All right, so I've been using Win10 on a few different machines just to see how it scales and behaves with a bunch of different configurations. My 4 test machines were:
-Pentium M 755 @ 2.72GHz, 2GB DDR2, 8800GTS-640MB, i915 chipset.
-Phenom II X6 1090T @ 4.07GHz, 16GB DDR3, GTX680, 890FX chipset, X-Fi Ti audio
-i7-4930K @ 4.5GHz, 32GB DDR3, GTX970, x79 chipset.
-The laptop I mentioned in the original post.
-I used spare mechanical hard drives (250-500GB) to test Win10 on each machine.
While initial impressions were favorable, the rough edges are unfortunately beginning to show. On only one machine was Windows 10 nearly as trouble free as Win7. Here are a few of the things I noticed.
-Win10 has higher DPC latency than Win7 on all 4 of the machines. On the Phenom and i7, this doesn't seem to cause any problems. However, on the Pentium M rig and C2D laptop, the increased DPC latency results in random bursts of choppy audio while watching online video. On the laptop, high disk activity occasionally results in choppy UI and pointer movement.
-On the Phenom machine, Win10 installed the wrong driver for the X-Fi audio card. Despite being correctly identified as "X-Fi" in the volume slider, the audio stuttered and was out of balance. Sometimes I'd get no sound at all. Fortunately, installing Creative's latest Win10 driver fixed this issue.
-I really don't like the automatic driver updates. I remember being able to disable driver updates in the original release of Win10, but it looks like they removed that option in v1511. I had the latest GeForce driver (368) installed for the GTX 680 in the Phenom machine. When I swapped in a GTX 760, the 368 driver was automatically applied to the new card 2 minutes after booting up. Great! HOWEVER, five minutes later, Windows decided to wipe out the 368 driver and install 353 from Windows Update. So I had to manually install 368 a second time.
-On the Phenom machine, my USB mouse and keyboard would always stop working after every reboot. I'd have to plug them into different USB ports to get them going again.
Here's what would happen: The mouse and KB LEDs would light up normally during POST and the initial Windows splash screen. However, when the splash screen "blinks" (indicating that Windows is almost finished loading), the LEDs shut off. Windows then indicates that my USB devices have malfunctioned. Seriously, Microsoft? You broke USB HID drivers?
-What is up with Windows Search? It's not as quick and accurate as it was in Windows 7. Disabling Web search and Cortana helps immensely, but it's still far from consistent. For example, a search for Device Manager worked properly on 3 out of the 4 systems I tested. However, on the laptop, Search refused to find it. Very annoying. Sometimes after a reboot, Search takes a while to get back up and running.
-Umm, I disabled Cortana. So why is it randomly using small slices of HDD/CPU (noticeable on the slower systems)? Is it updating? I have no idea. Ugh.
-On the laptop, Edge would occasionally get stuck in a restart loop. I'd close the browser, then see it continuously re-open in the taskbar. I had to kill the process in Task Manager.
-Is the Start menu a seperate "app" now? Is it no longer integrated to Explorer? Sure seems that way! Twice my Start menu just stopped working for seemingly no reason. Restarting Explorer did not fix the issue; I had to reboot the entire OS. That was never a problem under Windows 7. Also, I noticed that it would sometimes take awhile for the Start Menu to become responsive after booting up. Probably wouldn't be an issue if I had my SSDs plugged in, but I was testing the OS with spinners.
-The only reason Win10 boots up faster than Win7 is because, by default, it cheats a little. Unlike 7, which does a full shut down and startup of the entire OS, Win10 does some sort of a hybrid sleep thing. However, selecting Restart forces Win10 to do a full shutdown, and man is the resulting startup slow! On HDD based systems, a full Win10 startup is quite a bit slower than a full Win7 startup.
-Speaking of speed, synthetic CPU and GPU tests show Win10 to be roughly the same speed as Win7 running newer benchmarks and games. Win7 is slightly faster at older benchmarks/games. Win7 is also more compatible with ancient games, but I guess that's to be expected. Win98 was more compatible with DOS games than XP ever was.
So yeah. Windows 10 is certainly in better shape than it was a year ago, but it looks like I'm going to have to wait yet another year before I use it as my main OS. Win7 still feels more polished and sturdy. But hey--at least I got all 6 of my spare Win7 COAs updated!
94 MHz NEC VR4300 | SGI Reality CoPro | 8MB RDRAM | Each game gets its own SSD - nooice!