It was intended as a month-long immersion in Windows 10 and a test of using the new OS on a hybrid laptop.
But the experiment ended after just seven days. It turned out that upgrading a hybrid laptop/tablet was a trial of BSoDs and compatibility issues.
Duplicating last year’s experiment with Win8.1 (see the April 3, 2014, Best Practices
article; paid content), I upgraded the small laptop/tablet hybrid (laplet) to Windows 10, planning to spend a month using it in place of both my main Win7 system and my iPad.
The ASUS Transformer Book T100 (
more info) might just be the lightest, cheapest, and least powerful PC ever designed to run Windows 8. Without its detachable keyboard, it weighs only 1.4 pounds — or 2.4 pounds with the keyboard. It has only 2GB of RAM, 64GB of internal storage, and a relatively low-power 64-bit, 1.33GHz Atom Z3740 processor. It came with the original Win8 x32 but was later upgraded to Win8.1. Now it would run 32-bit Windows 10.
When using the T100 as a desktop PC, I connect it to a Plugable UD-3900 Dual Display Universal Docking Station (
site), which in turn connects to an external monitor, a keyboard, a mouse, speakers, and an external drive for more storage.
Part of the 30-day plan was to use the T100 as my mobile-computing device on an upcoming vacation. No, I wouldn’t use it for work — just personal email, social networking, and reading.
The upgrade goes badly awry almost immediately
The initial process of moving up to Windows 10 seemed to go well — if you don’t count having to update the touchpad driver. But when I tried to get actual work — or play — done, problems piled up.
For example, my browsers behaved badly. I couldn’t comfortably read the newspaper or an ebook. And the new OS crashed — repeatedly.
By the seventh day of the experiment, only hours before leaving for the airport, I’d had enough. I put the laplet aside and packed my trusty Win7 laptop — and I plugged in the iPad so it’d have enough power for the flight across the country.
Reviewing the issues, starting with the crashes
The worst problem hit on day two. When I tried to lower the volume on my music, suddenly Win10 wouldn’t respond. Then the mouse pointer started behaving erratically. Within a minute, the music stopped entirely, the external monitor went black, and then the laplet’s monitor turned blue.
I was suffering my first experience of the Win10 version of a Blue Screen of Death (but not the last). Surprisingly, it’s a big improvement over the vintage BSoD. Instead of the usual technical mumbo-jumbo, you see a big, sad-face emoticon (which I dubbed the Friendly Face of Death — FFoD) and clear, concise text that tells you what to search for online.
Figure 1. Win10's Blue Screen of Death provides a friendlier face and a bit less-obscure information than do previous Windows versions.
Still, that was not much consolation. The first crash occurred on day two, in the middle of work. Two days later, it happened again. On day six, Win10 crashed twice! Each crash was preceded by erratic Windows behavior and no response from the keyboard and mouse. Two more crashes the next day effectively ended the 30-day experiment.
Over the week, I searched the Web for information on the error — “KMODE EXCEPTION NOT HANDLED.” I found suggested solutions, such as those on a Microsoft Answers
discussion, but they were always for Win8.1 — and none worked for me.
I managed to go another 12 days without an FFoD — but half of that time my laplet and I weren’t in the same time zone, and over the six days following my vacation, I used the machine only occasionally. I wasn’t surprised when it crashed again for a seventh time.
Fellow contributor Susan Bradley kindly offered to take a look at my system’s dump files. (She’s far more skilled at interpreting them than I am.) Her guess: the manufacturer’s drivers were at fault. And she was apparently right — the final crash was on a Friday; the following Monday, Microsoft pushed out updates that included new ASUS drivers. Those updates seem to have fixed the crashes, but there were still other issues to solve.
An unfriendly environment for Web browsers?
I use Chrome as my browser of choice, but it had some choice problems with Win10.
I prefer to read my local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, via my browser. Every morning, I use an emailed link to launch a browser-based version of the paper. (The process uses Olive Software technology;
site.) With Win7 or Win8 — or on Android and iOS — I wait only a few seconds for a facsimile of the day’s paper to appear in Chrome.
But with Win10 installed, nothing ever comes up. An Olive Software
FAQ offers a Chrome-specific fix but makes no mention of Windows 10. It basically says to always enable Adobe Flash. That didn’t solve my problem — I already had Flash enabled.
