Let’s flash back to 2012. About three years ago, Windows 8, the last major release of Microsoft’s ubiquitous operating system, was released to manufacturers. This was to be Microsoft’s most ambitious release yet. Traditional PC sales were in decline, and more personal devices such as the iPad tablet were poised to end the dominant PC platform. Microsoft’s response to this was to change Windows more than in any previous release, in a bid to make it usable with the tablet form factor. Windows 8 launched in October 2012 to much fanfare.

Windows 8 Start Screen

There was much fanfare, but little in the way of sales. Yes, Microsoft did sell many copies of Windows 8, but it did not help the declining PC market rebound. Windows 8 came to be with a touch first interface, with a new Start Screen replacing the traditional Start Menu, and a new breed of Windows 8 apps, which run on the WinRT framework. These WinRT apps have been named many things over the past three years, starting with Metro apps. A trademark dispute ended that naming scheme though, and over time they have morphed from full screen apps to universal apps to Windows Store apps, and practically none of them were able to rival the older Win32 platform in popularity or productivity.

Windows 8 did bring some great features to Windows, but they were overshadowed by the major design shift which, while good as a touch based operating system, alienated many who still used Windows on a traditional desktop or notebook. The Start Screen was a big turn off to many people, and full screen apps were not very efficient on a large screen display. Even the multitasking in Windows 8 was less than ideal, with the initial release only allowing two Windows Store apps to be open at any one time, and the second was relegated to a small side bar.

Microsoft’s own faith in Windows 8 was clearly not strong. Only a couple of weeks after Windows 8 launched, they unceremoniously dumped the project head Steven Sinofsky from the company, and spent the next two years trying to make Windows 8 more usable on traditional mouse and keyboard type machines, which were the vast majority of Windows devices in the hands of users. Windows 8.1 arrived and fixed some of the key issues with Windows 8, and 8.1 Update launched with the ability to boot to the desktop, and avoid the touch interface almost completely if you wanted to.

Windows 10 Start Menu and Desktop view

When looking at Windows 10, I think it is pretty important to look back over the last three years, because none of this is ever built or designed in a vacuum. Microsoft has a huge number of devices running Windows, but a large majority of them are running Windows 7, which was an evolutionary desktop upgrade. Windows 8 struggled to ever take over any of that usage share. Windows 10 is Microsoft’s attempt to bridge the divide. Windows 7 is used by hundreds of millions of people, but its touch support is practically zero. Windows 8 works well in a touch scenario, but is not ideal for keyboard and mouse based devices. Windows 10 promises to be the version of Windows which bridges this gap.

Windows 10 brings about as much change as Windows 8 did, but in almost all cases it is going to be appreciated by users rather than avoided. It will run on a dizzying number of device types, including the traditional desktop, notebook, tablet, two-in-one, phone, IoT, Raspberry Pi, Hololens, Surface Hub, and even Xbox One. What it will bring to each of those device types is not the single interface that Windows 8 pushed on the desktop, but a unified app platform. Each device type will have its own interface, but the underlying app platform will allow developers to target a huge number of devices. And developer buy-in is the one thing Microsoft needs more than any other in order to make this vision succeed. For all of Windows 8’s quirks, it was really the lack of quality apps in the Windows Store which was the one hurdle Microsoft could not code around. Only time will tell whether or not the new model succeeds where the old one failed, but at the beginning of the life of Windows 10 we can go through all aspects of it and see what’s new, what’s changed, and how it fits in on today’s devices.

Return of the Desktop and Start Menu

Windows 10 moves back to the strength of Windows over its lifetime, and the desktop is certainly that. The Start Menu has been a staple of Windows since all the way back in Windows 95. It has evolved over the years, but the layout and functionality was always there. Windows 8 removed the Start Menu and replaced it with a Start Screen, which was great on a tablet but certainly less than ideal on a desktop. It was jarring to move from the desktop to the start screen, and the layout of it was inefficient when accessing it with a mouse or trackpad. Windows 10 brings back the Start Menu, but with some changes.

The hierarchical nature of the Windows 7 start menu, with Start leading to All Programs, then individual folders, and shortcuts inside, has been replaced with a miniature version of the Start Screen from Windows 8, including the live tiles. While this may not please everyone, it is still functionally a lot easier to access than the Start Screen, and most importantly there is not the jarring sensation that Windows 8 had. The live tiles do fit in well though with the new look, and they still offer the extra information that live tiles are known for. The one issue with them is that it can be difficult to find apps when the image changes. This is somewhat exacerbated when you have multiple devices and the live tiles are not in the same location. One of the features that I quite liked in Windows 8 was being able to sync the start screen layout among devices, and for reasons I can’t understand that has been removed from Windows 10.

Accessing all apps is different than Windows 7. Instead of a heirarchical list of folders there is just an alphabetical list of all apps that you can scroll through, but the list can itself contain folders so there can be some organization. You can also click on the letter headers to bring up an alphabet in order to jump to any letter. This is not new to Windows, but it will be new to people moving from Windows 7. Being able to sort applications into folders is obviously nice when you have a lot of apps. One possible solution would be the live folders from Windows Phone, and perhaps they will make their way to Windows 10 at some point. Regardless, on the desktop, the Start Menu functions a lot better than the Start Screen ever did. When you move to a touch mode, the Start Menu switches to a full screen mode for use with touch, and as we will get into in the touch section, evolving the UI to work for the different user interfaces is a lot better solution than trying to make one UI work for both.

There is also one bug with the Start Menu which may affect some users. The Start Menu can only handle around 512 apps, and while that is a pretty large number, it is still going to affect some people so hopefully this can get sorted out quickly. If you do go over the limit, the list is truncated. I have not run into this myself, but be warned if you are a heavy user of software that consists of lots of applications.

If the Start Menu was the only change to the desktop, it may have been enough for Windows 10. Windows 8 and 8.1 brought some nice upgrades to the desktop that were overshadowed by the Start Screen changes. The new task manager, for instance, is much improved over the Windows 7 version. It also brought the ability to natively mount ISO images, file copies were improved, and many other things that were nice benefits to Windows 8. But luckily, Windows 10 goes far beyond just a Start Menu when discussing desktop improvements.

The most obvious change, and perhaps even more welcome than the Start Menu, is Windows Store apps can now run in a window. Most of my frustrations with Windows 8 was how when you double clicked a photo file, the default app was the Windows 8 version of photos and it would take over the entire display. Like the Start Screen, it was a jarring experience, and when you are on the desktop this is just a poor UI decision. With Windows 10, when running in non-tablet mode, apps like photos now correctly open in a window which can be resized and moved around. In Windows 8, the tablet mode was forced upon all, and although you could change what the default apps were and avoid that interface to some extent, it was the default. With Windows 10, rather than force the tablet apps upon users, the tablet apps themselves can now morph from windowed mode to tablet mode, which is a much better solution.

One feature that started its life in Windows 7 was Aero Snap, which let you position and resize windows by dragging them to the sides to split the screen, or to the top to expand the window to full screen. Windows 10 improves on that with Snap Assist. When you use Snap to split a window to half the display, Snap Assist will display a list of other windows that are open so you can easily pick the one you wanted in the other half of the display. Generally when you snap a window to the side, you want to snap another window to the other side, so this makes a lot of sense, but you can also hit escape to close Snap Assist or just click on the desktop to close it. Snap Assist is one of those features that you get used to really quickly, and moving back to a device that doesn’t have it feels like a step back.

One other perk of the new snapping features is that if you resize a window on the side to a value other than 50%, when you snap another window to the other side it will automatically fill whatever space is left. It’s a small change but once again another nice change that is welcome, especially when you consider how Windows 8 took a step back when it came to window management because none of the new apps could be run in a window. The changes introduced in Windows 10 have more than rectified this, and Windows 10 is a nice step ahead of Windows 7 in this regard.

If you really have a lot of windows that you like to manage, you may be a fan of a long requested feature coming in the latest version of Windows. Virtual Desktops are now in. This has long been a feature of other operating systems, and you could always add it to Windows with an add-in, but it is now a native feature. I discussed this in our Windows 10 first impressions post, and that was very early on in Windows 10’s development cycle. Some changes have been made to how they operate which I find make the experience a lot better. By default, apps open on another virtual desktop no longer show on the current desktop’s taskbar. I think this makes a lot more sense, since if the point is to have lots of windows open, but separate, I would not want my taskbar packed full. Alt-Tab now, by default, only shows apps that are open on the current desktop, which once again helps to separate them and make them their own workspace. But if you would prefer to change these defaults, there are options in settings to allow you to choose virtual desktop behaviour.

More Desktop Changes

One of the goals of Windows 10 is to entice Windows 7 users to migrate to the new operating system. The additions we’ve seen already to the traditional mouse and keyboard interface have already been substantial, and should make most Windows 7 users comfortable. But they are not the only changes to the desktop. There is a little bit for everyone, both casual users and enthusiasts alike, so lets check out some more of the new features of Windows 10’s desktop.

Windows 8 changed up Windows Explorer, and brought in the ribbon menu. Office 2007 was the first Microsoft program to move from the file menu to the ribbon menu, and while it was controversial at the time, it is now very familiar. Moving Windows Explorer to a ribbon menu made it both easier to use with touch, as well as exposing settings and features that may have been tucked away in a submenu before. Windows 10 evolves this. Opening up Windows Explorer now greets you with a list of files you have recently accessed in the main pane. The thinking is that when you go to Explorer, you are likely looking for something you’ve used before. I won’t dispute the logic, but I prefer to see the computer view myself. Luckily it’s an easy option to change by clicking File->Change folder and search options. What I do like though is the Quick Access feature in Windows Explorer, which gives you – you guessed it – quick access to folders that are used a lot. The system will automatically add folders you go to frequently which is kind of great for discoverability, and you can add or remove any folder here. I have found it very useful, and since it is also built into the file picker for saving files, it makes it easy to get where I want to go when saving files.

Another nice feature to come to Windows Explorer is the Share contract. Windows 8 introduced contracts, which allow apps to communicate with one another over dedicated protocols, and adding it to Windows Explorer is a great way to expand them from the tablet style apps to the desktop. Share was likely the most useful contract, and I was always disappointed that the Windows 8 Charms did not offer any functionality on the desktop, so this is a great addition.

