BILT Speaker

BILT Speaker
RevitCat - Revit Consultant

Saturday 27 February 2016

Windows 7 to 10 upgrade?

I normally post exclusively about Revit issues, but this one relates only tenuously to Revit . . .

Andy Milburn recently posted about confusion, and mentioned he had taken the risk to upgrade to Windows 10.  I have heard varied accounts of problems with running Revit on Windows 10, although Andy only seems to have run into issues with the QAT in Revit.  Either way I have avoided the upgrade despite the insistent haranguing by Microsoft with its pop-up messages, often stating how many people have already upgraded (poor deluded people).

I recently acquired a small laptop for travelling, which came loaded with Windows 10.  Oh boy am  happy that I never upgraded my work computer from Windows 7.  It may well be a different story to move from Windows 8/8.1 to 10 - quite possibly 10 is an improvement over 8.1?  But so far I cannot see a single reason that Windows 10 would be better than Windows 7, especially in a large organisation.  All I can see is Microsoft taking away more control from me as a user, and hiding nasty little surprises in default settings, that you have to discover, then figure out how to disable.  One example relates to downloading photos:
The default image handling software is the new 'Photos App', which has a few extra features compared to previous offerings, but mostly it does stuff I don't like - such as automatically "enhancing" photos when downloading them, without even telling you, let alone asking.  OK, you can disable that feature, but it requires IT gymnastics to make 'Windows Photo Viewer' your default program if that is what you want to do (perhaps you miss the ability to zoom with a scroll wheel, for example).  Who knows how many other similar 'features' lie hidden in Windows 10?

Microsoft inserted the automatic upgrade messages into earlier Windows versions by stealth, using "security updates".  Let us hope that Autodesk does not follow their lead and force us into upgrading our Revit versions when we don't want to!  Oops, it is too late, they already did it to us - that cheeky little program "Autodesk Application Manager" does some minor updates with only a minimal prompt for users, whether the BIM Manager wants it or not.  As for the major upgrades,  what with their onerous, inflexible licensing systems and lack of backward compatibility, we have no choice but to upgrade with almost every version - either that or never collaborate with any other Revit users.