By Lincoln Spector
That "Get Windows 10" icon sitting in Win7s notification area will get you a free upgrade, but you havent decided whether its worth taking the plunge.
For most Win8 users, upgrading is a virtual no-brainer; for Win7 users, however, the case is not so compelling. Here are a few enhancements that might tip the balance toward Win10.
We all know that Windows 7 is an excellent and firmly established operating system that has a familiar and fully functional Start menu. And for classic, non-touchscreen systems, Win10s new Start menu offers no real advantages over Win7s.
However, Windows 10 is far more than a revamped Start menu; it has numerous features that either dont exist in Win7 or have been significantly improved. Not all of these enhancements were introduced with Win10; some are familiar to Win8 users. But Win7 users can now get the latest Windows features for free — and never have to cope with Win8s "neither fish nor fowl" interface.
That said, Im not promoting the Win10 upgrade for all Windows 7 systems. In fact, Im writing this article on a PC thats still running Win7. My initial attempt to run Win10 on my production computer turned into a disaster of incompatibilities and BSoDs, as detailed in the Aug. 27 Top Story, "Thirty-day Win10 experiment lasts only a week."
There are also Win10s controversial — some say notorious — privacy issues to consider. For more on that topic, see the Sept. 10 LangaList Plus column (paid content).
To be fair, my Win10-upgrade nightmare ended just nine days after the OS was first released. Of course there were going to be problems — many of which have since been fixed.
Sometime in the relatively near future, I plan to purchase a new PC for work. When that happens, Ill be happy to have Windows 10 — for a variety of reasons. Here are five of them.
Task View: Get a quick glance at running apps
Managing and sorting through a bunch of open windows can get annoying. Win10s Task View gives you a clean, easy-to-see view of all of your open windows — including warnings and dialog boxes. The displayed boxes are smaller than the actual windows but bigger than icons or thumbnails (see Figure 1), so you can really see whats in them.............................................................................................
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