There are also small changes which improve Windows 10 over Windows 8. Things like having drop shadows back. Windows 8 went for a very flat UI, and it was clean looking but the lack of depth was not very useful with multiple windows open. Adding drop shadows back give the subtle definition around windows to make them stand out a bit more.

One of my favorite features that has come to Windows 10 is the ability to scroll an inactive window. Prior to Windows 10, and assuming you were not running a third party utility which enabled this, in order to scroll a window you had to first select it. Now, you can just move your mouse over any open window and use the scroll wheel to move whatever window you are over. You can do this on windows that are buried three or four deep – as long as you can see some of it you can scroll it. It is great when you are referencing a PDF or site, and writing at the same time, since you can continue to type while scrolling around in your reference document. For those that think this is insane, yes, you can turn it off.

Windows 8 seemed to signal that Microsoft was looking to a future past the desktop. There were some nice changes brought to the Windows 8 desktop but they were overshadowed by the changes brought in by the touch-first UI. With Windows 10, Microsoft is not only trying to bring back the focus on the desktop, they have added a lot of great features as well which should certainly entice users of both Windows 7 and 8.1 to want to switch.

Continuum

Windows 10’s mission in life seems to be to correct the failings of Windows 8. I think the touch based UI worked pretty well on Windows 8 when using it on a tablet, however forcing that same UI onto traditional PCs was a tough pill to swallow for many people. Windows 10 takes a very different approach, and rather than try to shoehorn a single UI into all devices, the UI itself adapts to each device. Microsoft is branding this transformation as Continuum. You can enable this functionality by turning on tablet mode, which can be enabled as a setting, or if you have a 2-in-1 device, the system will prompt you asking if you want to switch when you move to or from the touch mode. You can of course control how this happens, and even enable it to automatically switch for you without a prompt.

Windows 10 on the PC has a tablet mode which morphs the UI into something that works better with touch. The Start Menu expands to fill the display, much like the Start Screen in Windows 8. This allows the live tiles to take center stage. The UI feels a lot like Windows 8, which is a good thing when using it on a tablet, but there have been some tweaks here too.

Windows 8 went with a lot of hidden gestures to get things done. The charms menu was a swipe in from the right, but there was no obvious way to know that other than stumbling upon it. Multitasking was swiping in from the left to switch between apps, or you could bring up the task switcher with an even more obscure swipe in from the left and then swipe back to the right. Apps could access their options either in the charms or from an app bar that could be opened by swiping up from the bottom or down from the top. There is nothing really wrong with hidden UI gestures but there has to be a way to teach people that they are there. Out of the box on Windows 8 there was very little training. Some was eventually added, but it was pretty sparse.

Windows 10 really moves away from the hidden gestures, and moves things like search to the task bar. Task switching moves from a complicated gesture to the task view button, and there is a back button added as well. Closing apps can be done with task view, or you can still drag the window down off the screen like Windows 8. You can still use some of the gestures, but almost all of the functions can now be accessed by findable onscreen elements.

The one function that is not obvious anymore though is multitasking in tablet mode. In Windows 8, you could swipe an app over to the side and it would snap it there. Windows 10 does not work like this anymore and you have to swipe the app down as if you are going to close it, and then bring it to the side to snap it. It’s actually a pretty easy gesture, it’s just hard to discover on your own. However when you do snap a window, you get Snap Assist again to help you find what you want to snap to the other side.

So there have certainly been some nice changes to the tablet interface as well, and Windows 10 brings some nice features to the touch above and beyond Windows 8. However one thing that I find a step back is the Start Menu when in Tablet Mode. There is a lot of wasted space now, and the Start Menu looks like it is somewhat handicapped to work on a phone display. The tiles now arrange themselves in groups which can be no more than three medium tiles wide. Windows 8’s Start Screen was scrollable horizontally, and Windows 10 only scrolls vertical. Looking at something like the Microsoft Surface 3 shows wide gaps of unusable space when in landscape mode, but switching it to portrait mode means you only get to see a single group, which is a big step back in density over Windows 8. On the Surface 3, there is easily room for three groups of tiles when in landscape, or the groups could be made wider to let you get more on the screen at once. How it is right now though feels very sparse.

Still, Continuum is a much better solution to having Windows 10 adapt to different device types than what has been available before. Forcing a touch UI onto desktop PCs was always going to alienate users. Over the time of Windows 8’s lifecycle, it did evolve to get better on the desktop, but it was never going to win over the fans of Windows 7. With Windows 10, both traditional PCs, tablets, and 2-in-1s can all get the right UI for the right time. It is a big step up for the PC, and on a touch device Windows 10 is pretty nice to use, despite my issues with the Start Menu in full screen. I think this can be sorted out, and I hope it does happen. The new tablet interface offers a lot more in discoverable actions, and it offers quite a bit of customizability.

Digital Inking gets a Promotion

Microsoft launched the Surface Pro with a Wacom stylus, and the Surface Pro 3 switched that up to a N-Trig model. Microsoft ended up buying the N-Trig pen technology outright, and they now offer pen support in the smaller, less expensive Surface 3 model.

They have had a good response to the stylus input support, and some of their first-party apps like OneNote and Fresh Paint have great stylus support. Using the rest of the operating system with the stylus was more for easier selection of items, and navigation. That is of course still there, but the stylus has gotten a big promotion in Windows 10.

With this release, the system now supports pen input for any text field. Let me say this again. Any text field now supports pen input. Even desktop apps like Skype can be written to with the stylus now, and that is a big change over previous versions of Windows.

And, the text support is really good. I have, well let’s be honest here, I have atrocious handwriting. Windows 10 consistently had no issues knowing what I was writing and getting the right word added. It also offers a text correction box so you can tap on a word to correct it if it wasn’t right, much like a touch keyboard offers.

Some 3rd party tools have tried to emulate this, but it is really hard to compete with built in tools, and this addition to Windows 10 really moves the operating system forward for anyone who loves to use a stylus as an input tool. Before, you had to use in in combination with the touch keyboard, but now you can drastically increase text input by using a pen.

If you look ahead, you can see that this may also be a big feature of Windows 10 Mobile, coming to smaller tablets and phones in the near future. This should be a nice benefit to those devices, and the rumblings are that the new flagship Windows 10 Mobile devices from Microsoft are going to come with stylus support.

To a big chunk of users, adding pen support as a first-class citizen may not seem like a big deal, but going forward it may end up as one of the differentiators for the platform. For those that do have a device with pen support already, you are going to find it to be a big change that is very welcome.

The Windows Store: Unifying Across Devices

The original iPhone had no App Store. It seems hard to believe now since the App Store is one of the biggest strengths of iOS and has been for some time. It’s a model that has been successful and one that is now a staple of all platforms. Windows 8 introduced the Windows Store to Microsoft’s desktop platform, but it never really saw the success that was necessary to elevate it and the tablet apps to the level needed to drive sales.

Microsoft has made some pretty big changes to the store for Windows 10, and more are on the way. Likely the biggest change, and this one is not yet 100% realized, is that Microsoft, with Windows 10, is unifying their platform across all device types. This allows them to provide a single store which can have apps which can be run on everything from IoT to desktop to phone, and eventually Xbox One in November, and the Microsoft Hololens when it launches sometime in the next year.

So what does it mean to unify the platform? This is not about providing phone apps for use on the tablet, or tablet apps which don’t really work well on a phone. By providing a common set of APIs across all of their platforms, the developer can now write a single app which can be used on any device they want. Rather than stretch out a phone app to run on a desktop, the platform is designed to allow scaling of apps across all devices. The developer will have to provide a bit of work to make the UI work on different devices, but the amount of work required is a lot less. Another big part of the system is that apps will be designed with XAML layouts, which can be automatically scaled by the operating system depending on a lot of factors. This is one of the reasons that apps can now be run in a window, since the OS can present the app in the right layout for a given window size. When you look at the struggles Windows has had with high DPI over the years, the move to XAML should be a big boon to high resolution devices since the WinRT framework is DPI aware.

So there is a lot of work that has been put into this new framework, which originally launched with Windows 8. It provides a lot of flexibility to different device types, input methods, and even architecture. Windows RT is now dead, but the ARM processor is still the standard on phones, and this framework still allows apps to run across architectures too.

But the Windows Store is about more than just providing apps. Microsoft has unified the store now and it is the single place to make all purchases now. Music was available in the Xbox Music app in Windows 8, and movies and television shows could be purchased through the Video app. That changes in Windows 10, and all purchases including media are now in a single location.

The store gets a new look too, which looks a lot better than the original store in Windows 8. Windows 8.1 brought some nice changes, but the new look of the store is much improved. Featured apps are shown at the top, and you can easily access your account, find apps you’ve already bought, and search for new ones. One of the biggest issues with the store in Windows 8 was how Microsoft had not really shown a lot of dedication to ensuring the store had quality apps. They started well behind, and seemed to pretty much allow anything in the store in order to say they have a higher app count. That changed recently, and Microsoft is now cracking down on apps which are basically clones of others, and they are ensuring that apps which are game guides are clearly labeled to ensure people don’t purchase the wrong thing. They still have a lot of work to do on this front, and the store in Windows 8 was really a poor experience. However one of the worst offenders is actually Microsoft themselves. There has been discussion around the fact that Solitare, a game which has been around for since WIndows 3.0, is now a subscription based game. That is not the entire story of course, because the subscription of $10 per year is just to remove the ads from the game, and you can still play for free. This is also the same subscription for Solitaire which was around back in Windows 8. Luckily the ads are not intrusive, but it is a slippery slope and one that can easily be taken too far.

In fact, once again it is Microsoft that has taken it too far. In-App purchases (IAP) are an unfortunate way of life now, and are something that will not be going away anytime soon. Some developers have found them to be the saviour to their business model. Generally a small portion of the user base invests heavily in the game, and they end up making more than they would have by just selling the game at a fixed cost. The "benefit" as it were is that the game ends up being free for most people, but the games are often riddled with stumbling blocks in an effort to get you to pay up. As an old school gamer, I'm not much of a fan of In-App purchases, but I get that the people have spoken, and it is a viable way to market.

