As a Windows user, we’re hoping you’ve heard of Windows 10 by now. If not, then it’s the next version of Windows; Microsoft is skipping Windows 9 entirely and going straight to 10. It announced Windows 10 in October and made a Technical Preview version available to download the next day.
The Technical Preview of Windows 10 doesn’t have every feature of the upcoming operating system, but Microsoft has revealed that over a million people are testing it anyway, and we’re among them.
“It’s been awesome to see so many of you joining the Windows Insider Program and letting us know what you think about the Windows 10 Technical Preview software,”
Microsoft’s corporate vice president of operating systems Joe Belfiore wrote in a Windows blog post, celebrating the millionth download.
Here at pcprotuts we’ve been getting stuck into the new operating system for a good few weeks now, and here we present our findings. You’ll find out what Windows 10 is really like to use, what we like and what we don’t.
To summarise, we think Windows 10 is going to be a hit. It’s already won our hearts by combining the best bits of Windows 7 and 8, but perhaps the best news is that there’s more to come.
We expect some new features to be added before its final release around summer 2015, so look out for details of those in the pages of this magazine shortly.In the meantime, let’s take a closer look at what Windows 10 has in store for you…
We expect some new features to be added before its final release in 2015
Microsoft tries to strike a balance for every kind of user
Yes, the Start menu is back. Yes, there are virtual desktops. No, the Charms bar hasn’t gone away. And no, we don’t know precisely when Windows 10 will be released or what it will cost. But we’ve seen the Technical Preview of the new operating system, and the word to bear in mind is ‘productivity’.This isn’t the place to look for changes in Explorer or the Control Panel, let alone desktop tools like Paint and Notepad, or Store apps like Music and Video. The Technical Preview is about the core features that are supposed to prove Microsoft can balance touch, mouse and keyboard input without making any users feel abandoned.
Boot it up
There are profound differences between Windows 8.1 and Windows 10, even in this early technical preview. For starters, the installation process has been streamlined. You can get through the entire process without creating a local account on your machine and instead authenticate via your existing Microsoft account. We also like the ability to setup and configure sync settings for Microsoft’s OneDrive file hosting service from the installation itself.
Unlike Windows 8/8.1, Windows 10 boots straight into a traditional looking desktop. This contains all the elements you’d expect, with icons on the desktop and a taskbar at the bottom and a fully functional Start menu. As expected, the Start menu is the default if you use Windows 10 with a keyboard and mouse, but you can keep the full-screen Start screen if you prefer it. Even on the Start menu, you can pin Live tiles in multiple sizes on the right, but on the left you also get the familiar list of pinned and recent apps, with jumplists for files, the search box (which you can also use to run typed commands), and a power button for shutting down or restarting your PC.The search box has all the Windows 8 features, including results from Bing and the Windows store, and a separate Search menu next to the Start button gives you trending topics directly from Bing, too.You can resize the Start menu, although you can only drag to change the height; changing the width means picking a separate setting. This is more familiar for mouse and keyboard users, but it remains to be seen whether Windows 8 users who like touch will find it a step backwards.
Snaps, apps and desktops
You can still use [Alt]+[Tab] to move between open windows. As in Windows 8.1, these now include any modern apps you have running, and those now open as windows on the desktop like any other software you’re running, ready to be resized or snapped side-by-side. The new Task View button on the Taskbar is there to introduce the idea of moving between windows to the many Windows users who have never tried [Alt]+[Tab].
There are many more ways to snap windows than there were in Windows 8. If you have a narrow window, the second one can take up all the rest of the space, or you can snap four apps, one in each corner. Windows even shows thumbnails of open windows to help you pick one to snap without rearranging everything.
The [Windows]+[Tab] keyboard shortcut now gives you a view that’s the same as [Alt]+[Tab], except for a button at the bottom for adding virtual desktops, and the list of desktops you already have open. You can use your mouse to pick the set of windows you want to put on screen, and the window you want to start using.
Virtual desktops aren’t new, but they never graduated from a utility to a main
Windows feature because they can be confusing to manage. There’s a subtle clue in the Taskbar to help you; if an app is open but not in the current desktop, it is underlined rather than outlined, and if you click on its icon you go straight to it and the rest of that desktop. It remains to be seen whether that’s enough to avoid confusion, but it certainly signals that Microsoft has power users in mind.
Works like a charm
Despite rumours, the Charms bar hasn’t gone away, but you might not see it when you use the [Windows]+[C] shortcut. If you have a mouse and keyboard and the window that’s active is a modern app like the Windows Store, that shortcut brings up a mini Charms menu hanging off the top left corner of the app instead.
This has the three dots that give you any relevant extra commands (labelled as App Commands). These include the Search, Share and Settings charms that are usually on the Charms bar, other useful commands like Play, Print and Project, plus the option of running the app full screen.
If you can’t print from the app, the Print charm on the menu is greyed out. That makes the Charms less touchfriendly, but much more mouse-friendly when you’re controlling an app. That’s exactly what users without touchscreens want; moving all the way over to the side of the screen and all the way back isn’t efficient with a mouse. When you’re controlling Windows – which is what you get when you don’t have a modern app selected – having the Charms and settings bar at the side of the screen is fairly logical. And those Charms are staying around (although probably in a different arrangement with a more logical division of what shows up where) because when the Windows team took tried taking them out, users at Microsoft complained loudly.
That big, friendly sidebar for choosing and changing Wi-Fi options turned out to be really handy and surprisingly popular. This is the Windows 10 experience in microcosm. Microsoft is trying to keep the bits of the modern interface that people like and find useful, but not have them be annoying and intrusive when mouse users are getting things done.
The command prompt
At the other extreme from Charms is the command prompt, where you go to run scripts and batch files. In recent years the emphasis has been on the far more powerful PowerShell automation system, but in the spirit of ‘no feature left behind’, the humble command line is getting the same harmonisation as the rest of Windows 10. You can finally use keyboard shortcuts to select a line or a word at a time, and to copy and paste text.
Only a tiny fraction of Windows users may ever use the command line, but Microsoft wants them to be happy as well, and this is the kind of modernisation that’s a decade overdue.
New tools
Some of the most interesting features for business aren’t visible in the Technical Preview. These include the ability to upgrade PCs using management tools, and manage them through the same Mobile Device Management systems used for smartphones and tablets. There will also be an enterprise app store that lets businesses manage volume licences for modern apps instead of making users sign in to a work PC with a personal Microsoft account, and separation of personal and business data using encrypted containers. These features will appeal to businesses, but they can’t try them out until the previews of Windows Server and the necessary management tools come along.
Integrated Internet Explorer
The preview of Windows 10 only includes a desktop version of Internet Explorer, and it’s not a new one; future updates to the web browser are coming out on their own schedule. That doesn’t necessarily mean the immersive version of Internet Explorer is going away, but it doesn’t make sense to have a separate, full-screen browser when all the modern apps are now just windows on the desktop.
We don’t know what changes there will be to the IE interface, and the Windows team hasn’t yet decided how to handle the different modes of the browser. Having a plugin-free version of the browser is definitely a real security advantage, but unless it’s immediately obvious how to switch between them people will get annoyed and confused. Getting challenges like this right without abandoning the benefits of Windows 8 is where Windows 10 will succeed or fail.
