The free upgrades to Windows 10 ended this morning, around 6am Eastern, or midnight at the International Date Line. What to do now? Well, hold on tight for the ‘Anniversary Update’, coming next week. And you can tweak Windows 10 to skip showing ads; look for ‘Windows ppotlight’ in Settings, Personalization, Lock Screen, and choose a picture instead. And turn off “Get fun facts, tips, tricks and more on your lock screen.” At best, it’s clutter on a locked computer’s screen, at worst, well we’ll see how that develops.

Backups Still Working?

More important than the inevitable new-software tweaks, however, are to check your backup software. That means start the program, and see if it works; some older versions of backup software are being detected as dangerous in version 10. Update to the current version as-needed.

Now go and look at the actual backups, and restore a few files. Does it still work as it should?

Operating system updates are a big deal. Windows deleted some programs and apps during the upgrade. Some of them, it warned you, well, after the fact, that it had removed them, by a chirp and a notification in the bottom-right of the screen. You can read those again–click the notifications icon, immediately left of the clock.

Missing Stuff?

Most of the deletions that I’ve heard about or seen have been software tools used by repair techs and consultants like myself. Anyone using those won’t have a problem reinstalling the latest version. But XP Mode is gone! That’s not news, XP Mode wasn’t available in Windows 8 or 8.1, either, but it was a separate downloadable add-on for Windows 7, from Microsoft, and there’s no notice that it was removed.

XP Mode was basically Windows XP in a box. It was handy for running an old program that isn’t compatible with Windows 7. If you lost XP Mode, switch to Oracle VirtualBox instead. It’s free, faster, and runs in Windows 10. You have to provide your own operating system to load inside VirtualBox; there are plenty of online guides on how to do that.