But there is certainly a limit to how far you can go with this. Most IAP is for a couple of dollars per transaction, and in an effort to clean up the Windows Store, Microsoft has taken it upon themselves to remove apps which they feel are not priced appropriately. They stated in a blog post: Ensuring appropriate app pricing

The price of an app must reflect its value. Customers need to know that when they purchase apps from Windows Store, they are paying a fair price. While developers retain sole pricing discretion, they should price apps based on their app’s value and functionality. This means that similar apps should generally be comparable in price. This also means that while developers may use pricing to promote their apps, they must not utilize irregular or unfair practices that violate Windows Store Code of Conduct.

So this is good news for customers, or it would be, except that Microsoft themselves is not following their own guidelines. Microsoft has an app in the store called "Microsoft Jackpot" which is a basic game of casino style slots. It is free, with IAP of course. The IAP is for coins which allow you to continue to play when you've run out of coins (which is very quickly by the way). This is not illegal, since you can't actually win money, but if you think about the ethics of allowing people to pay to play a casino game in which they can't win, it is certainly shady. And then you need to look at the IAP itself.

Microsoft will sell you coins in a free game for up to $199. That cost is more than it would cost you to purchase WIndows 10 Pro. This is just for coins in one free game in the store. This is ridiculous, and even more so because the game itself is terrible.

There is no way that this game reflects any sort of value, and the worst part is, it breaks (in my opinion) their own guidelines on what can be in the store. If they are serious about cracking down on poor apps which rip people off, they need to start with their own apps and use them as a model on what to do right, and not wrong.

So with that out of the way, let's move on with some other information about the store and the app platform. There are a couple of more changes too. The design language for Windows 10 has changed quite a bit from Windows 8, which relied in an App Bar and Charms Menu to perform options inside apps, and the apps themselves tended to scroll horizontally to take advantage of widescreen displays. Now that apps are in windows, the horizontal scroll is no longer going to work, so the design of Windows 10 apps is that they are now scroll vertically. The app bar has been replaced by options menus. Pivots, which were one of the key design features of Windows Phone and Windows 8, are now pretty much gone.

Windows 8 Design Language - Horizontal Scroll, App Bar, Charms - Money App Pictured

And of course what is an app store if there are no apps in it? Microsoft has certainly struggled to gain developer support for many big name apps, and even apps that were there like Twitter were not kept up to date, and were missing key features that were available on iOS and Android. It is too early to say if this will change with Windows 10, but there have already been some key apps released with the new Windows 10 design language, including Twitter.

Windows 10 Design Language - Veritcal Scroll, Menu Bar on left with flyout, more information per page

At Microsoft’s developer conference, they announced some big pieces to the puzzle too. Windows 10 will have support for iOS apps running as native code. This will still involve the developer having to import the apps and do a bit of coding, but the amount of work necessary to port an iOS app to Windows 10 is far less.

Android apps will also be able to be ported to Windows, but only on mobile devices like phones. This strategy makes a lot of sense, since iOS tends to have better tablet app support.

Porting apps from other operating systems is not a long term solution to the problem of lack of apps, but it is a short term solution which will at least drop the barrier to entry for devs that write on non-Windows platforms. The long term goal is to expand the footprint of Windows 10 enough so that it is a platform that developers want to target, but getting there is going to take some time. Microsoft’s goal is to have Windows 10 on a billion devices within three years of release. It’s an ambitious goal, but certainly one that is attainable for the Redmond based company.

Another change to the store which is coming later on in Windows 10’s life is that traditional desktop apps will be available through the store. This is a nice change and should make it a lot easier to purchase, install, and update these apps.

There will also be built in support for volume license customers to provide apps to their employees, and to offer a curated store to provide just what they require.

The store will also be the update mechanism for apps, as it is now, but also for system apps like the new browser named Edge, and other system features too can be updated through the store. It should offer faster updates, especially on mobile devices where system updates can get tied up by mobile operators.

Microsoft needs the store to be successful. Windows 10 brings about a lot of changes to help draw back customers, with the start menu, and other changes, but really the store is the key to everything. If they can’t bring developers in to the platform through the store, it is going to be tough for the rest of their strategy to come to fruition.

Changing the Way You Interact With Your PC: Meet Cortana

Digital personal assistants have graced our smartphones for a couple of years now. Traditionally, computers reacted to specific commands. Double click to open calendar. Select tomorrow. Right click. New. Reminder. Meeting about mortgage. At the bank. 3pm. Save. It’s the way it has always been, because as fast as computers are at certain tasks, they don’t speak any languages other than the commands that they know. Google Now, Siri, and Cortana on Windows Phone have allowed us a glimpse at natural language input on mobile devices, Microsoft is extending that functionality to all Windows 10 PCs with Cortana now available on the PC as well..

“Hey Cortana, remind me to go to the bank at 3pm tomorrow for my mortgage”

There is nothing you can do with Cortana that you could not have done manually yourself, but the goal of these digital assistants is to make certain tasks easier. At the moment, Cortana is certainly not an AI being, and as such, is still limited in what commands are possible. Anything that falls outside of the features of Cortana end up in a web search. For a full list of commands, ask Cortana for help and a list will appear. Cortana is able to do contextual searches and replies too, and can respond to follow up questions without having to restate the original question again.

You can use Cortana to search for what music is playing, track your flights, set appointments, give directions, and more. Over time, this will also expand to offer more functionality.

Cortana will of course respond to speech inputs, and can even be set to always be listening for Hey Cortana much like you see on smartphones these days, but it is also just as capable with text based input, and it is smart enough to know that if you talk to it, it can reply in audio, but if you type something in, it will reply with a text response.

Sitting at your desktop, you may be thinking that you don’t need or want this on your PC, since you have it on your phone. If you are someone who uses your PC for any amount of time, being able to type in quick reminders or check calendar appointments can be a great feature. Cortana is also proactive, and knows your appointments and can remind you that you need to leave. Once again there is nothing new here, since smartphones already have this functionality, but for those of us who spend a lot of time at a PC during a day, it is very nice to have this.

I think one of the untapped potentials of Cortana will evolve over time. Microsoft has been pushing to add Cortana support to iOS and Android, and while you may feel that effort is in vain because they already have their own integrated personal assistants, Cortana will be the link between any of your devices. You can set reminders on your PC but if you are out at the gas station with your Android phone, you’ll get notified. Cortana also supports geo-fencing, so you can tell it to remind you to do something the next time you are at a location, and that will work from the desktop to the phone as well, no matter what phone you use.

The one major issue with Cortana at the moment is just how limited it’s deployment is. Microsoft is tuning Cortana to each region where Windows is available, and as such it is only available in seven countries right now, with the U.S., UK, China, France, Italy, Germany and Spain being available at launch. More countries will be coming online in the next couple of months. By tuning the experience to each location, they can ensure that the experience fits in with the culture which varies so greatly across the globe.

I have only had a small glimpse of Cortana on the desktop, although I have used it quite a bit on my phone, because being from Canada I am on the list of countries waiting. But that small glimpse, as well as the integration of Cortana with the rest of the system, shows that Cortana might be one of the most important additions to Windows in this release.

Check out the New Browser: Microsoft Edge

Internet Explorer has been the one browser from Microsoft for around twenty years. Just think about that for a moment. Twenty years ago, there was just the beginnings of what we all now take for granted, that being the internet. Over the years, it has evolved from version 1 to 11, with some sticking points along the way, such as IE 6 which came standard with Windows XP back in 2002. Over time, it has evolved like all software does, but Microsoft had to balance the needs of the web with the needs of its clients, and they did not always get this balance right.

Internet Explorer certainly has some good features, but it has been dragged down by the backwards compatibility built in to ensure that business customers who built line-of-business apps on Internet Explorer would be able to have a platform that worked for them.

To this end, the decision was made to stop developing Internet Explorer, and with Windows 10 we get a new browser called Microsoft Edge. It is still based on the same rendering engine and scripting engine as IE 11, but hundreds of thousands of lines of code related to backwards compatibility have been removed in an effort to streamline development, increase performance, and reduce the attack surface. All of the traditional IE features have been deprecated, such as ActiveX controls, plug-ins, and more.

What that leaves is a much leaner browser, and Microsoft has committed to better web standards support, which should lead to more compatibility with the modern web. Edge with experimental support is currently supporting more of the ECMAScript 6 feature set than any other browser. That is a big step up from IE which has lagged behind most other browsers on support of these features.

Another thing that IE lacked was performance, and Edge has made tremendous gains here. As seen in our tests of several common web benchmarks, Edge now has performance very close, or even above, other desktop browsers. Websites these days are heavily scripted, and having strong performance is important for how the device feels, but it can also help out with battery life, since you will spend less time working. The gains have been large, and hopefully Microsoft won’t rest on its laurels here and allow this performance to fall back as it did with Internet Explorer.

Browser Performance - Core i7-860
Benchmark	IE 11 (Jan)	Spartan (Jan)	Edge 20 (July)	Chrome 40 (Jan)	Chrome 43 (July)	Firefox 35 (Jan)	Firefox 39 (July)
Sunspider (lower is better)	149.7ms	144.6ms	133.4ms	260.9ms	247.5ms	220.1ms	234.6ms
Octane 2.0 (higher is better)	9861	17928	22278	17474	19407	16508	19012
Kraken 1.1 (lower is better)	3781.2ms	2077.5ms	1797.9ms	1992.8ms	1618.7ms	1760.4ms	1645.5ms
WebXPRT (higher is better)	913	1083	1132	1251	1443	1345	1529
Oort Online (higher is better)	1990	2170	5470	5370	7620	3900	7670*
HTML5Test (higher is better)	339	344	402	511	526	449	467

Edge also brings some new features to the table. Cortana is likely the biggest and most likely to be used. We’ll cover Cortana some more later, but being able to search within a page for contextual results is a fantastic feature. Cortana also lives in the address bar, and is available to serve up answers to questions as you type them. You can check the weather, or stocks, or other things right from the address bar.

