Kogan
One of Australia’s most popular online retailers isn’t just known for talking up a good deal, it also spends time producing its own products, including numerous mobile phones, tablets, TVs, and yes, the humble computer.
You’ll find a few Windows PCs here and there from the company — two specifically that we can think of — with the “Atlas” models representing budget pricing for people who need a computer but don’t want to spend too much.
But will people who bought one of these be able to upgrade to Windows 10?
According to a Kogan representative, the answer is a solid yes, as they told us that “Kogan.com’s Atlas Laptops are Windows 10 compatible and ready to go.”
Good stuff.
Lenovo
One of the biggest computer companies in the world is good to go with Windows 10, and while it has started shipping Windows 10 preloaded onto computers, with availability likely landing closer to early August in Australia, current Lenovo owners can expect an update in a fairly timely manner.
New computers purchased this year are the ones that will make the transition quickly, and according to the company, this will be available to any “qualified Lenovo PC running Windows 7 SP1 or 8.1”, but that qualification is a bit of a catch.
In fact, the list of ThinkPad configurations not supported includes Intel Atom processors, Intel 2nd-gen Core chips (Sandy Bridge), and the 4th and 5th gen Intel Core processors running on 32-bit versions of Windows, throwing out a few laptops that Lenovo supports.
That’s mighty confusing, so we’ve reached out to Lenovo to find out just what these qualifications and catches mean, and if perhaps the Lenovo update site will be cleared up so that anyone with a Lenovo bought in the past five years will have an easier way of finding out whether they can upgrade to Windows 10.
For now, we’d advise Lenovo owners to check the website (found in this link) as it will give them all the information they need, at least until Lenovo tells us otherwise.
LG
You might not think of LG as a big name when it comes to computers, and in this country, you’d probably be right.
We’ve only seen three or four computers in the past couple of years, but we’re sure the people who spent their hard-earned money on these boxes would love to know if LG will be providing drivers and easy compatibility for making the shift to Windows 10.
Will they?
LG’s Australian website doesn’t tell us much, and is still set up to mention how its computers support Windows 8.1, and LG didn’t come back to us by the time this went to publication, so we’re making an assumption (we know, we know) that the computers will update, but that is simply based on what we’ve seen of Windows 10 installations to date.
Still, if you have an LG computer, we’d probably wait a month or two until LG moves away from Windows 8 and joins the Windows 10 bus. It would probably update cleanly, but this is just one of those “it might be better to be patient” circumstances.
Microsoft
Microsoft hasn’t been a tablet hardware maker long, but you have to know that it is just about ready for Windows 10 since it, you know, makes the freaking operating system.
It’s more or less assumed if you own a Microsoft tablet, you can probably upgrade, but there are some catches, and here they are:
If you own a Surface Pro device — Surface Pro, Surface Pro 2, Surface Pro 3 — your computer is Intel based and should be good to go, with Windows 10 able to be downloaded to your device.
If you own one of the recently released Surface 3 devices — which this article was typed on — you are free to install Windows 10, just like we did. It will migrate painlessly, and will work with no problems.
But if you have one of those Surface RT devices, you are basically out of luck.
Microsoft told GadgetGuy that there will be an update for the Windows RT editions of Surface, all two of them, but that it won’t come yet, and it won’t be a full-blooded edition of Windows 10.
That might sound a little strange when you think of that whole “Continuum” concept Microsoft is engineering, whereby Windows 10 runs cleanly on all devices, including phones and tiny computers that might run similar sorts of processors, but it seems Surface RT is just a little out of the way for Microsoft to really support.
Strange that. We’ll keep you updated when we hear anything more.