Other sites were apparently having Flash issues. PCWorld articles, for example, endlessly downloaded; social-media scores never appeared. I tried various Adobe Flash demo pages through Chrome, but they all worked just fine.
The obvious solution, of course, was to try another browser. Firefox, Edge, and Internet Explorer successfully launched the Chronicle. But they had other problems: Firefox and Edge both had scrolling issues inside the Olive environment. Internet Explorer had text-wrapping issues when viewing the paper in full-screen, portrait mode (my preferred way of reading on the T100). IE seemed to think that the screen was wider than it was.
I thought I’d found a solution when I uninstalled and then reinstalled Chrome. Everything worked fine — until the next morning. Suddenly, the news was back to an infinite loop. (Yeah, I know: 15 months before a presidential election, the news always feels like an infinite loop.)
I soon discovered that my browser problems weren’t exclusive to the laplet. The same issues with Chrome, Firefox, and Edge also showed up on the desktop PC I’d upgraded to Win10. (IE’s portrait-mode problems couldn’t easily be tested on my desktop machine.)
Win10 also unkind to some popular apps
In the aforementioned Best Practices story, I had proclaimed that “An operating system is only as good as the software that runs on it. In a desktop environment, that makes Windows king. But in mobile apps, it’s more like some minor lordling trying desperately to catch up.”
A year and four months later, Win10 is repeating history. Here’s one simple example — a problem that meant a lot to me because of my vacation plans: trying to use an ePub book reader (
more info; paid content).
On my iPad, I can comfortably read a book in ePub form through Apple’s iBooks. Google’s Play Books also does a reasonable job, although I prefer iBooks’ user interface. But neither of these apps is available in Microsoft’s Store.
So I tried three other book readers — all of which had serious flaws.
Bookviser Reader (MS Store
page) was the best of them, and the one I would have used, had I taken the laplet on my vacation. For the most part, it worked well. But in full-screen, portrait mode, it cut off a little bit of the last letters in the last two or three lines of each page. I could usually guess what those letters were, but it was annoying. I got around the problem by reading in a desktop window rather than full-screen. But that meant I couldn’t always stay in tablet mode when using the T100 as a tablet.
Figure 2. Bookviser Reader inexplicably cut off a tiny part of each page's lower-right corner.
ePub3 Reader (MS Store
page) kind of worked, but it was difficult to use. You had to cope with a too-tiny-for-tapping menu for basic chores such as adding a bookmark. That was my first impression; I revisited ePub3 Reader again while writing this article and got a big surprise. It no longer works at all — I cannot load a book into it. (My desktop had the same problem.)
Nook (MS Store
page) is, of course, the best known of the ePub readers. But on the Win10-updated laplet, it displayed the text off-center, with the end of every line cut off. I could find no way to fix that.
Figure 3. The Nook reader clipped off the right side of each page of text.
Going into my experiment, I thought I would have a way to, well, cheat on the tablet experience. By running AMIDuOS (discussed in the Feb. 26 Best Utilities
article; paid content), I could have a virtual Android tablet inside my Windows one.
Alas, it was not to be: AMIDuOS, which works fine in Win7 and Win8, fails under Win10. Last I heard from my AMI contact, the company “is still finding the root of the bug/in process resolving it.” That was more than two weeks after I first contacted them about the problem. (AMIDuOS doesn’t run on my Win10-upgraded desktop PC, either.)
Good reasons for delaying a Win10 upgrade
New operating systems always come with some kinks and compatibility issues. I doubt that Win10 has more than previous Windows updates. But this time around, Microsoft is giving a new OS away for free — and a whole lot of people are jumping on it.
My experience was likely worse than most. But you should nevertheless take it as a warning — be prepared for unexpected consequences. If you’re ready — with either experience or time — to tackle the potential problems following a migration to Windows 10, put the upgrade off for a few months — even if you’re sick of Win8. That will give time for the release of new drivers and software fixes.
You might also take some time to search the Web for trouble reports from people who have similar hardware and apps to yours. Ask yourself: Do I really want to deal with similar problems?
Win7 users have even fewer reasons to upgrade anytime soon. If you don’t have a touchscreen, Win10’s advantages to you are minimal.
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