Another feature that Microsoft has been touting on Edge since it was first announced as Project Spartan is support for annotation of websites using a keyboard, mouse, touch, or stylus. You can markup pages, and then share them with your thoughts to anyone. It’s certainly a neat feature, and I’m sure some people will love it, but when you get to what’s missing from Edge, as I will in a moment, you have to wonder if the time spent developing this might not have been more useful somewhere else.

Edge also has built in support for a reading list, so you can mark pages that you want to check out later. Favorites are of course still available, and if you are so inclined you can enable the favorites bar to be always available, rather than tucked away into a menu.

So the new browser is faster, smarter, has new features, and is, at least in my opinion, a nice clean look. So we should all use Edge right? Well, maybe, but Edge is clearly still a work in progress.

While Edge performs well on our browser benchmarks, it can still stumble on certain pages. Twitter is the most obvious example for me, and at times Twitter can almost grind to a halt in Edge. It can really start to chew into CPU and memory depending on the sites that are left open. However I’m told that they know about Twitter and are trying to get to the bottom of it.

Another huge issue for me is the lack of extension support. As of today, Edge has no support for any extensions, although it does have Adobe Flash built in (and that can be disabled) which is unfortunately still a necessity on the web. I’m a big user of password managers and other tools, and not having them available is difficult. This, at least, is a temporary situation. Edge is going to get extension support, likely within a couple of months, and the extension model will be very similar to Google’s Chrome browser which should let developers easily add support for Edge. Extensions will also be available in the store to provide an easy way to add them in without (hopefully) breaking the security model.

But that’s not all. Edge is also missing obvious things like being able to choose where to download a file. And even downloading is not always an option. If you click on certain file links, it will automatically download to the Downloads folder (which there is no option in Edge to change at the moment) but other files, such as .mp3 files, don’t download and instead start to play. There is no Save As option in the right click menu, so if the file is something that Edge can open, it will open it, and not give you the option to save. This is pretty basic functionality that does not yet exist.

Edge also has only partial support for cloud sync between devices for history, passwords, or anything else. I have to think that this is coming later, but reviewing the product today means that this is also missing. What would be very nice is if the Reading List would sync, so you could easily add from one device for later viewing on another. Hopefully this gets some high priority after extensions.

So with all of this missing functionality that we have taken for granted, even in Internet Explorer, using Edge can sometimes feel like a step backwards. These are certainly early days for the product, and it shows its rough edges a bit more than some of the other parts of Windows 10. But, I still use Edge as my default browser in Windows 10, despite its flaws. Yes, I have to use other browsers sometimes in order to do certain tasks, but Edge has some other nice features that I have come to like.

When you start Edge, you can set it to open a home page, blank page, start page, new tabs, or previous pages. The new tabs page can also be set to offer a blank page, top sites, or top sites and suggested content. The suggested content is news, sports, and finance information from the MSN portal, presented in a grid. Although I thought this might be a bit much, I have found that I do find a lot of the content interesting, and it keeps me abreast of what is going on. There is weather, sports scores, and more. It certainly is not going to be for everyone, but I’ve found I really like having this new content always available.

I also find that Edge has much better text rendering that Google Chrome, which is my number two browser. Fonts are a lot more defined and easier to read. Here’s a screenshot of text from both browsers.

Text rendered in Google Chrome

The same text rendered in Microsoft Edge

Edge, like all of the built-in apps, is one that can scale across different device types, and the touch support is very good. Using Edge on a tablet with touch is no problem at all, even though I kind of preferred the address bar being on the bottom of the page as it was in the touch version of IE, and you can no longer go back by swiping the page to the right, instead relying on the back button.

Still, looking at Edge today shows that it is a mixed bag. Performance is good, the looks and feel of the browser is easy to get adjusted to, and the new features like built-in Cortana support can be excellent. However with the lack of extensions, and some of the missing functionality that you may have taken for granted with other browsers might make it a problem for you to use at the moment. My advice is to give it a shot, but if you can’t live without certain features then Edge will not be the browser for you until such time as it gets them. The good news is that Microsoft has promised much quicker updates with Edge, and that will be helped since it can now be updated through the Windows Store.

Inspired by the Smartphone: Action Center Arrives on the PC

Originally released on Windows Phone 8.1, Action Center is one of many features that have been inspired by the rise of the smartphones. In fact, the end result on Windows 10 is practically identical to what is available on Windows Phone 8.1.

Having all of our programs place their notifications in a single location is as useful on the desktop as it is on the smartphone. You can, at a glance, check out what has happened. Windows Phone 8.1 also introduced several configurable settings toggles, where you could easily enable airplane mode, screen rotation lock, turn off Bluetooth, or more.

Windows 10 offers this same experience, including the customizable toggles. New to Windows 10 though is the ability to add more toggles, and expand the list to display them all. It is very handy for tasks like connecting a Bluetooth speaker, since you can now just use the Connect toggle in Action Center, select the speaker, and away you go.

At this point, everyone is pretty comfortable with notification systems, so we don’t need to dig in here too deep. For the moment, notifications can either be dismissed by swiping them to the right, or selecting them will open the corresponding app. In the not too distant future, apps like Messaging will be actionable from right within Action Center which will be very welcome.

Like practically everything in Windows 10, this is fully customizable and you can even disable Action Center yourself if you find it distracting. This is one of the key points that I have noticed with the launch, is that almost every single feature they have added also contains a way to disable that feature. Compare this to the Windows 8 era, and you can see that Microsoft has certainly opened its eyes and ears to their customers.

More Smartphone features: Wi-Fi Sense, Data Usage, Storage Tracking

Windows Phone, despite its low adoption, has some other very useful functionality that Microsoft is bringing to the desktop. And honestly, it makes just as much sense here as it does on a mobile device. With Windows 10, PCs and phones are converging far more than we may have even thought possible, but I think the idea is that if an idea is good on the phone, why not see if you can adapt it for the PC too?

The first feature is Wi-Fi sense, and this one has likely gotten the most publicity. Enabling Wi-Fi sense lets Windows 10 automatically connect to hotspots, and if the hotspots want you to agree to terms, it will automatically do this and get you connected. It’s a feature I’ve had on my phone for a while now and it is very handy not to have to deal with that all the time. I’m excited for it to come to Windows 10.

The other big piece of Wi-Fi sense is that when connecting to an access point, you can optionally share the information with some of your social networks. If enabled, your outlook.com contacts, Skype contacts, and Facebook contacts can all get access to this network if you opt-in to enabling this feature. In settings, you can also select which group of contacts will get access with check boxes beside all three choices so you can enable or disable whichever ones you desire.

This is a feature that already existed in Windows Phone 8.1, but with so few devices out there it never really got the attention then. When enabled, Wi-Fi Sense shares the network information without the other person ever having to see the pre-shared key. In this sense, it can be more secure than the old way, because they do not have to be told the key, and they have no way of seeing it. If they have Windows 10 and have this feature enabled, they will just get logged into the network. They also cannot share this network with any of their contacts. This is a one time share, and any contacts which receive it can’t share it again.

Now remember, this is an opt-in feature, and it is per network. There is no “always share” option. Each time you connect to a new network, there will be a check box that is unchecked by default asking you if you want to share this.

Still, this can be an issue especially at a corporate environment where they are using pre-shared keys (likely because they lack the infrastructure for other methods) and it would be a bad thing if someone added the work network to their phone and shared it with their friends. For this reason, you can add _optout to the SSID of the wifi network to disable this completely.

Once a network is shared, it may take a couple of days for it to be accessible on contacts devices, and if you remove access, it may take a couple of days more before it goes away.

The implications of this change are that it should make it a lot easier to have friends and family get access to your Wi-Fi if that is what you want. From a security standpoint, it is a little dicey. The actual network information is encrypted during the exchange, but that doesn’t mean an enterprising person won’t gain access to the information once it’s on their computer.

You can at least use one feature without the other. If you want easier access to hotspots, enable that, and leave the Wi-Fi sharing disabled.

Windows 10 also gets what Windows Phone called Data Sense. It keeps track of all of your network activity over the last thirty days, and it displays it in a list which is per-application. It is a great tool to see how much you use per month, and if you have a rogue application using tons of bandwidth. Windows Phone allows you to set the maximum limit as well, and you can set it to not just a 30 day period. I expect this will improve over time as Windows 10 evolves.

Another pickup from Windows Phone is Storage Sense, or so it is called on that platform. On Windows 10 it is just Storage settings. Here you can easily set where documents, music, pictures, and videos are stored, and this will be very handy for devices with not a lot of storage out of the box, such as low cost tablets or notebooks. It will also give you a list of all of the things on your drive to give you an idea where your space is being used.

One feature of Storage settings which is available in the UI but greyed out at the moment is the ability to redirect Windows Store apps to another location. Once again, for low cost devices, you may have some SD storage available which you can then move your apps to. Or, maybe you have a smaller SSD and want to store those apps on a secondary disk based drive. This was originally intended to ship with Windows 10 but unfortunately they have not yet ironed all of the bugs out of it, so it is ready to go in the UI, but is currently greyed out.

Mail, Calendar, and People

In the days of Windows 7, the basic functionality of email, calendar, and contacts, were split out of Windows 7 and moved into Windows Live Essentials. The idea behind this was that by moving them out of Windows, they would be able to be updated more often. I’m not sure that ever really happened though.

Windows 8 brought new touch-first versions of all of these apps, and they could be tied to your Microsoft Account to allow mail, contacts, and calendar, to easily sync among devices. But the Windows 8 versions of the apps were very sparsely laid out, and although they worked on touch, the design and functionality was lacking. This improved, at least slightly, with Windows 8.1, but for Windows 10 Microsoft has once again overhauled these products to follow the Windows 10 design language, and all of them are Universal Windows Apps which means that they are not only updated through the store, they are also scalable and can work on small phones, all the way up to large desktop devices, with different layouts depending on what device type they are being used on.

Email is a staple of our lives now, and a quality experience is something that we have come to expect and rely on. In December 2014, Microsoft acquired Acompli, which was one of the highest ranked email clients on iOS. This acquisition was about more than just iPhone and Android though, and the design of their email client has certainly permeated into the Windows 10 mail client as well.

