Sorry Jim but if I had to be confronted by your laptops' desktop, I'd pull my hair out whilst screaming! At least with Windows 7 and earlier, the desktop icons were (1) larger, (2) labelled and (3) less prone to confusion. I mean, what's going on with the four identical cyan "radar screens" under "Play" - how do you distinguish between them?! And how often do you invoke the "wrong" version of Visual Studio? How long will it before Microsoft sells advertising space on your desktop as live tiles based on how you use your PC? It's already pushing adverts on Skype; bastards.
That's not the desktop that is the Start menu. It is actually logically easy to use and the groupings are very effective for me, my desktop is actually pretty much empty. I have reduced the tile size to small in most cases in order to get the grouping I want which is particularly effective for the development group.
I stopped installing VS 2005 a while back and although I still have VS 6 I am not planning on doing any VB or ancient C++ coding I still use VS 2008 for Windows CE development (barcode scanners and so on) The Windows 10 start menu clip actually shows VS 2015, Delphi 7, VS 2013 and VS 2008. I use VS2015 for all my own projects now but am still building in VS 2013 for most work related projects.
There have been adverts in Skype for many years now on all Operating Systems, I don't get them because I have an old subscription type that is no longer offered that eliminates the ads, but the skype ads are usually just at the bottom of your contact list they are not too intrusive.
VS is laid out left to right with 2015 on the left and 2013 on the right and I put Delphi in the middle to help with the separation, I never click the wrong one Flight Radar is an individual tile per airport, you get told what they are when you hover over them but again they are laid out in a logical sequence, the Flight Radar app then MAN -> AMS -> MNL
I don't get advertising on the Android version and it is only quite recently that they've appeared in the Windows version. Our marketing regions are very different - you're EMEA and I'm not! - and that might account for the difference, I guess.
My laptop (below) is a touch screen, you do it like this with the pen, with a bit of dexterity you could probably do it with a finger
Sorry for my comment regarding this. (Married life is not at all smooth at the moment since the issue of buying a house in Phils surfaced.) I apologise for not thinking more beforehand.
I've not upgraded to windows 10 as I was advised against it. So am I better to go ahead now and upgrade? Also the weird thing it I don't seem to be able to get on with the apps type view on my laptop even though I obviously use on my tablet and phone. Maybe its because I associate the old file and folder layout of previous computers with laptops.
Do you see any benefit in upgrading changing to the new operating system? Are there any new features in w10 that you need? I will be sticking with windows 7 for the moment, when I buy my next laptop I expect it will arrive with windows 10 installed and that is when I will upgrade. Incidentally it seems that windows 7 is still by far the most popular windows operating system, most people are quite happy to stay with it.
