A Microsoft employee who wishes to remain anonymous to the public has informed Windows Central that as of 8 AM this morning, the Windows 10 OS has reportedly been installed on a massive 67 million machines.
Even more interesting is the claim that Microsoft hit a max bandwidth of 15 Tb/s, topping the previous record of Apple’s 8 Tb/s during their last OS push. Microsoft has reportedly reserved up to 40Tb/s “from all of the third-party CDNs combined”.
These are pretty insane numbers.
Windows 8 was so bad and Windows 10 is so good (despite handwringing about what are mitigable privacy issues).
Added to that, the upgrade process is really pretty easy. I did an upgrade on a weak GMA500/Atom 2GB netbook (“Designed for Windows XP!”) that I was sure would die horribly, and it just worked. And it didn’t bork the linux partition or Grub. Performance is no worse than Win 7 was on the same box. And it didn’t cost a dime.
Microsoft finally did something that people really need to stretch to say bad things about.
Typically, Windows upgrades don’t mess with your boot setup, since there’s no reason to touch it beyond adding entries to the new Windows.
I think the only upgrade that did was when moving from XP to Vista, since boot.ini was replaced with the BCD
Oddly, one of the big gripes about installing Windows was that it nuked existing boot configurations, but more and more Linux distributions are removing options to boot Windows from the installer, and even removing the ability to add non-Linux systems after the fact, without having to manually edit config files.
Which makes it no different than Windows – it’s easy enough to boot Linux (or, more specifically, GRUB) from either the nt50 or nt60 loader (boot.ini and BCD, respectively)
On UEFI systems, it is not necessary anymore. The built-in boot manager will offer you to boot into ntldr or grub (in user-friendly way, it will label these choices as “Windows” or “ubuntu”, for example).
Having other systems in the ntldr or grub menus would be confusing, redundant and slowing down the boot unnecessarily.
No, not at all. _All_ Linux bootloaders will by default allow you to boot any boot record they’re able to find, unlike MS’s, which just offer “current Windows” and “previous Windows” by default. And just in case there’s any doubt future MS direction, the UEFI Windows boot loader can’t boot anything other than Windows, not Linux or even standard EFI applications.
Why should I have to mitigate privacy issues? For that matter, do you consider having to edit the registry and disable services as acceptable solutions to regain privacy? Because that’s the only way to completely disable the Telemetry service unless you have the Enterprise edition.
And then there’s the whole issue with Wi-fi sense. I can guarantee you that I’ll never allow a Windows 10 machine on my home network.
What’s the issue with that? It asks you if you want to use it or not, ticking the option off is too much of work?
The issue is that if you give your wi-fi password to someone else it could be sent to MS without your permission.
Well, I suppose there is that. But then again, Android, for example, isn’t any better as, by default, it uploads all Wifi-passwords you use to Google’s servers and doesn’t even ask about it.
I never give anyone my Wifi-passwords anyways, so luckily this doesn’t affect me.
Android asks about it.
Before you check “backup my settings on Google servers”, it will warn you, that your wifi passwords are there too.
Never seen such a warning on any of my phones. Does it do this on the Nexus – devices? They use stock Android, so maybe that’s the reason.
How did you miss this during Google Account setup?
http://www.geeksquad.co.uk/media/1416219153-large.png
(first screen in this set)
“Backup your phone’s apps, app data, settings and Wi-Fi passwords using your Google Account so that you can easily restore later. Learn more.”
Edited 2015-08-02 08:05 UTC
As I said, that looks like it’s stock Android. Never said anything like that on either my Samsung or on my LG.
how many ended up in roll backs afterwards?
They’ll not disclose that figure, I’d guess.
In the many threads I’ve been following on the Windows 10 release, I’ve seen nobody talk about the roll back. Some of these people in these threads aren’t the early adopter type, either.
The one person I know personally that made the switch that doesn’t know anything about computers said that it was fine enough – programs took forever to load, but otherwise was generally fast.
I’ve noticed longer program load times, but I think it really only happened to programs I hadn’t launched yet after the upgrade. Subsequent launches (even after reboots) seemed just fine.