The basic layout is a list of accounts and folders on the left, with the current folder list in the center, and a reading pane on the right. When no email is selected, the right pane displays an image, which by default is an image of clouds. Like the mobile apps, the Windows 10 app now supports swiping the messages in the inbox to delete or flag the messages, which is a great way to deal with the mail when using touch. Swiping left deletes the message, and swiping right marks it as flagged. You can change what the swipes do in options as well.

As a basic mail client, it works fine, but there are some issues with it out of the box which may or may not get fixed over time. First, and I believe this is important for consistency in the operating system, the default action of swiping left to delete a message is the exact opposite of Action Center, where you have to swipe to the right to remove a notification. It’s a small thing, but I’ve gotten used to dismissing notifications, so you would think it would be the same action in email but it is not.

I also don’t love the giant image on the right. When you open Mail, the entire right pane has a picture of blue clouds. You can set it to whatever image you would like, but when I open the mail client, I would prefer an option to be able to display whatever message is the latest. This doesn’t need to be by default of course.

There is also no option to disable conversation view, and while many people like that, many people also prefer to have their email listed chronologically so they can find it. Update 2015-09-03: An update as of today lets you disable conversation view in settings.

One of the biggest issues for me is that there is no way to send as anything but the default email address. In Outlook.com, I can send and receive as a number of accounts, but in the Windows 10 mail app, there is no way to choose which email address to send from.

Considering Microsoft just bought Acompli in December 2014, perhaps some slack should be given considering how much works well out of the box, but as it stands now, the Mail client is just ok for light work, and is pretty easily surpassed in functionality by even Microsoft’s web based mail.

Taking a look at the Calendar app, once again we see a big departure from the Windows 8 version, which is a good thing. The new app is a very clean look, and it is easy to add new events, sort what events are seen, and which calendars are displayed. You can choose whether to start the week on Sunday or Monday, what your hours of work are, and colors for the various calendars displayed. You can choose a view of a day, week, work week, or month. It does what you would expect a calendar to do, and the layout once again can optimize itself to how much display it has to work with. However, like Mail, it’s not quite done yet. There is no way (that I have seen anyway) to create a new calendar, or share calendars from within the app. To do this, even if you are using an outlook.com calendar, you have to go to the web interface.

Moving to the People app, we see yet another redesign to a look that is a lot cleaner and easier to use. The contacts themselves have changed from square pictures to circles, consistent with the rest of Windows 10’s profile pictures which are now circles as well. It is pretty easy to add, edit, or remove a contact, and you can action the email or mapping to launch the respective apps for that.

I feel like a broken record again, but the People app is also lacking things that were available in Windows 8.1. The app no longer pulls contact info or pictures from social networks, and you can’t action the phone numbers in a contact to launch Skype. However if you go into settings, social network integration looks like it is coming, but for the moment there are no results when you try to add one.  In another inconsistency, the options for People are not found behind the gear icon like in Calendar and Mail, but behind an ellipse and settings.

You can open Calendar from Mail, and Mail from Calendar, but People has to be opened on its own. Typing in a person’s name for a new mail brings results from People, but there is no way to choose the recipient from People without starting type their name. All of it feels a bit disjointed at the moment.

The good news is that all three apps support multiple accounts from multiple sources, including Outlook.com, Exchange, Office 365, Google, iCloud, or even by manually setting them up with POP or IMAP. There is support for setting how your mail syncs, how far back to sync messages, and what notifications to display.

As a set, these three apps are likely fine for a lot of use cases, but they are clearly works in progress at the moment. Luckily all of these apps are Windows Store apps, and can be updated over time easily through that mechanism. Let’s hope they get some updates soon though.

Photos

Another app that was in desperate need of attention was Photos. The Windows 8 photos app was frankly a nightmare, and it was one of the first things I disabled on any new install. The new version is far superior to what came before, in both looks and functionality.

Once again, we have a Universal Windows App which means that it can scale and reflow to fit any display size or window. By default, it grabs pictures from your pictures folders in your user profile as well as OneDrive, and you can also toggle whether or not to show pictures from OneDrive which are not synced with your PC.

Once in the app, you can browse photos by your collection, which shows all photos, or by albums. Collection is pretty self explanatory, and just contains a list of all photos in chronological order. There is no way to sort any other way, although you can click on a month to jump to another date. The albums view is a lot different though, and the system will automatically create albums based on time and location in your photos, and then present them to you. You can change what photos are in the album if you want to.

The Photos app does some nice things like automatically not displaying duplicate photos, and it can clean up images and remove red-eye in a non-destructive manner. If you don’t like the auto-enhance, it can be turned off.

The Photos app is now the default app for viewing pictures, and it supports most photo and video file types, and they recently added GIF support which is one format that was left out of the previous photos app in Windows 8.

It is a good improvement over the Windows 8 version, and being a Universal Windows App means it supports high DPI and multiple display sizes. I’d like to be able to create my own albums, and that is not possible yet. The change is going to be pretty drastic for those coming from Windows 7 though, and people tend to not like change.

Maps

I’d be curious to see how many people use mapping in an app on the desktop compared to mobile systems. I tend to gravitate to the web on my desktop when I need mapping capabilities. But with Windows 10 going to be deployed on everything from phones to Xbox, having mapping as an app is obviously important.

Microsoft leverages HERE for their mapping technology, and while Nokia recently sold the HERE divisionto a group of automotive companies, the licensing arrangement is likely part of that transfer. Mapping is a very personal experience though, and some people may love HERE maps while others can’t use them because they are missing local information. It’s an incredibly difficult industry to get into and keep up to date. Google is the obvious competitor here, and they have spent a lot of money and time to build up their mapping to the point it is now. HERE has some street view, but none in my area. One thing HERE has been working on though is interior views of places like malls. I’ve used this before on the phone and it is pretty handy although it appears to be missing from the data available right now on Windows 10.

The mapping app itself is fairly well sorted out, and it can easily do directions or searches as you would expect. The views themselves can be either from straight overhead, or you can get a bird’s eye view as well and tilt and pan the camera. On a standard 2D map this can give you a nice sense of direction, but in some locations, the maps have 3D views as well which is a very nice effect. 3D views are only available in select areas, but they are a great way to find your way around when you can use them.

Another great feature of Maps which is built right into Windows 10 is the ability to download and manage offline maps. You can pick your area and have the maps ready to go without having to wait for the lag of your internet connection. It appears to only work with the road maps though and not aerial views which makes sense when you think about how much data you would need to download for aerial views of anywhere larger than a city.

The performance of maps on the devices I have tested it on is very good. Clearly this is all being offloaded to the GPU because the rendering is fast, and rotations and panning is very smooth. Once you get into the 3D maps though it can tax the system quite a bit. I still found performance good even on integrated graphics, but on laptops it is going to create some heat to get rid of since the GPU can draw a lot of power, even on integrated devices.

Maps are good on the desktop, but you can see that this app is one that will be more important on smaller devices running Windows 10, since you’ll be able to have your offline maps available for use on the go.

Messaging

When Windows 10 was shown off in January, one of the apps that was shown was a new messaging app. Windows 8 included both a touch based Skype app, and the traditional full desktop app, but the touch version never seemed to offer as consistent of an experience as the desktop version. For Windows 10, it would be replaced with new standalone apps for messaging, phone, and video.

Windows 10 is now here, but delays in the messaging apps mean that for the moment, people who want to use Microsoft’s messaging service need to use the full desktop version of Skype, since the touch version has been removed from the store for all users except those on Windows RT.

Once the new messaging apps are released, I will check them out and see how well they work. Being based on Skype, the backend is at least well known and Skype itself has improved a lot as a messaging app over the last couple of years.

Xbox on the PC

Gaming on Windows has been one of its biggest strengths, and technologies like DirectX have solidified Windows as the platform for PC gaming. Microsoft has also had good brand with the Xbox, but overall the experiences have been kept separate on the two platforms. Instead Microsoft has taken some half-hearted attempts to introduce their own gaming brand on the PC with things like Games for Windows Live. None have succeeded.

Will the new Xbox app change this? Maybe. It ties into their already strong gaming brand, and offers some great functionality out of the box as well.

Rather than reinvent the wheel, the Xbox app on Windows 10 offers access to the Xbox services, such as your avatar, chat, activities, and more. People who have not ever used an Xbox before will be prompted to create a gamertag, which is your name across all of the Xbox ecosystem. In a world where many services want you to use your real name for everything, it’s refreshing that you can still be anonymous in the world of Xbox.

Xbox also ties into the Windows Store, giving you a single place to access all of your Windows games. You can also add other games into the My Games section, and doing this brings up a list of almost all of the executable files on your system. Find the one you want, select it, and add. Then you can launch the game right from the Xbox app. There’s a couple of pretty big oversights here though. None of your installed Steam games appear in the Xbox app. There is no way to browse the file system when adding games either. It’s a bit surprising this is not here now, but you can, for instance, add Steam itself if you want, and then go to your library. Hopefully this will be added in the future. This does not appear to be an issue for Origin though, since on my desktop it discovered Dragon Age Inquisition automatically.

It’s all well and good to add these features to the desktop, since you can now check achievements and chat with your gamer friends even when you’re not at the Xbox. This was of course also possible in the Xbox Smartglass app on Windows 8.1, so much if this is more evolution than revolution.

What is new are two new features that are in their infancy, but already show a lot of promise.

Game DVR

The first is Game DVR. For those that have used an Xbox One, this is a feature that they will already be familiar with, but now it is on the PC. This lets you do game recordings which is a handy thing to have built into the OS. Just like the Xbox, you can set it to be always recording too, with options to keep the last fifteen seconds to ten minutes of gameplay in a buffer, allowing you to go back and get a clip if you do something truly wonderful that you want to save.

The Game DVR also works on pretty much any app, and is not restricted to games. When you bring up the Game Bar in an app other than a known game, it will just ask if this is a game. Say yes, and you can record away. It doesn’t work in all apps, but things like the Edge browser can be recorded if you want to do a tutorial. Skype, as an example, just gives a message saying that this app cannot be recorded.

