel 2016, Photoshop CC2015 and Cubase 8.0 work without problem.  HP keeps My ten-year-old printer driver compatible with Win10.

Edge is crap and IE still survives in the OS, but I'm using Firefox.

[Tristin]

Win 10 it is then, thanks for the input.

[ColinM]

Agreed Tristan.
As mentioned above, I've not had any lockups or crashes that I can remember.

And most importantly, all the software I use has continued to run with no visible differences. I may be seeing this through slightly rose tinted spectacles though as I switched to an SSD at the same time as doing the upgrade

[Tristin]

I'm going from never having faster than a 7.2k straight to m.2 nvme.  Looking forward to it!  Glad to hear Windows 10 is better than 8.  Window's good iterations certainly skips generations.

[Jørgen Ramskov]

My experience with Windows 10 is positive too, but it does spy on you a lot more than Windows 7, though you can turn much of it off.

[Bjørn Rørslett]

Apparently in order to gain slightly more control of your machine under Win10, you do have to select certain options when installing the OS the first time. Otherwise you are literally hijacked.

It is bad customer policy for a corporation to gloss over its true intentions like Microsoft has done with Win10. Hopefully there will be acceptable third-party remedial tools available. Or tighten your network firewall.

I will not replace Win7 on the machines  currently using this OS. These are production  machines and their configuration is set by that fact anyway. Thus not a machine for everyone's use or access.

[Tristin]

Not liking 10.  The interface, while not as egregious as 8, is still dumbed-down, restricted and not at all natural to navigate.  I will spend some more time with 10 to see if I can make it what I want, but I suspect I will be going back to 7.

All the spying stuff is easily turned off and I will give Microsoft credit for being very open with it.  It's the UI that is poor.  I can see that they are trying to homogenize their OS across serveral platforms, but they are going about it in a very non-sensical fashion.

[Akira]

Tristin, we should not waste our time and energy trying to "like" the UI or anything relating to the "design taste" of any Windows OS.  Just get accustomed to it and let it pass by.  I've been using Windows purely because of the apps I use and need, the customizable hardware optimized for my use and the cost.

It is completely different from, say, the musical instrument that will sound better and better as you play, will become part of your body and will be cherished more and more.

[Airy]

Good point, Akira. Anyway I'm working with apps much more than I'm interacting with the OS, so the latter is not really my main concern, except dependability. Since using Win 8 (then 8.1, now 10), I had only one serious crash (the PC won't boot anymore, consequence of a botched auto update), and the easy, quick, and full recovery was to me reason enough to stick with those newer versions.

My main rant is limited to lack of responsiveness, even for simple operations like file viewing, selection, and copy. Apparently this occurs when being online and working with cloud-synchronized files. Not everything takes place in background threads.

[Akira]

My main rant is limited to lack of responsiveness, even for simple operations like file viewing, selection, and copy. Apparently this occurs when being online and working with cloud-synchronized files. Not everything takes place in background threads.

Yup, I share your frustration, Airy. 

[Tristin]

My issue is that things I like access got buried more.  They are still there, and I hope to find a way to un-bury them so the OS can be less in the way.  It'd be nice if "Pro" versions of Windows didn't come cluttered with consumer level stuff. 

Is it a huge deal to have to go through extra steps to do the same thing? Not really.  Certainly a time waster though.