Last Friday was the last chance to get a free upgrade/downgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10. The Microsoft checking utility confidently announced my system was compatible, but I doubted that as I was running stuff in XP Mode, and some old Chicago (Windows 9x) software. But I thought I’d give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt and try. But before that I backed up the entire hard disk.
Giving Microsoft the benefit of any doubt is always a bad plan, and in my case the installation died half way. The update was apparently downloaded, but I left it all weekend and it failed to install.
It’s hard to see why anyone who knows about computers used for serious purposes would consider “upgrading” to Windows 10 a good idea. I’m not sad I had to revert to the backup and get my Windows 7 machine back. Windows 8+ completely failed to implement the backward compatibility that Microsoft used to do so well. Upgrading DOS or Windows meant you could keep your legacy applications and hardware, but switching to OS/2, Apple, UNIX or Linux meant you could not. Now upgrading Windows means ditching older software too – in my case, I suspect my company’s accounting system. If you’re going to do anything as rash as that, you might as well break free from Microsoft completely and choose a whole new platform.
I was expecting to write something slamming Microsoft for messing up my PC this morning, but thanks to their complete incompetence, the upgrade didn’t work anyway.