Upgrading to Windows 10 – A Smooth Experience

For the past couple of months Microsoft has been urging me to upgrade my various PCs, tablets and workstations to Windows 10.  I finally relented and made the upgrade on a couple of tablets, virtual machines and a workstation.  All of the installations were completed using Cox highspeed internet (150 mbps) from the Cloud.

For the most part the installations went hitchless.

Here is the very brief list of issues that I found:

1. The Displaylink driver on Windows 8.1 needed to be upgraded to support Windows 10 on 2 tablets.  We use this software to drive our Pluggable multi-screen displays.
2. On a workstation we needed to upgrade an Intel Rapid Storage Technology application to a new version.  This is used to create RAIDs.
3. We needed to upgrade Siber Systems RoboForms to the latest version.  However this upgrade failed to create a menu in Microsoft Edge the new browser.  We’re still working on a fix for this issue.
4. Our old version of TeamViewer 9 is still running (used for personal not business purposes).  Although a weird (<–>) error appeared on the home screen, this was resolved by disabling that feature.  We need to update to v11 which will happen in 2016.
5. Stardock Start8 kept popping up errors.  So we uninstalled this software.  We’re going to try going without by using the Windows 10 startmenu.  I’ll update you in the future if we decide to go back to Stardock.
6. On one of the Windows 8.1 tablets the upgrade only put on Windows 10 Home.  We needed to pay $99 to upgrade to Windows 10 Pro.  Other than the expense this was easy and completed entirely through the cloud.
7. On a Windows 10 Pro Workstation two older NVidia GeForce 9800GT cards are having driver issues at random times usually related to video playback on certain news and video websites. (New issue c. 1/2016 – Core i7 930@2.8GHz 24GB 64 bit)

I am very pleased with the upgrade of our Windows 8.1 Pro to Windows 10 Pro.  We use this on a 64 bit workstation which also has Hyper V Manager installed.  The upgrade went seamless and no changes to Hyper V were necessary.  This particular upgrade has me most concerned because we have virtual machines which control Ubiquiti WiFi authentication and running the BlueIris video software.  Other than the very brief downtime for the Windows 10 upgrade we had zero downtime on these machines.  We even updated the virtual machines to Windows 10.

On a personal security note, if you have not installed two-step verification onto your Microsoft Account yet, now is as good as time as any.  I am an Android user and I found that you can setup for both the Google Authenticator Account (by choosing ‘other’) and a Microsoft Account app (by choosing ‘android’).  This will help to prevent unauthorized third parties from accessing your Microsoft account which often contains passwords, alternate contact information and credit card information.  It takes just a couple of minutes and provide invaluable protection.  We use similar protection for our Google accounts.

The only feature that I haven’t found in Microsoft Windows 10 or Office 365 that I would really like to have is support for the FIDO U2F.  I have been told that it is in there but I haven’t figured out how to activate that yet.