The Game Bar, which can be opened with Win + G

Unfortunately you also can’t record fullscreen games. This is a pretty big limitation, and the only way to get around this is to set the game to a windowed mode. If you want to record a fullscreen game, you’ll have to leverage something like NVIDIA’s Shadowplay functionality instead. I’m going to try and get clarification on why this is the case, but it could be as simple as Microsoft has full access to the WDM and this was an easier solution for them.

Game DVR also leverages hardware encoding for the recording feature, so it will not be available to all customers. A Microsoft spokesperson let us know the following:

Game bar is available on all Windows 10 PCs. To record game clips, your hardware must support hardware based H.264 encoding and you need one of these video cards:

• AMD: AMD Radeon™ HD 7000 series, HD 7000M series, HD 8000 series, HD 8000M series, R9 series and R7 series. AMD A-series APUs based on the Graphics Core Next architecture.
• NVIDIA: GeForce 600 series or later, GeForce 800M series or later, Quadro Kxxx series or later.
• Intel: Intel HD graphics 4000 or later, Intel Iris Graphics 5100 or later.

Game DVR leverages Intel’s QuickSync, AMD’s VICE, or NVIDIA’s NVENC depending on the hardware in your system. The support is fairly broad, but there will certainly be systems out there without the required hardware.

Xbox One Game Streaming

The other great feature coming to the Xbox app is the ability to stream games from an Xbox One to the PC. Now, many PC gamers will scoff at this, because the Xbox One has hardware far less capable than a modern gaming PC. This is true of course, but the Xbox One has far more GPU available than the majority of computers sold today.

Gaming PCs have been selling well lately, but they are still the minority market in the PC space. Being able to stream Xbox games to your computer will allow you to play them anywhere as long as you are on the same LAN as the Xbox itself. All you have to do is plug an Xbox One controller into the device and you have yourself a portable gaming machine which can be something as low powered as a tablet, yet you can play games like Forza 5. The Xbox is generally hooked to the main TV in a household, and it may not always be available too. There are plenty of use cases for streaming this direction.

You can set the quality levels to a couple of levels depending on your network connection. Right now, there are Low, Medium, High, and just available as of this week is Very High, which offers 1080p 60fps streaming. I’ve found that on High the network requirements are pretty low – on the order of 5 to 7 Mbps – but the latency is excellent and the overall quality is quite good. Very High will help somewhat with the graphics which is not going to look quite as good as the Xbox directly connected to a television due to the encoding. Very High bumps the quality up again, and it is still not quite as good as directly connected but it is very close especially on the smaller display of a typical PC versus a large television. Bandwidth on Very High when I was streaming Forza Motorsport 5 was around the 12-15 Mbps mark at maximum, which should be achievable on most wireless networks if the congestion is not too high. You can also easily switch the stream quality using a button in the top right corner while streaming, so if you are starting to get drop outs you can just lower the quality a bit and see if it improves. I had no issues at all but my Xbox One is wired to Gigabit and there are not a lot of other wireless networks around my home.

As for decoding, the Xbox game streaming is done over H.264, so any device which can decode H.264 (which is pretty much everything now) is going to have no issues being a receiver for this. I’ve not been able to find a device which doesn’t support this.

You can also remotely turn on the Xbox if it is sleeping (not powered right off) although I’ve not had much luck with this on my limited testing.

For those that want to stream from the PC to the Xbox, Microsoft has not ruled this out and are working on adding keyboard and mouse support to the Xbox One, which would be required for PC gaming. This could open up the possibility of even better graphics on the TV, but we’ll have to see how the streaming impacts this when (and if) this does make it to the system.

My only real issue with game streaming is that it completely takes over the Xbox One. Microsoft debuted the Xbox one with a lot of media functionality (some would say too much media, and not enough gaming, but that’s a discussion for another day) and all of that is unavailable on the Xbox One when game streaming is in use. This includes the TV pass-through which is available on the Xbox One. It kind of makes this a feature that is pretty much unusable for people that have connected the Xbox One as the center of the TV Hub.

DirectX 12 & WDDM 2.0: Reworking the Windows Graphics Stack

At a low-level technical perspective, it’s perhaps a bit of a generalization though none the less true that Windows at the kernel is relatively stable and feature complete these days. After the massive reworking for Windows Vista (6.0), Windows finally reached a point where the kernel and other low-level components of the OS supported the necessary features and sported the required stability to drive Windows for generations to come. As a result Microsoft never significantly tampered with the Windows kernel through Windows 7 (6.1) and Windows 8 (6.2/6.3) – making small feature additions where it made sense to – and even the kernel version number of Windows 10 (10.0) is largely arbitrary, with its roots clearly in 6.x.

Which is not to say that Microsoft hasn’t made low-level changes, only that those changes have been more deliberate and driven by specific needs. Case in point (and getting to the subject matter of this section) is DirectX 12 and its underlying driver structure, the Windows Display Driver Model. Even after the release of Windows Vista and its massive overhaul of the graphics stack, Microsoft has continued modifying the stack over successive generations as GPUs have become more flexible and more capable. After a series of smaller changes in Windows 7 and Windows 8, for Windows 10 Microsoft has gone back to make what are the most fundamental changes to the graphics stack since Windows Vista over 8 years ago.

DirectX 12

Microsoft’s changes ultimately reach out and touch several aspects of the OS, but the bulk of these changes are being put in place to support DirectX 12, the next generation of Microsoft’s game & multimedia API. We have covered DirectX 12 in a great amount of detail over the past year, so for deeper coverage we’ll reference the appropriate articles, but in summary here is what DirectX 12 brings to the table and why it is a big deal.

Excerpt from Microsoft Announces DirectX 12

Why are we seeing so much interest in low level graphics programming on the PC? The short answer is performance, and more specifically what can be gained from returning to it.

Something worth pointing out right away is that low level programming is not new or even all that uncommon. Most high performance console games are written in such a manner, thanks to the fact that consoles are fixed platforms and therefore easily allow this style of programming to be used. By working with hardware at such a low level programmers are able to tease out a great deal of performance of this hardware, which is why console games look and perform as well as they do given the consoles’ underpowered specifications relative to the PC hardware from which they’re derived.

However with PCs the same cannot be said. PCs, being a flexible platform, have long worked off of high level APIs such as Direct3D 11 and OpenGL. Through the powerful abstraction provided by these high level APIs, PCs have been able to support a wide variety of hardware and over a much longer span of time. With low level PC graphics programming having essentially died with DOS and vendor specific APIs, PCs have traded some performance for the convenience and flexibility that abstraction offers.

The nature of that performance tradeoff has shifted over the years though, requiring that it be reevaluated. As we’ve covered in great detail in our look at AMD’s Mantle, these tradeoffs were established at a time when CPUs and GPUs were growing in performance by leaps and bounds year after year. But in the last decade or so that has changed – CPUs are no longer rapidly increasing in performance, especially in the case of single-threaded performance. CPU clockspeeds have reached a point where higher clockspeeds are increasingly power-expensive, and the “low hanging fruit” for improving CPU IPC has long been exhausted. Meanwhile GPUs have roughly continued their incredible pace of growth, owing to the embarrassingly parallel nature of graphics rendering.

The result is that when looking at single threaded CPU performance, GPUs have greatly outstripped CPU performance growth. This in and of itself isn’t necessarily a problem, but it does present a problem when coupled with the high level APIs used for PC graphics. The bulk of the work these APIs do in preparing data for GPUs is single threaded by its very nature, causing the slowdown in CPU performance increases to create a bottleneck. As a result of this gap and its ever-increasing nature, the potential for bottlenecking has similarly increased; the price of abstraction is the CPU performance required to provide it.

3DMark 2011 CPU Time: Direct3D 11 vs. Direct3D 12

Low level programming in contrast is more resistant against this type of bottlenecking. There is still the need for a “master” thread and hence the possibility of bottlenecking on that master, but low level programming styles have no need for a CPU-intensive API and runtime to prepare data for GPUs. This makes it much easier to farm out work to multiple CPU cores, protecting against this bottlenecking. To use consoles as an example once again, this is why they are capable of so much with such a (relatively) weak CPU, as they’re better able to utilize their multiple CPU cores than a high level programmed PC can.

The end result of this situation is that it has become time to seriously reevaluate the place of low level graphics programming in the PC space. Game developers and GPU vendors alike want better performance. Meanwhile, though it’s a bit cynical, there’s a very real threat posed by the latest crop of consoles, putting PC gaming in a tight spot where it needs to adapt to keep pace with the consoles. PCs still hold a massive lead in single-threaded CPU performance, but given the limits we’ve discussed earlier, too much bottlenecking can lead to the PC being the slower platform despite the significant hardware advantage. A PC platform that can process fewer draw calls than a $400 game console is a poor outcome for the industry as a whole.

DirectX 12 as a result is the next-generation API that will be providing the basis for graphics going forward in Windows 10. Along with enabling critical improvements in CPU efficiency and scalability in multi-threading, the latest version of Windows’ major graphics API also introduces some other features that further the state of computer graphics. This includes a number of disparate but otherwise “neat” graphics tricks like asynchronous shading to better utilize GPU resources by processing certain classes of rendering tasks in parallel, and explicit multi-adapter functionality that allows the integrated GPUs found on most gaming platforms to be utilized in a meaningful way to contribute to the rendering process, rather than sitting idle as is now the case.

Meanwhile DirectX 12 also introduces some new graphics features that are being rolled out under the feature level 12_0 and 12_1 specifications. These include conservative rasterization for better calculation of pixel coverage, raster order views for better control over rendering order, and even freer resource binding to expand the amount of resources devs can use and how they organize them. And due to the nature of feature levels, most of these benefits are also being exposed in one form or another to the existing DirectX 11 API through DirectX 11.3, though certainly the bulk of their use will be under DirectX 12.

The first commercial DirectX 12 games are expected at the end of this year, with more to follow in 2016. Like so many other elements of Windows 10, ideally Microsoft would like to quickly push development towards this new API, using the free upgrade to quickly build up an established base. With DirectX 11 having taken years to really achieve traction due to the stubborn perseverance of Windows XP, there is a good deal of hope that with the free upgrade there will not be a repeat performance with respect to DirectX 12.

