Windows 10 is everything Windows 8 should have been. Now, it's still early: the technical preview is just a week old, and barely scratches the surface of what Microsoft has promised is coming down the pipe. It's also buggy, and definitely shouldn't be installed on your primary PC.
But this fledgling operating system is at once panacea and prescience, a remedy for Windows 8's identity-crisis that also rethinks and reworks the overly-bold approach to Microsoft's dream of unifying the desktop and mobile experience.
Boot up a PC running the Windows 10 Technical Preview, and you'll be dropped off at the oh so familiar desktop. A taskbar with familiar looking icons sits on the bottom, and the recycle bin sits in the upper left corner. A build number sitting on the right side of your desktop is the only indication that this isn't Windows 8 all over again.
And then you press the Start button, and are greeted by the return of the Start menu. It's a proper Start menu too, with your apps all stacked in that endless column of nested folders we've all been scrolling since Windows 95. And sitting alongside that column are Windows 8's lovely Live Tiles, with news-bites and social updates spinning ad infinitum.
With Windows 10, the familiar and the new are mashed together in a form that's only a little different, but suddenly more useful than ever before. You can have your Start menu, with familiar apps and services that you can pin to a list. And I can have my Live Tiles in a form that actually makes sense: informative nuggets of information feeding me calendar information, the status of my inbox, and social network updates, called up unobtrusively with the press of the Windows key. Press those Live Tile shortcuts, and the "Modern" apps open as classic windowed apps. You can drag them around, snap them to half of your display, or minimize and maximize them at will.
Windows 10 isn't going to fix everything, but a seemingly simple tweak to one of Windows 8's most divisive elements has made a world of difference to the OS. And that's crucial to Windows' future, as Microsoft is still looking at the big picture: PCs are old news.
But this fledgling operating system is at once panacea and prescience, a remedy for Windows 8's identity-crisis that also rethinks and reworks the overly-bold approach to Microsoft's dream of unifying the desktop and mobile experience.
Boot up a PC running the Windows 10 Technical Preview, and you'll be dropped off at the oh so familiar desktop. A taskbar with familiar looking icons sits on the bottom, and the recycle bin sits in the upper left corner. A build number sitting on the right side of your desktop is the only indication that this isn't Windows 8 all over again.
And then you press the Start button, and are greeted by the return of the Start menu. It's a proper Start menu too, with your apps all stacked in that endless column of nested folders we've all been scrolling since Windows 95. And sitting alongside that column are Windows 8's lovely Live Tiles, with news-bites and social updates spinning ad infinitum.
With Windows 10, the familiar and the new are mashed together in a form that's only a little different, but suddenly more useful than ever before. You can have your Start menu, with familiar apps and services that you can pin to a list. And I can have my Live Tiles in a form that actually makes sense: informative nuggets of information feeding me calendar information, the status of my inbox, and social network updates, called up unobtrusively with the press of the Windows key. Press those Live Tile shortcuts, and the "Modern" apps open as classic windowed apps. You can drag them around, snap them to half of your display, or minimize and maximize them at will.
Windows 10 isn't going to fix everything, but a seemingly simple tweak to one of Windows 8's most divisive elements has made a world of difference to the OS. And that's crucial to Windows' future, as Microsoft is still looking at the big picture: PCs are old news.