From the standpoint of a completely clean install of Windows 10 compared to the same system running 7, I’d say once the system settled down with the auto updates from the installation (you know, the inevitable patching from the update servers in the background that were released after RTM), program launch times are pretty much all nominal. Some programs seem more responsive versus 7, some are roughly the same. One or two new program installs silently failed (and were fixed by installing .net 3.5). Over all the install experience and normal usage is about the same. The UI though… is schizophrenic between touch and legacy mouse/keyboard though. A lot of inconsistencies between the two that seem to be a half hearted “mea culpa” over trying to force metro down users throats in 8. Some people love it, some hate it, personally I am “meh” as I’m only a traditional desktop user and refinements over 7 were what was in order rather than Win 8 team’s “our way or the highway”.
Disable OneDrive and applications will start faster as it syncs for every application for some reason.
I know at least one did. My Dell laptop froze up on the first reboot, it tried to roll back and appeared to successfully. However, after a reboot after the rollback it started throwing “out of memory” errors necessitating rolling back to a previously saved disk image backup.
Microsoft isn’t likely to cough up the real numbers of failed upgrades, but it’s very likely they have those numbers for diagnostics purposes when the device managed to phone home after.
I upgraded my home laptop from Windows 7 Home -> 10. My first experience of Windows > 7.
I did an upgrade install first but saw lots of problems so clean installed afterwards.
I am getting to like it. The new start menu had to go – I have a trial of Start10 which seems a lot better and looks worth the $5 they are asking.
Adverts in Solitaire is an abomination. Goodbye Solitaire, old friend…
As someone who hasn’t installed it yet, what is so bad about the Windows 10 start menu? I’ve heard a couple of other people mention that they don’t like it …
For me, it took a while before it was searchable without having to use the Cortana search.
Though, once it became searchable, it was much faster than searching the start screen in Windows 8.x – back to, or slightly faster, than searching the start.
Otherwise, I like it much better. Pinning app tiles to it is actually really good – since I put everything small size anyways, it’s a good place to put icons for everything I use frequently enough that I want fast access, but infrequently enough to not want it to live in the task bar.
Also, task bar icons are a tad smaller, and closer together, since it no longer has to accommodate fingers.
But, I have a couple of weird issues, too:
First, a couple entries (Maps, and People) display the associated UUID rather than the actual name.
Second, when I drag the scroll bar in the all programs list, the mouse moves faster and beyond the scroll bar itself. It looks weird, but doesn’t seem to actually affect usage.
Edited 2015-08-01 02:51 UTC
I think the new menu is fine. I certainly am used to the Windows 7 – style menu, but the W10 – style on isn’t that much different and as someone else said, there are a few things that are handy to pin to it, like e.g. I like having up-to-date weather information visible just by tapping the Windows – key.
It definitely is leaps and bounds better than the abomination in W8.x
I can’t seem to change the weather location from the default of London. I live 9,493km from London…
I live 2,464km away from my default (Amsterdam)
The default tiles on the right side are annoying at first. I unpinned most of them and put in tiles for programs I use regularly. It seems to be no better or worse than Windows 7 Start menu to me. I’m used to it now.
Too bad about adverts in Solitaire.
Not that I played that game often but this makes one wonders how many of the “included free applications” we have become so accustomed to have now includes advertisements.
The OS has gigantic leaps technologically… a great and vastly improved task manager, full EFI support, incredible driver detection.
So far the only issues I have encountered with it is that it sort of borked my geforce experience (had to uninstall and reinstall cleanly the video driver) and then the very, but very annoying fact that explorer.exe keeps a connection to bots.microsoft open even if you tell the entire OS to not keep tabs on you.
The power management is superb, and so is the memory management. Every single application actually works, but then again I didn’t keep anything old in the system. I didnt’install from scratch so I don’t know if you can get away with creating a non-microsoft account (Windows 8.1 home doesn’t allow this from a fresh install).