WDDM 2.0

Meanwhile below the API layer, quite a bit of work has gone into Windows at the driver level in order to enable the functionality of DirectX 12. While the full list of these changes are beyond the scope of a simple OS review, perhaps the most important point to take away is that due to these changes, Windows 10 is the biggest overhaul of the Windows graphics stack since WDDM 1.0 in Windows Vista. A big part of this is changes to how virtual memory works, which though largely abstracted from both the user and the developer, is crucial to the performance improvements unlocked by DirectX 12.

However because of these changes, there is a clear division in capabilities between Windows 10 and earlier version of Windows, and for that matter in the drivers for the two OSes. While Windows Vista/7/8 graphics drivers were distributed using a unified WDDM 1.x driver, Windows 10 graphics drivers are being distributed separately as their own WDDM 2.0 build. So much of WDDM 2.0 will be hidden from end users, but this will be one area where though minor, users will notice that something is different.

Memory optimizations and drivers aside, WDDM 2.0 also gave Microsoft the chance to fix some niggling issues in how the graphics stack worked. Quite a bit of effort has been put into multi-display cloning, for example – a feature that never worked quite as well as it should have – with the new WDDM 2.0 stack changing how scaling was being handled so that it’s more useful, more consistent, and works with multiple GPUs. These enhancements are also being deployed to Miracast support, and further improvements are being unlocked there such as support for dynamic resolutions and framerates.

WDDM 2.0 improvements are also an element in enabling Microsoft’s GameDVR feature, which sees game footage recording become an OS-level feature. And for better or worse, WDDM 2.0 also enables some new DRM functionality, which is being deployed as a condition of getting 4K (and above) protected content licensed for use on Windows.

Touch-Enabled Office Apps Arrive with Windows 10

When Windows 8 launched, Microsoft had built a touch-first version of their operating system, but they had not yet completed their touch-enabled version of their most popular productivity suite. In fact, in the almost three years between Windows 8 and Windows 10, Microsoft released Office on iOS first, and then Android, leaving their own platform as the only one without a touch-enabled version of Office. Finally, with Windows 10, Office Mobile is here.

These are, like practically all pieces of Windows 10, Windows Universal Apps, and therefore they are made to scale all the way from a phone to a large display desktop. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote are all available. The experience is very similar to how it looks on the other platforms, and Microsoft has done a nice job keeping the look and feel consistent across the different mobile operating systems.

I think most people are familiar with the Office trio of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, and perhaps not quite as familiar with OneNote, but the mobile apps are surprisingly competent versions, and can likely easily replace the full Office suite for a lot of people. If you need some of the extra functionality like conditional formatting in Excel, or the ability to open password protected documents, you will need to go with the full version of Office, at least for now.

In pretty typical Microsoft fashion, the apps have been created to allow basic file reading, creation, and editing for free, but if you want to access all of the features you need to purchase an Office 365 subscription. There is a big caveat here though. This only applies to devices under 10.1 inches in screen diameter. Anything larger than this requires a subscription to gain access to edit, which is a pretty big concession. According to Microsoft, they want to keep the free capabilities available for devices that are mostly used with touch, and the Office team feels this cut-off is 10.1 inches. Amazingly, the same company also sells a consumer version of their tablet line, the Surface 3, which is a 10.8 inch device and therefore over the cut-off. They do sell it with a one year subscription, but it’s a rather odd way to market the new Office Mobile apps.

There is also a new piece to the Office puzzle, which is called Sway. Luckily, like OneNote, Sway is free for all users. So what is Sway? It is an interactive storytelling app, and it lets you easily add some text and media, and it will create a sway for you. It’s very much a cloud based app, and you can share links to your sway to view or edit. Think of it like a simpler version of PowerPoint. Here is a sway as an example of what it can do.

OneNote is of course back, and this is Microsoft’s app which lets you do a lot more than just take notes. The touch version is changed from Windows 8, and it now fits in with the theme of the other Office Mobile apps. Fans of the Windows 8 version’s radial menu will be disappointed though since that has gotten the axe.

I think the capabilities of these apps are going to improve over time, but it is unlikely they will ever offer the full functionality of the desktop version of Office. They are targeted towards a different set of needs. It was certainly one of the key missing pieces of the Windows 8 era, so it is great that they have made their debut with Windows 10. Only OneNote is installed out of the box, and the other apps can be found in the store.

OneDrive

OneDrive is Microsoft’s cloud storage for consumers, and it of course is built into Windows 10. For free, it comes with 15 GB of storage, and there are a couple of paid tiers to increase that storage. If you purchase Office 365, as a bonus you get unlimited OneDrive storage (right now it just shows 10 TB but it's increasing over time) so if you do need space in the cloud consider that.

OneDrive has changed dramatically from the Windows 8.1 implementation, and not necessarily for the better. In Windows 8.1, going through the Windows Explorer view you could see all of your files in OneDrive whether they were synced to your PC or not. Opening a file which was not on your PC would initiate a download of it, and then the file would open and stay synced on your computer. If you wanted to free up some space, you could just right click a file or folder and choose “Make available online only” and it would remove the local copy.

OneDrive in Windows 8.1 showing "Online-Only" Placeholders

This was an incredibly simple way to access a huge amount of online storage without having to have it copied to your PC first. However, for Windows 10, that feature is gone, and we have a reversion to the Windows 7 style of sync client.

In Windows 10, OneDrive is installed by default, and out of the box it does not sync any files or folders from OneDrive. If you don’t interact with it, you will get a pop-up asking you what files or folders you want to sync on this PC. You can drill down to subfolders just like in Windows 7 and just keep those synced, but compared to Windows 8.1 this is a major downgrade. Once you get used to being able to see all of your folders, it makes it really easy to save files and access them later. According to Microsoft, this was too complicated for end users though, and people would see the placeholder files for their online data and assume it was on their computer. Then they would go somewhere with no internet access, and they would have no access to their data which they thought was on their computer. I can kind of get that argument, but regardless the solution we have in Windows 10 is a huge step back in terms of functionality.

OneDrive Sync Client in Windows 10

With the huge amount of storage you can get in OneDrive now, and the relatively small amount of local storage available on SSDs, the placeholder system in Windows 8.1 was really nice.

In the Windows 10 sync client, you get all of the options you would expect. You can set where your OneDrive folder is stored on your PC, choose which folders to sync, and enable things like automatically copy photos to OneDrive when a camera is connected.

There are also a couple of other features which have come to OneDrive lately. You can now (finally) sync folders that other people have shared with you, although the method to do so and the end result is kind of complicated. In OneDrive on the web, you can now “Add this folder to your OneDrive” which will add the folder within your own OneDrive, and there the files will be synced as you want based on your settings. It’s a kind of clunky solution, and I’m not sure why they didn’t just add a “Shared” folder in the OneDrive shell. Also, I’m not sure if this will cut into your own storage, and since this feature is rolling out to users now, I don’t have access yet to test it.

You can also set OneDrive to let you "Fetch" files off of your computer through the OneDrive web client. This feature is one that was part of older Microsoft tools, and those tools have been phased out in favor of SkyDrive/OneDrive, and Microsoft is bringing their feature sets to OneDrive.

With that out of the way, Windows 10 does have some functionality for OneDrive which did not exist on Windows 8.1, and it is very handy. From within the Windows Explorer shell, you can now share a file directly from OneDrive by simply right clicking the file and choosing “Share a OneDrive link”. This was only available on the web before, and being able to create a web link for a file from within Windows Explorer is much more convenient.

It seems like I’ve been harsh on OneDrive, and I have, because Microsoft offers some of the most competitive priced online storage, and then they make it difficult to use. The Windows 8.1 solution was much nicer for many people, but perhaps with the changes to allow unlimited storage for Office 365, the placeholders would themselves take up too much space and be too much work to sync. Regardless, I’m hoping this gets improved over time.

Why Do I Need a Microsoft Account?

In all versions of Windows up to and including Windows 7, you would create a local account on the computer with a username and password, and log in. Business customers could also have an Active Directory domain, which would allow workers to log in with one set of credentials on any approved domain joined workstation.

Windows 8 introduced the construct of logging into Windows with a Microsoft Account. Logging in with your online profile for Microsoft would then also log you into all of the online services, such as OneDrive for cloud storage, Skype for messaging, and email through outlook.com or Hotmail. Other services, such as weather, could sync your favorites across devices. It also allowed you to optionally sync your computer layout across devices, so your desktop wallpaper, theme, and even your Start Screen layout could all by synchronized across any Windows device you logged into. Also, any password changes would be synchronized as well.

There is certainly people who do not want this though, and Windows 8 made it very difficult to use the Microsoft services if you were not logged in with a Microsoft Account (MSA). During initial setup, the default prompt is to set up the computer with a MSA and although you could bypass this step and create a local account, it was somewhat non-obvious.

For Windows 10, Microsoft has backed off on this somewhat. During setup, the local account option is still not the default, but it is more obvious that you can bypass the MSA login. Most of the built in apps also support login individually rather than at the system level, which gives you the option to log into those services individually if you want to use them, or you can use multiple accounts for things like Xbox in case you have a different profile for that.

Adding a user defaults to MSA but you can choose the link at the bottom to switch to Local Accounts

I think they have found a much better balance with Windows 10 in this regard. Local accounts can now be used without really forcing you to use a MSA for everything. You will lose some features, such as Cortana, if you don’t use a MSA, so it’s not 100% the same but for the people who don’t want to log in with a MSA this is maybe just the way they want it.

So do you need a MSA to use Windows 10? If you want the best and easiest experience, then yes you should use a MSA for Windows 10. You will get the features that we have come to expect from modern systems such as the ability to sync passwords, themes, and more. Hopefully Microsoft will bring back the ability to sync the Start Menu layout like it had in Windows 8 as well, at least as an optional toggle. Windows 10 leverages cloud services for a lot of the functionality, and in order to use these services you have to be logged in. It’s certainly not anything most people are not accustomed to with the rise of smartphones, but there are certainly going to be desktop users who prefer to not log in with their online profile, and for those people they should find the experience a lot better than Windows 8.

