Review Subscribe

1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8...10? Yes Windows 10 is here, well I say here, I mean announced, I say announced, I mean you can get your hands on the technical preview right now and I've been giving it a spin.

Now before I start I've been accused of being a Windows 8 basher, now this is not entirely true. The issue I had with 8 is that it was destined for a touchscreen world and left the users of keyboards and a mice out in the cold. I was never a fan of the interface formerly known as ‘Metro’ just because it was forced on you no matter what device you were using but the Windows 8 desktop mode was solid, fast and reliable, I loved it and now it’s back.

I really respect Microsoft for admitting their misstep. They should get kudos for trying something new but it was before its time. The majority of use still haven’t moved into the world of touchscreen PCs so this needed to be identified and this has finally been addressed in 10.

First and foremost the Start Menu is back. Now I know that us in the know have been overcoming this in Windows 8 with hacks such as Classic Shell but it’s good to officially have it back. It has all of the features that you used to know and love but they've also crammed in a area to fit in live tiles so you can, at a glance, see updates from your favourite apps. I think that this is a really great idea as it gives you the best of both worlds, the old and the new and works pretty well. You can even arrange tiles much in the same way as you can in Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone so you can customise your experience the way that you want.

I’m a huge Mac fan and for day to day tasks OS X is my OS of choice but if I want to be productive I always turn to Windows. The main feature that makes this possible is snap where you can resize windows to identical sides of the screen so that you can work on multiple apps at the same time and something that OS X is sorely lacking. With Windows 10 snap just got intelligent. So when you snap a window to one side of the screen it will then show you all of your active windows and make intelligent suggestions about what else you may want to snap. So say for example you snap and Excel document and have another one open it’s probable that your other open Excel files would be a likely candidate. Other improvements include being able to snap more than two windows as well as being able to snap windows across multiple screens.

Also if you were ever a fan of the full screen ‘Metro’, I mean Windows Store apps, then you can now run them in desktop mode and resize them based on your needs which can only be an advantage (if you can find an app in the store that you find useful).

There is also a task view and finally for Windows multiple desktops.

My first impressions are great. This first technical is pretty solid out of the gate. If you want to give it a try you can download it by becoming part of the Windows Insider program.

I’m sure that there’s a lot more to come but my impressions are great. I’m a huge Windows fan and glad that its back and firing on all cylinders.

Only good can come from this.

Author

Paul Wright

Gold Subscriber : $20.00 USD - monthly Silver Subscriber : $10.00 USD - monthly Bronze Subscriber : $5.00 USD - monthly