New Features on Older Hardware: What Have You Gained From Your Windows 10 Upgrade (and where)?

[PGHammer]

Windows 10 has a rather far back upgrade matrix - which certainly means that some hardware - and pretty darn OLD hardware at that - will actually see feature gains, while some will see feature losses.  While the feature losses (Media Center) have had their day in the sun, I'm launching this thread for those of us that have upgraded to talk about feature gains, and especially on older hardware.

In my case, the obvious feature gainer among my hardware is Baby Pavilion, the newer of my two notebooks.  The old OS there was Windows 7 Home Premium, and the destination OS today is Windows 10 Pro.  The feature gain is (surprisingly) Hyper-V - which Windows 7 didn't support at all.

While Windows 7 DID support (and include) VirtualPC for Windows, VPC is not even CLOSE to the same as Hyper-V - I can say it from having used both.  Even if you plan on using Hyper-V for straight virtualization ((an alternative to either VirtualBox or vmWare Player/Workstation), it is mostly far easier to use, more robust, and far more stable to use Hyper-V than either OVB or vmWare.  If you  are looking at developing applications, there Hyper-V REALLY comes into its own - and especially if you are using Visual Studio Community - the professional-class (and utterly free) multiplatform development tool suite from Microsoft.  Hyper-V is, quite literally, the linchpin to leveraging Visual Studio's mobile-development chops, because of the included emulators that take advantage of Hyper-V.  Hyper-V on portable hardware equals mobile development on the move - even if it's just as far as a deck.  Further, mobile development does NOT require as much in the way of resources (in terms of the host) as desktop devlopment, and VS Community supports development of both Windows Phone (back to 8.x) and Windows 10 Mobile (in addition to desktop Windows 10 and Universal Windows, of course) AND Android (as all the SDKs are no-cost add-ons).

Where did YOU gain by upgrading to Windows 10?

[abecedarian paradoxious]

Can't say I necessarily gained much with mine, but I've got you beat with regards to hardware age: desktop PC with Asus P5K-VM motherboard... from the XP era. What I gained is that finally Windows can put the board to "sleep", and it wakes up properly. Previously, XP, Vista, 7, 8/8.1 would all sleep but it wouldn't wake and I'd have to reset the computer. I had to disable the feature on all of those, but it works now.

[PGHammer]

That has been a rather ugly problem with old Intel chipsets, and especially CSM (corporate-stable/consumer-stable) chipsets like the G series.  While G41 (Eagle Lake) had its sleep support fixed, it still has issues with hibernate, even with Windows 10.  With Windows 8, it was the same - it could sleep, but not hibernate; however, with 7 or earlier, it couldn't even sleep.  So you DO have me beat in the age department - which is precisely the point of this thread.

Every Tomas, Richard, and Harriet has been so busy bemoaning the minuses, they forgot that there very well could be pluses to upgrading - even, if not especially, on older hardware.