So all and all, as an upgrade, it is pretty good, but it is still missing the polish that windows 7 had at launch (and by that I mean that the default applications bundled with the OS like Mail and Calendar are more like beta versions than final versions, missing features).
Actually, Windows 8, 8.1 and 10 all allow you to install without a Microsoft – account, the option is just a tad hidden. See e.g. http://www.intowindows.com/how-to-install-windows-8-1-without-micro… how one would do it for 8.1.
Install? Yes
Actually have access to all the requisite functionality, like Windows Updates? No.
Yes, I ran some Win8/8.1 VMs, and every time it prompted me for updates it wanted me to sign into the Microsoft Windows Store. So I ignored the updates.
I would hope they changed that for Win10, but some how I doubt it.
That’s a lot of bandwidth. It would be interesting to know how this compares to Netflix on an average day.
It would be also interesting to know the relative proportion of installs which were PCs, Phones, and Tablets. That information, I presume, will probably never been leaked out from Microsoft server data.
I have now upgraded my desktop and two laptops to Windows 10 and I am impressed by two things: 1) How much smaller Windows 10 is on the disk compared to earlier Windows – versions. 10 gigabytes less than even unpatched, clean install of Windows 7 is quite a lot. 2) How much faster it is, especially when booting. Both Windows 7 and 8 took several times longer to boot on one of the laptop’s mechanical drive, but Windows 10 boots so fast you might be fooled into thinking it booted off an SSD.
Whatever you think of Windows 10 otherwise Microsoft sure did slim it down, making it much more appealing on low-end systems.
Hi,
Was it 67 million separate people installing Windows on 67 million computers; or was it one person that tried to install it on one computer 67 million times before the installer worked properly?
– Brendan
actually, i would be more interested in:
– how many are upgrades from Win 8.x vs. Win 7
– how many are upgrades of genuine installs v. pirate installs
– how many are real installs vs. virtual machine installs
that would be really juicy stats.
I don’t know about juicy but they would be interesting stats to look at. In the end it doesn’t even matter though.
I am truly interested in the virtual machine installs. I performed it that way myself not to bork anything up.
In my personal view it is not good enough yet, but most of my issues are just that “personal”. So ill wait for at least until christmas before i give it another go. If that does not suit my needs i’ll just stay with Windows 7 until a reasonalbe alternative comes along.
Actually the number of upgrades was to be expected considering:
– how hard Microsoft worked for a rapid adoption and how pushed it;
– is a free of charge upgrade;
– there are so many Windows boxes in the world.
I’d guess those 15 Tb/s don’t include the upload bandwidth from users’ home connections when the OS sets itself as a seed.
While people usually don’t have fast upload speeds, with 67 million installs so far it has to amount to something noticeable.
Blizzard used P2P (don’t know if they still do) in their download client. It works very well to transmit large updates to a large amount of people at the same time.
Who have a couple old laptops laying around and figured, “What the hell?”
It’s pretty bad. It’s ugly. Cortana is awful. Imagine if Google Now was unable to understand 60+% of what you say, and then just constantly returned a fairly useless Bing result. The voice recognition in other apps is nearly as bad. A lot of arbitrary menu options moved around (this is a MS hallmark, it seems). Various apps got a bunch of ads added. Inclusion everywhere in Microsoft cloud bullshit, which is definitely second in class if not farther after google, dropbox, etc..
Needless to say on my REAL machines I’m happily motoring around at lightning speed in Linux Mint Debian Edition Mate version x64. It is the perfect OS.
The control panel is really, really bad and the worst part is how complicated it still is to search for lets say all .h files containing “version” in a specific folder compared to XP. Search is a little better than vista, but still a complete mess.
The sollution to those two is to use the godmode folder as replacement for the insane “modern control panel” (GodMode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}) and for the latter problem to use a third party file manager/search tool.
Another problem is that windowblinds does not yet work properly and the general window UI is a flat mess for people with my particular vision impairment, making it hard to distinguish what is a control element and what is not.
Edit:
As for the cloud integration: you can turn off OneDrive through a registry hack.
Edited 2015-08-04 12:48 UTC