July 29th, 2015 is here, the day that Windows 10 becomes available as a free consumer upgrade for millions of Windows 7 and Windows 8 computers. Like many of you, I've been using Windows 7 since it came out, and I've been very happy with it. However, Windows 10 looks like a sufficient step forward (and sufficiently compatible with my existing Windows 7 programs and workflow) that I'm happy to give the new version a try. I'm in the middle of manually forcing the Windows 10 installation process, and I'll post my impressions here as soon as the installation process completes. Who else is installing Windows 10 today (or soon)?

Edit: Well, that was pretty painless, and unless something goes terribly wrong, it was a success. Here are some of my first impressions and thoughts of the OS and the upgrade process:

• Be sure to choose the advanced settings option during the install. The default settings are HUGELY invasive, and involve automatically sending all your contacts, your web history, your location, and what you type and say to Microsoft (and Apps). I can't believe there hasn't been a larger backlash about this yet. Seriously.
  
• The "Search the Web and Windows" box in the taskbar is huge, especially on a laptop screen that has only mediocre resolution. You can right-click it and choose to turn it into an icon instead of a whole bar.
  
• The new, huge [ - ] [ [] ] [ X ] buttons look pretty messy in my apps. I'll be looking for a setting to shrink them.
  
• My Apps and documents and settings seem to have all come over fine. My vibration sensor that I use to auto-lock my laptop if someone moves it still works exactly as designed. Launchy (alt-space) still faithfully pops up.
  
• I have a laptop with a touch screen, and I'm confused that it doesn't seem to automatically pop up an on-screen keyboard when I tap a text input box with a finger rather than click it with a mouse. Is there a setting for this somewhere?
  
• The Add/Remove Programs list is super-buggy. There's a search box to type a program name into, but you can't click on it or type into it. When you try to scroll the Add/Remove Programs list, the GUI freaks out. Edit: I right-clicked and pasted into the box, and then I could type in it. Bleh.
  
• Windows seems to have forcibly installed OneDrive for me, but I can't find it as something to uninstall.

I'm still yet to upgrade from 8 to 8.1

I'm waiting for the guinea pigs like you to do it first. The reviews I saw all suggested it's still pretty glitchy, but is conceptually a huge upgrade. I too have been on Windows 7 since release, so I'm excited to get the tech upgrades from 2 release cycles without the terrible UI changes from Windows 8.

Here's what I've seen on my WinBook TW700:

GWX didn't offer it right away (not enough free space on C:)
Manually built a thumb drive on another machine, it failed to install almost right away due to insufficient space
Couldn't boot the thumb drive off of Micro-USB, just full-size USB, but there's no touchscreen drivers slipstreamed in, so I needed a hub
Tried through a hub (on a Dell 2001FP), performance was dreadful (I think this thumbdrive and that hub didn't get along)
Tried through another hub (on some horrible Dell rubber dome keyboard I had lying around at work), it didn't provide enough power for the drive, and Windows noted that the drive disappeared when it enumerated it, and asked for storage drivers
Disabled swap and hibernation to free up some space, used the thumb drive to try to install it, got a license key validation error
Tried to use the Media Creation Tool from within Win8, the download hangs at 0%

I think I'm going to try building another thumb drive (this time booting my Mac directly into Windows to make it, and using a different drive), and getting a powered USB hub.

Indeed, Kerm, the Search bar is to large.

I also believe that I may have found bug, in chrome only, (it doesn't happen in edge) when hovering over the red X it stays red when moving away. A video: http://youtu.be/Dz-UlHyLjUU?hd=1

Also, is it possible to change keyboard shortcuts?

Other than that, its pretty nice!

Here's a pretty in-depth review from Ars.

I found my first functionality chink in the armor, in terms of things from Windows 7 not working properly in Windows 10. My actual-device printers were all gone (things like Windows Journal printing and PDF995 printing were not). I reinstalled my two office network printers, and Foxit Reader still does not list them as options in the File -> Print dialog. I'll try a restart and see if that helps.

Something else: IF you are on the desktop and press Ctrl + Alt and use the arrow keys, the desktop gets rotated.

Don't forget to check out my Fish Tank app! (Project post.)

Who cares about Windows?

Can anyone confirm if Casio's FX-CG Manager Plus emulator works on windows 10.

Notepad++ presumably works, and if compiling existing prizm add-in works I will upgrade.

Let me know if I should not please

That's likely a "feature" of your graphics driver - that's been a thing since at least the XP era in the Intel drivers.

It came built into Windows 8(.1?) too, so it's not exactly Windows 10 news. It doesn't bother me too much, but that may be just because I actually use it and its sync engine doesn't consume as much resources as Dropbox (right now the Task Manager says it's using 1 MB of RAM).

Downloading the Windows 10 update on a Voyo A1 Mini (a tablet with 32 GB storage where 6 GB are for the recovery partition; it uses WIMBOOT), let's see how this goes. I've heard the tablet experience is worse in Windows 10... fortunately I won't be needing this tablet much until September.

Good luck with the new windows, gbl08ma - I hope the update goes well and works reliably for the casio stuff (I wonder if the emulator will still work and if the latest sdk setup causes any issues?) all the help you can give windows users will be much appreciated and hopefully will promote more developments from users without linux.

I don't have any Casio development tools installed on Windows, so I'm afraid I can't help you with that. But I don't see why they would not work.

So over the course of the two dys that W10 has been on my computer, I have noticed tiny display bugs like the one above, and some pleasantly nice new features . For example, the built in recoder for games is smooth to run, and hardly lags me.

Does anyone know if Windows 10 uses the webcam as a proxy for an ambient light sensor? I swear I've seen my display brightness occasionally flick up and down without my intervention, and to the best of my knowledge, my laptop lacks an ambient light sensor.

Brightness flickering seems more an intel driver bug than win10 emulating an ambiant light sensor.
I know that some of driver have this bug (I had it actually), so check if your intel driver are correctly updated.

If you don't have an intel integrated cards, then I totally don't know

It noticeably changes the brightness when your power is below 20%. But that's the only thing like that I've had happen to me.

Here is some bashing: http://gbl08ma.com/windows-10-is-unfinished/

I would like to get to the part where you enjoy the new features, but the non-functional touch keyboard doesn't help. Also, Cortana isn't available in my region yet (even though Windows is in English).