After installing the Windows 10 Technical Preview on my wife’s computer yesterday morning–actually, you know what? I just want to take a moment to dwell on that last statement. I installed an entirely new operating system on my wife’s laptop yesterday morning. And I’m not talking about something that took from 5:00a to just before noon, qualifying the time frame as “morning.” Rather, starting at 6:30a, I signed her up for the Technical Preview Insider’s program (with her consent and direction, of course), downloaded the latest ISO (Build 10074) and the legacy USB Download tool to make a bootable USB drive (which still works fine), created a partition on her hard drive, installed the ISO onto a 4GB USB thumb drive, installed the operating system from the USB drive, and had her computer up and running with all available updates in a dual-boot environment by the time my daughter woke up at 8:15. When I upgraded my old desktop computer from Vista to Windows 7 back when it came out, I’m pretty certain I remember the process taking about 3 or 4 hours. And I already had the Windows 7 disk. A lot of progress has been made, to be sure.
The Good Aspects of Windows 10
Anyway, how does she like it? She’s fine with it. It feels much less bloated, she reports, and responds quicker than her Windows 7 environment. She likes Project Sparta (the Edge browser) a lot, and hasn’t felt compelled to download Chrome, Firefox, or Opera. She enjoys the start menu expanding to full screen, with the translucency effect. Her “All Apps” list is on the right-hand side, and that seems to work well for her. The main thing is that it feels familiar, but better, and that’s good enough.
The Annoyances of Preview Software
That isn’t to say there haven’t been hiccups. For whatever reason, when we tried to play with the OneNote app yesterday afternoon, it wouldn’t load. Trying to download it from the Green Store (as opposed to the Gray (beta) Store) again, did nothing. And it was frustrating that OneNote couldn’t be uninstalled from the device. It’s not a matter of it taking up less than a MB of storage; it’s a matter of trying to wipe it off and giving it another go. Trying to set OneNote up in the browser didn’t really work any better, so there could have just been some issues with OneDrive yesterday. Those happen from time to time. Other than those minor bumps, though, things have been bumping along smoothly so far.
We’ll see how it goes when new updates or builds are sent out.
