I gave into Microsoft's persistent nagging and upgraded my non-Avid PC from Windows 7 to Windows 10 just before the free upgrade period ended.   Since then, performance has been wildly inconsistent.   After the 1st upgrade, it was very sluggish.   Then slowly performance began to improve.  Finally, it was ALMOST back to where it was before the upgrade.   Then Windows 10 does an automatic update and performance is terrible again and it's back to the same cycle of gradually increasing performance until the next update.  

If I were experiencing the same thing on my Avid workstation I'd be pulling my hair out.  (My Avid system is still on Win 7 Pro.) The inability to refuse updates on a professional computing platform is essential.  Thankfully, I've got a few good years left on my Z800...and Windows 7 will be around for a while.  By then, I hope Microsoft will come up with a professional OS option that restores control of updates to the end user.

They tricked you. You didn't have to either upgrade or keep the upgrade. I downloaded the W10 installer while it was available (and it may still be available). It was never necessary to use Windows Update to get it. I installed it temporarily with the downloaded installer and followed the "undo" procedure built-in after finding it broke many hardware features.

If you desire to go back to what you had, you may still be able to. I think the "undo" was an option for 30 days. If you use it, it may take hours to complete as it did for me but it worked. I got back to where I was with W7 just as it was before the so-called "update."

i've also seen more downs than ups.

and i was particularly pissed the week when "close update window" meant "please update"

2 avid workstaions under my supervision were updated, both with raid controllers that don't have win10 drivers.

oh the joy. tried to roll one of them back: crash boom bang.

I'm writing this on a win 10 machine that doesn't show mapped network drives in explorer since last week, but they are accessible in avid (how??).

you can still get win 10 for free, if you tick a checkboc that u're using assistive technologies. easily google-able.

any trick to get to 1 billion, eh microsoft?

smyers63:

They tricked you.

Lukas Boeck:

any trick to get to 1 billion, eh microsoft?

Trick...but no treat.  Happy Halloween to all!

After doing the update to Windows 10 you neeed to update all the hardware drivers.  Do not trust Microsoft to have put the right ones on.  I prefer to do a clean install (during the update you choose to keep nothing on the C drive and get a clean system).  Then install the correct drivers and it works nicely.

The best way to avoid automatic updates is not to plug the editing machine into the Internet.  If you do then updates generally fix security problems.  There is an option the settings to "defer updates" and there are a variety of programs which can stop them altogther but it is not as easy as Windows 7.

David Clarke:

After doing the update to Windows 10 you neeed to update all the hardware drivers.  Do not trust Microsoft to have put the right ones on.  I prefer to do a clean install (during the update you choose to keep nothing on the C drive and get a clean system).  Then install the correct drivers and it works nicely.

To be perfectly clear for all: In my case, as I said, W10 broke quite a few hardware features on my computer.  These were features I specifically bought the computer for.  THERE WERE NO DRIVERS FOR W10 that made them work again so to get the use of those features back, I had to undo W10.  There was no hope at all of getting those hardware features to work with W10.  I looked for 2 days and tried all the drivers.  None worked.  After all that, I found that the manufacturer noted that W10 wasn't compatible with the machine.

Be sure your computer with its hardware and software will work with W10 before you install it.  You've had fair warning.

My advice is that unless you REALLY, REALLY, REALLY need something in W10 that you just can't do without, leave it alone. Or, unless you REALLY, REALLY, REALLY like to troubleshoot problems you never though would occur, leave it alone.

It's usually only the high-tech addicts that recommend installing W10 and they do it for reasons I can't imagine, not all that far from things like it will prevent dandruff and make you live forever.  They recommend it to "fix" things you don't even have wrong.  You don't change OS to fix something that isn't wrong.  It's crazy.

I agree.  Unless it has something you want don't bother - especially now it is not free. Windows 10 is a bit better at HiDPI screens (Avid is not compatible with these yet). There are some other quite nice things and some annying things.  Some people on the forums here say Avid works better under Windows 10;  I probably do not hammer mine enough to notice. 

