March 20, 2016

Upgrading to Windows 10

2 minute read

Last weekend I finally decided to take the plunge and update my gaming PC to Windows 10. My wife upgraded, my parents upgraded, and even my grandmother upgraded, so I figured I may as well see what all the rage is about.

The initial upgrade seemed to go smoothly, and completed in under an hour. However, immediately after the first system restart (and Windows users know how mandatory restarts can be for applying updates), the Start button stopped working for me. I tried a variety of hacks suggested on the internet, such as forcing reinstalls of the Metro environment, even going so far as to do the “refresh” of my PC. To my dismay, none of these worked. I ended up needing to do a full “restart” of my PC, wiping out my C drive and all installed programs along the way.

It’s been a few days since then. Now that I have a working Windows environment, I’m beginning to appreciate some of the things that were provided, like a notifications center and more powerful “power user” tooling (like upgrades to the tiling window manager and the file explorer). However, if I knew that I was going to need to wipe out my computer to do it, I might have held off on upgrading for another few months.

© Jeff Rabinowitz, 2023