Having waited until the last minute for a number of reasons I finally bit the bullet and updated my main Windows 7 x64 machine to Windows 10. It went smoothly but took several hours. Now it’s settled down it works smoothly, with a noticeable improvement in overall responsiveness.
The negatives of the upgrade process were that it lost network printing from other connected machines and more importantly removed IE11, leaving Edge as the main browser. The printing issue needed file and printer sharing to be set up again and was eventually sorted out. I decided to try Edge but this wasn’t a happy experience.
I use twin monitors on this machine and fire browsers up on the right hand one. Edge however doesn’t remember where it was and always launches somewhere on the left hand monitor. Not useful. It also doesn’t have a proper status bar and instead puts a ‘tooltip’ up at the bottom left hand side of the browser window. The problem is that it doesn’t work for every link for some reason. Again, not useful. Worst of all, it hangs frequently when you use multiple tabs. Three tabs seems to be the limit for me. So, it may be fast, it may have a clean interface but it seems still to be in beta.
OK, so if I don’t want to use Edge, I’ll use IE11 instead. On my Windows 10 tablet IE11 is there. On a previously upgraded Windows 7 machine it’s there. But this latest Windows 10 (1511) Upgrade removed IE11.
It took a lot of searching before I found the solution, which is to install IE11 as a ‘Windows feature’. Go to ‘Control Panel, Programs and Feature – Turn Windows features On or Off’ and you find IE11 in the features list. It takes a few minutes to find the required files but then, after a reboot, you have IE11 back.
Postscript
1) The removal of IE11 may well be specific to the machine in question for some reason.
2) The Win 10 Anniversary Update includes an updated version of Edge which works correctly with multiple monitors
3) The problem with the status bar remains
4) Crashes with multiple tabs remains an issue fro me.