I am a UK resellar of systems and today is the last day we can buy Windows 7 (or 8) from Microsoft.  This means that from now on new systems will come with Windows 10 only - at least once the remaining stocks of Windows 7 dry up. 

I don't see this as a bad thing as a Windows 10 system, properly configured, works well.  The upgrade doesn't, without a lot of fiddling with drivers and reinstalling.

David Clarke:

After doing the update to Windows 10 you neeed to update all the hardware drivers.  Do not trust Microsoft to have put the right ones on. 

The biggest beef is the way Microsoft touted the Win 10 upgrade as the greatest thing since sliced bread.  It would have been more honest if they said, "If your computer is a couple of years old it will take 15 seconds to open a file that used to open instantaneously...but you'll get to contemplate the meaning of life while watching the little circle go 'round and 'round."

I updated my non-Avid PC because that's the one I use to go on the internet--and Win 10 is reputedly safer.  But the inconsistent perfomance has been frustratiing.   Once it improves, I don't know why it degrades again with every other update?

FWIW - I keep my Win 7 Avid Workstation off-line and only go on line to update drivers occasionally.   I scan any dowloaded file before moving it onto my Avid system.  I have to deliver commercials on a weekly basis and don't have time to keep retweaking my system everytime Microsoft issues an update.

Well they weren't going to shout about WIndows 10 saying "We've got a new operating system and its fairly average".

I can't say my experience has been flawless either.  But along the way I discovered a few good tips.

1. If you haven't switched to an SSD drive yet, this is a good time to do it. I can boot up from powered off state in less than a minute.

2. Do a clean install using the Windows 10 Anniversary version. You can download the image from Microsoft directly.  I used a USB thumb drive. It worked flawlessly. This lets you skip the big upgrade.

3. Allow time for other devices to install drivers after the install.  Give it some time.

4. Check the device manager for anything that didn't find a driver. If you are running an Intel chip set then download the appropriate chip set updater from Intel or better yet from your motherboard vendor.  Windows 8 version drivers will usually work fine if you can't find offically branded Windows 10 drivers. YMMV.

5. A couple missing device drivers were the only issue for me and I had fewer missing drivers with the anniversary edition.  I tracked them down and my system has been very stable.

Keith

Yep - my experience was generally the opposite and I upgraded 5 different machines of various ages and because I did a clean install on 4 of them I'm finding it a lot faster that win7x64pro. I did have to upgrade the video card on an admin machine because there were no W10 drivers for it. That machine was quite old (probably 7 years) but still everything was supported bar the video card.

Of course being faster doesn't help if your chipsets don't support W10 but if you did the W10 upgrade assistant first I found it pretty accurate for flagging hardware issues (eg the video card mentioned above).

BTW - if you upgraded rather than a clean install you can always roll back to win7. 

The other thing I would say is turn off "fast start" which you find as an option in some of the power menus.  This is a kind of fancy hibernation mode.  When I had this on and I dual booted my system between Windows 10 and Windows 7 it caused problems.  After using Windows 10 I switched to 7 Windows and Windows decided my hard drives needed checking - and then promptly trashed lots of my video files.  I have disabled it ever since.

In fact now I just start up an admin command prompt and type "powercfg -h off" which switches off this and hibernation.  With my SSD windows still boots in a minute.

Haven't read this all, but You may find useful info here: 

http://community.avid.com/forums/t/161696.aspx 

I find Win10 a great improvement over Win7, provided that You go for a fesh install and tweak the system.

My apologies, new link http://community.avid.com/forums/t/161485.aspx

David Clarke:

The other thing I would say is turn off "fast start" which you find as an option in some of the power menus.  This is a kind of fancy hibernation mode.  When I had this on and I dual booted my system between Windows 10 and Windows 7 it caused problems.  After using Windows 10 I switched to 7 Windows and Windows decided my hard drives needed checking - and then promptly trashed lots of my video files.  I have disabled it ever since.

In fact now I just start up an admin command prompt and type "powercfg -h off" which switches off this and hibernation.  With my SSD windows still boots in a minute.

Do you by any chance have Paragon HFS+ installed? They actually mention turning off fast start in their notes as it can cause file corruption when booting.