Personal experience sharing on choosing between Win7 and Win10

Thread Content

I’d like to share some of my personal experience to offer those who are still hesitating about upgrading to Windows 10 as 2017 comes to an end, some little insights from life. Windows 10 experience: Why upgrade? 1. Compared to the previous methods of activating Windows systems, the activation process for Windows 10 is much more user-friendly. If you obtained Windows 10 through an upgrade, it will be activated automatically over the network during the first update; at that time, Microsoft’s activation servers will remember your computer’s hardware ID. The next time you reinstall Windows 10 using a legitimate Windows 10 image and are asked to enter an activation code, you can choose to skip it. Once the installation is complete and your computer is connected to the network, Windows 10 will be activated automatically. (The prerequisite is that the version installed must correspond to the licensed version you previously had; if you upgraded to the regular home version earlier and then reinstall it as a professional version, you will need to obtain a separate activation license for the professional version.) 2. The old system is no longer able to take full advantage of the capabilities of the new generation of hardware. Let’s compare Windows 7 with Windows 10. First is the graphics card and DirectX 12 – currently only Windows 10 supports it (although it remains to be seen to what extent DX12 can truly utilize the graphics card’s performance). At least, on my laptop, which has a GTX950m from NVIDIA, the latest graphics drivers no longer work properly on Windows 7; I have to use an older version of the driver to get things to work. Don’t try to comfort me with claims about poor optimization for NVIDIA cards – driver updates still provide significant improvements in performance for new games. For example, World of Warships. As for card A, although it’s not clear what differences in performance there are between the drivers for this card on these two platforms, considering the tradition of using highly optimized drivers for card A, as well as the fact that the RX 4 series cards based on the Polaris architecture were among the first to support DX12, it’s clear that future hardware will need to be supported by new software. As for Windows 10’s unique memory compression mechanism, my opinion is that when a new computer has sufficient memory and a powerful CPU, storing less-frequently used data in compressed form directly in memory is more efficient than transferring it to disk and then reading it back from there. Memory is meant to be used, not to be conserved just for show. The multi-threaded processor optimization in Windows 10 is said to be slightly better than that in Windows 7, but I find it a bit confusing – I’ve also encountered situations where only a single thread was active, and this was caused by a specific file decompression process. I’m not very familiar with this aspect; I hope someone knowledgeable can explain the extent to which Windows 10’s multi-threaded processing optimization improves performance. At least one thing is clear: Microsoft is making efforts in this area. 3. Windows 10 has many truly exciting features, such as a simplified settings interface, a new system notification mechanism, the voice-based artificial intelligence assistant Cortana, various designs that facilitate use with touch screens, UWP platform applications, and the Edge browser, among others. Which computers are suitable for upgrading to Windows 10? Not all computers are suitable for upgrading to Windows 10; it might be possible to do so, but the experience could be quite poor, and if you’re not happy with that, what should be done? If we use the manufacturing time of computer hardware as a criterion, I consider 2013 to be a turning point: computer hardware produced after that year (including all hardware components from CPUs to memory, motherboards, and even wireless network cards) can generally be upgraded to Windows 10 without problems. As for hardware produced before 2013, it’s harder to say. My cousin’s ASUS laptop from 2012 was successfully upgraded, but the wireless function didn’t work. I checked the ASUS official website for drivers specific to that model, but only drivers compatible with Windows 8 were available. With no other choice, I had to revert his laptop to Windows 7. My father’s custom-built computer from 2011 ran out of memory after being upgraded to Windows 10. My ThinkPad x60s behaved relatively normally, but its screen would dim as soon as the power was turned off; it would only brighten again after restarting. My father’s laptop was the one that functioned closest to normally, but there was a bug in the drivers for its HD7470 graphics card under Windows 10 – the screen went black as soon as the power was disconnected. Thanks to the advice of an expert on a forum, I was able to solve this issue by going to the power management settings and adjusting the brightness from 40% to 100% in the advanced settings. This is the luckiest computer I’ve come across from 13 years ago. Not all computers come equipped with drivers specifically designed for Windows 10, and without the appropriate drivers, one can imagine how poorly the computer will perform. For those computers from years ago, unless they are particularly important models, computer manufacturers generally do not provide drivers for Windows 10 for computers that have been out of production for many years. Put simply, for new computers, using Windows 7 is a bit of a waste of performance; as for older computers, don’t expect Windows 10 to make them faster. There are plenty of guides on how to upgrade available online (the Installation Experts forum has detailed installation instructions). Here I will only cover the key points, the truly crucial ones. It is recommended to download the system and installation tools from the official Installation Experts website, as they are clean and stable; many websites offer unstable systems, not to mention those that are extremely minimal in size. If a Windows 10 system, along with universal drivers, still takes up less than 4GB in size, do not install it – just because the system size is small does not mean it’s good; overly minimal systems are unstable. Another issue is that the installation tools come with third-party software; therefore, downloading the right tools along with a clean system is a crucial matter. In my tests, the installation tools, system, and activation tools downloaded from the official manufacturer’s website were all clean, without any bundled software. If some netizens want to use the original version of Win10, they can simply go to the official website of the installer and download an activation tool – there will be no plugins at all! ! !