I would love to be able to use my new windows 10 laptop, but I can't as on the start up page where it shows my name and a newly created outlook email account, i can't because microsoft/outlook have locked me out saying I'm using the wrong password. I'm not, I know that for sure and several attempts at trying to reset the password have failed.

If I manage to somehow access it, how do I stop the bloody password thing, I just want to press start and get straight into it.

Ive been online to ms support today nearly all the day and nothing has helped me.

So, feeling very frustrated.

I haven't had any adds appearing in the start menu or anywhere else for that matter. My machine performs just like a closed system. I made sure I went through all the setup options and switched most of the items.

I did say you could turn almost all the annoying new features off, and indeed, I have done so. I really tried with the W10 menu but the live tiles mean nothing to me as I don't use any of the apps, don't use Cortana, couldn't find a simple way to pin favourite applications to the menu and, anyway, I prefer the W7 style.

In terms of privacy, I found this youtube video very informative. Spybot Anti-Beacon makes it easy to disable most of W10's built-in spyware (don't miss the second page of blocks - there are more than you think). I can't think why any W10 user would not do this.

Until recently, I had two old PCs running Vista, two laptops running W7 and a Home Theatre PC running 8.1. The Vista machines were virtually unused, the W7 and 8.1 machines in constant use. Over a fairly short period I replaced Vista with Linux Mint and upgraded all the Windows machines to W10. Now I find that I make more use of the Linux Mint PCs than I do of the W10 laptops. The HTPC, being extensively customised for entertainment, is no better and no worse now that it's running 10 instead of 8.1.

Just search web and see how many people have run into problems after disabling telemetry (not spyware) and cannot get updates or install new apps, and worse break OS etc.

Why would anybody be so dumb as to trust third party tools from unofficial sources?

Can they be sure it does not have keyloggers etc?

Re. menu - Windows 10 allows users to install third party menus in same way as Windows 8.

The tripe was the rest of the assumptions, not the fact you were getting the notices.

I take it the rest of my post fixed it for you?

Well FWIW I've never had any notifications of this nature on my install but this is probably because I am using a local account. I also uninstalled a significant amount of the metro guff that was preinstalled including the "Get Office" button. I don't recall running any specific tweaks but did set basically all options on the privacy screen to disabled.

In terms of apps all I've got is the preinstalled News, Weather, Calender, Photo and Mail apps. As I mentioned in the past I've had terrible problems with Microsoft's customer service department trying to recover locked/hacked accounts so there is no way I would trust them with my PC logon or sign up to their app store.

I had a similar problem and it was because two-factor authentication was turned on which effectively means you can't just enter your password first time you access your email or try to access on a new device.

Now seeing the first proper prelease of Redstone on Insider versions (14383) - the watermark and expiry are gone.

This is a true "Beta" version ie it has all the functionality - so any changes now are just bug fixes.

My PC won't upgrade to: Windows 10 Home, version 1511, 10586.

Is there a known reason why, and if so, is there a fix please.

Not a great deal to go on there.

What OS are you running?

What is your PC spec?

What is the error message?

Me too, I shall do all of the above, maybe more if I can think of more! And if it still does stuff I don't want, I will just continue using W7 & 8 until I can find a way to fix what I don't like. I haven't used one single app in W8 this year so I see no reason to think I'll want to use any W10 apps either. Sod all this syncing, signing on, sharing and online storage/apps, they can stick it all up their jumper.

You don't have to have any live tiles or Cortana for that matter. You can replace live tiles with your most used programmes/apps if that's what you want to do. You can pin a donkey to the menu if that's what you want or pin apps/progs to the taskbar. W10 is in fact the most customisable Windows platform to date. You can even make W10 look like W7.

I didn't know people were still using HTPC's as they have largely been made redundant by the PVR and NAS.

Crikey, just installed it as my third boot O/S, added itself automatically to the boot menu, all took less than 20 minutes for my clean install with local account. Most impressed! I did get the "GPT partition" error initially but googled that fix on my other PC in 2 minutes.

Can't face getting rid of all the tiles and apps in the start menu tonight though, that's for another day.

My laptop just updated to Windows 10 Insider Preview 14385 on the fast ring just more bug fixes .... https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexp...pc-and-mobile/

These are Release Candidates rather than Betas

Semantics.

Man - they are coming fast now. The Fast Ring should be renamed to Greased Lightning Ring!

Version 14388 out today.

It really cheers me up to hear all of these Windows 10 disaster stories. I've made my mind up now. I've had enough of Microsoft and my next PC is going to be one supplied without an operating system and based on Linux, although it's a shame that Linux developers have copied the Android trend for giving each build a playschool name. I can foresee fun and games trying to copy all my old files (and especially programs) over to it, but I'm sure that where there's a will there's a way. I'm in no hurry as I feel my Windows 7 on a brand new hard disk will last me many more years.

What Windows 10 disaster stories?

Have you also heard from the 350 miilion people for whom Windows 10 is fine?

Good luck with that! I hope you know what you're doing, and not making decisions based on hearsay.

Percentage-wise the number of people who have problems upgrading to Windows 10 is tiny. I've done around a dozen for various family members and my own laptop all have gone smoothly. At the the end of the day, its your personal choice what O/S you prefer but you shouldn't use 'disaster' stories' as a reason to avoid Windows 10.

Most of the decent hi-end software (eg Adobe CC) won't run on Linux. If you really dislike W10, the only real alternative is Mac (at 3X the price of pcs). All my graphics packages are Win/Mac, but the only stuff I use that also runs on Linux is Firefox and VLC.

I used to be a diehard W7 user, but I upgraded all my machines to W10, and after a small amount of tweaking, everything's OK - I don't even notice I'm on 10. Have even got my TV card and WMC working.

I'd like to see a source for 'tiny'. Certainly a dozen members of your own family perceived problems because they didn't attempt to do it themselves but let you do it.

Yeah - I haved heard that there is a little known but excellent package called MS Office - it apparently has a great word processor and spreadsheet etc. (Word, Excel). I am told it runs great in Windows but does not run in Linux.

And Office runs on Mac - QED.

At the risk of repeating myself, we're only talking about operating systems - designed to run the hardware so you can use Photoshop etc. Microsoft want us to see the OS as the thing we should be focusing on, but I beg to differ.

You shouldn't really notice the OS.