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October 06
Windows 10 Thoughts

Windows 10 was announced on September 30th, and on October 1st, the Technical Preview came out. Microsoft has advanced the version number from eight to ten, and in doing so, they say they're focusing on the enterprise with this release.

As leaked and re-posted by every web site on the entire Internet, Windows 10 returns the focus on the platform back to desktop experience computers running Intel CPUs, with keyboards and mice. I have it installed on a machine, and after the initial experience of waiting for a few things to come up, it is very much what you'd expect: Windows 7, but with some elements of Windows 8 thrown in.

During the event, Microsoft stressed that the experience was to be "familiar," which let's be honest with ourselves, is code for "we're bending backward in order to please customers."

On one hand, I think it's good that Microsoft is listening to feedback form its customers – the Linux distribution makers were totally doing so – but I also think it's bad that they're reneging from the original concept of Windows 8. I'm actually undecided on that last point, because you could just as easily interpret it as reneging and this release of Windows could be the "7.8" that so many people were pining for back in 2012 when Windows 8.0 was released.

On the other hand, when some of the experimental functionality and experiments with the user experience come onboard, such as the "continuum" user interface, it'll be good to see how Microsoft handles transitioning between "desktop" and "tablet" interfaces in the operating system, and how convertible devices (presuming Windows itself can even detect that a device is convertible) will be handled. I may absolutely be in the minority, but I totally liked the full-screen start screen as a launcher for the system, especially on my systems that have a lot of different applications installed, such as my work PC with two large application suites and other incidentals and administrative tools.

Although the full-screen launcher is not the default on "desktop" computers (things with keyboards and mice) it is available, and I'm personally not yet sure whether or not I will go and use that option. You can control the height and width of Windows 10's Start menu by adding tiles and dragging them around. I think for me, it's that the full-screen launcher represented The Future™ and without that being the default, this is just Windows with some incremental improvements. On the other hand, I appreciate that the new interface applications are still around, and will mention that Windows 10 still feels better organized than Vista and 7, which themselves were very large improvements on Windows XP.

I'll admit, and I'll write about this more later, I'm personally a little bit worried for the Surface RT and its successor, the Surface 2. It's presumed so far that Windows 10 will receive an ARM port, but Microsoft said literally zero things about what the future is for those devices or for "Windows on ARM" as an overall concept. I personally believe that it would be a shame if, in a misguided quest for "appropriateness," Microsoft killed off the functionality I love best in the Surface RT and its brethren.

As a side-note: I'm doing this testing on umea, one of the ThinkPad R61s I wrote about in my post about hardware scavenging. It's honestly surprising how sprightly a 1.8GHz single-core processor feels. On the other hand, there are definitely times when you can tell that a dual-core CPU would be that much better. I have a 2.4GHz Core2Duo T8300 in the wings for this computer, but have yet to install it. At that point, the biggest limiting factor will be the old slow 80 gigabyte disk.

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