Windows Hello and Passport

Welcome to the future. Windows 10 includes a new feature called Hello, which may change the way we log into our computers forever. Maybe that is a bit dramatic, but Windows Hello is a new framework which allows biometric logon to Windows, and it can include facial recognition, fingerprints, or even iris scanning technologies to authenticate you.

Now let’s take a step back. Windows has of course supported this in the past, and laptops have come with fingerprint readers for years. Much of that was through third party support, but you could easily set up Windows 8 to log in with a fingerprint. So this is not all new, but the new framework may be one of the biggest changes to come yet.

Windows Hello is meant to be a replacement for the traditional password logon. No one really likes passwords, but it is what we have, and therefore it is what we use. Maybe, just maybe, with Windows Hello we can start to move away from passwords. But, we are a long way from there yet. Let’s dig into Hello.

As I mentioned, laptops have come with fingerprint readers for years, and Windows 8 had native support for this (Windows 7 may have as well but I’ve not used a laptop with a reader on Windows 7) and you could pretty easily set it to log in. Windows Hello takes this to the next level with more options for login. At launch, there is support for fingerprints, iris scanning, or facial recognition.

In order to allow facial recognition but not easily be fooled by photos or other objects, Windows Hello requires an infrared camera. Right now, the only supported model is the Intel Real Sense 3D camera system, which was something that was shown off quite a bit at CES earlier in 2015. At the time, I wondered what the point of these 3D cameras were other than for some interesting demos, but clearly the companies were aware of this upcoming framework from Microsoft.

Microsoft has had some experience with this in the past. Kinect, which is an add-on for the Xbox, also allows facial recognition in order to log you in to it. I have to admit that my own experience with the Kinect for this function was so frustrating that I almost cheered the day they added the ability to automatically log into the Xbox One without the Kinect. So I was a bit skeptical about Windows Hello. One of the biggest issues I had on the Xbox One is that it would constantly think my eight year old son was me, and though people always say we look alike, I would think that the thirty extra years of age would make it somewhat obvious that we are not the same person.

I’ve been able to test out Windows Hello with the Intel Real Sense 3D camera dev kit, and I have to say the entire experience is almost perfect. It was incredibly easy to set up, and once configured, the entire process takes only around a second from the time it sees me to the time it logs me in. It seems much more accurate than Kinect, and part of that could easily be the distances it is used at versus the Kinect which often has to read my face from eight or ten feet away. But time after time, it quickly recognized me and logged me in, and once you experience it moving back to typing in a password is going to be a challenge.

I also tried to have it log in when my son was sitting in front of the PC, but he was not recognized, which is exactly how you want it to work. That's a pretty small sample size, but it's already better than Kinect was for me. The Australian had the resources to do a small test as well, but they were able to gather up six sets of idential twins. In none of the cases was the other twin able to unlock the device, so clearly there has been a lot of work to ensure that only the correct person unlocks the machine.

There are some extra security features too you can set up for Windows Hello. You can set it to not automatically unlock the screen if it sees you, which could be helpful in a corporate environment where you are near your computer but not at it, and you can also set it to have you turn your head from side to side before it will unlock, which should help with a more accurate unlock.

This is one of those features where once you first see and use it firsthand, it is almost a must have. I’m not sure if this will drive adoption of Windows 10 on its own, but I would certainly see it driving higher adoption for devices which include it versus those that do not. Hopefully we start to see this incorporated into desktop monitors as well.

Passport

Windows Hello is login, so what is Passport then? Passport is the next step. Windows Hello helps you log into your computer, and Passport is a service to help you log into everything else. This is another framework which can be leveraged in order to provide secure login to services without having to give them a password. There have been some pretty big cracks of online password databases in the last while, and any work to move to a new system which doesn’t require you to have a password at every location is something that will hopefully gain traction.

I think the most confusing aspect of Passport is its name. Passport was at one time the name of your Microsoft login, which was eventually named your Windows Live account, and now your Microsoft Account. It is also used in some other products like the Passport Authentication Protocol for WinHTTP. Confusing as it may be named, how it works is actually fairly simple.

Rather than authenticating with a username and password to a service or website, Passport will instead use a public/private key pair. The private key is stored in the machine and can be protected by the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) if it is present. Services or websites will get a copy of the public key. When a request to authenticate is made, the request is signed by the private key, which can then be opened by the public key.

But before all of this happens, Windows will prompt you to ensure you are in control of your device, using a PIN or Windows Hello. That way, if you leave your computer unlocked, people passing by can’t get access to your bank account using Passport.

None of this security technology is new, and that’s a good thing in the security world. Public/Private key pairs are what already powers all HTTPS traffic on the internet now.

The beauty of using a public key instead of a password is in the event the service is compromised. Attackers no longer gain access to a username and password which may or may not be the same one used by that person on many websites and services. Instead they get a public key, which can only be used to verify requests which come from the corresponding private key. Public keys are called that because they can and are made public for that single purpose.

Both of these technologies are a big step forward for the computer industry. We have already seen how much biometrics can help when looking at devices like the iPhone. For any inherent insecurity of using a fingerprint reader, the actual security is much higher than people using a four digit pin, or worse yet, nothing at all. Technologies like Windows Hello and Passport can be the solution to better security and ease of use. Hopefully both will gain traction with the ramp up of Windows 10.

Windows 10 Privacy

There has been an enormous amount of talk lately about Windows 10’s privacy settings, and what this means for people who use Windows 10. Yes, Windows 10 does do more with your data than any previous version of Windows, but that is not always a bad thing.

Many of the services which are designed to help you are going to require access to your information in order to function. Cortana can’t let you know about an upcoming event if it doesn’t have access to your calendar. The state of the world in 2015 is that in order for these types of services to work, you have to let them have access to your information. Cortana, as an example, does not live in a vacuum, and these same types of features are certainly prevalent on other operating systems too. Google Now is a great example of a service which people have come to really appreciate, and the very things they appreciate are based on the fact that it has a lot of access to your personal information.

Any person that is concerned about what Microsoft is collecting and how they are using it should really start by reading their Privacy Statement and getting an understanding about what is collected and what it is used for. Some of this is obvious, like Microsoft needs to provide access to your information if requested by a court order. Microsoft is not above the law. Some of it is not as obvious though, like what is your advertising ID.

Windows 10 is a free upgrade, but regardless of Windows 10 many of the services which are associated with it are free as well, such as outlook.com. Microsoft is paying for these services with advertising much like many other web services. In order to provide you with more relevant ads, you have an advertising ID associated with your account. Some people may not like this, and the privacy settings to turn this off can be found in Settings under the Privacy header. There are also more settings within Edge which let you enable Do Not Track requests and more.

Edge Privacy Settings

Search Privacy Settings

A lot of the discussion about privacy is how so much of this is on be default, and that is certainly true. If you choose Express Settings during setup, a lot of this is enabled. You can also choose Custom and choose what you want turned on during setup. Other services like Cortana are Opt-In, and will prompt you for consent the first time you try to access it. If you don’t want Cortana to access your information, please turn Cortana off.

For people that would like to read more about the individual features of Windows 10 and their privacy concerns, Microsoft has a Windows 10 Privacy FAQ page which you can take a look at. This goes over all of the features, what they do, and how you can turn them off. I really encourage users that are concerned to read this over.

Let’s be honest here for a minute though. The privacy concerns are certainly not overblown, but for most people, they will make the trade-off of less privacy if it means an improved experience. The textbook example here is advertising, where in order to deliver relevant ads to the user (or rather not serve them useless ads) the ad service must be able to learn something about the user and their preferences. Microsoft is certainly not the first company to do this, and Windows 10 is not even the first version of Windows where this is an issue. Many of these same concerns could be had with Windows 8 as well. But I think services like Cortana that are so proactive can touch a nerve with the privacy conscious and that is 100% fine. If you are concerned, the best thing to do is to read the privacy statement and adjust your settings accordingly.

Windows 10 Editions

Branding Windows has been somewhat hit and miss over the last couple of generations. Microsoft took the entire exercise a bit too far over the Windows Vista and Windows 7 period, with a lot of different versions that had different features available. With Windows 8, they moved to just a couple of different versions which simplified the selection. Windows 8 Core was the one most people needed, and Pro offered a few more features that most home users would not need, such as the ability to join a domain, or use Remote Desktop. There was also an edition for volume license customers called Enterprise, and it contained every feature.

Windows 10 continues down this path, but rebrands the home version Home again. That makes a lot of sense since the “core” branding on Windows 8 was kind of silly.

Once again, there are two basic versions which you can purchase. Windows 10 Home, and Windows 10 Pro are both going to be offered in retail sales, and once again there is a volume license version called Enterprise, and another carryover from is a special version of Enterprise for education, called, you guessed it, Education.

Education and Enterprise are almost identical, with only a couple of differences. But most of us are going to be using Windows 10 Home or Pro.

As before, Windows 10 Home is a subset of Pro, with Pro offering features that are aimed more towards business users. The one big exception is Bitlocker support, which is Microsoft’s drive encryption software. Many people were hoping to see this come to the Home version for this round, but alas, that is not the case.

All versions except Home also support a new Windows Update for Business service, which is a method for companies to deploy and manage updates. Windows Server Update Services is the existing method for this, and that also still exists for customers who want to keep that level of control.

Speaking of updates, Windows 10 no longer offers a way to disable Windows Updates in the settings page. Pro will let you defer feature updates, but not security updates, and Enterprise versions will offer a long term servicing branch option, but the goal here is to keep Windows up to date going forward.

Windows as a Service

Windows as a Service is the new theme from Microsoft. With every major release of Windows, there are always people who get left on the old version which eventually gets out of date. In the meantime, Microsoft has to create software and security updates for the people stuck on the older versions. The same could happen with Service Packs too, where there are going to be people that never update.

This has certainly put Windows at a disadvantage for developers. Microsoft is constantly updating their APIs and frameworks to add new features for developers to take advantage of, but with people being on such varied versions of the operating system, it is very difficult to target the latest APIs and features since there will always be a large group of people which cannot use these features.

The idea behind Windows as a Service is that as soon as you upgrade to Windows 10, your system will automatically be kept up to date with new features and of course security updates. This should improve the experience over time, and in fact in the couple of weeks since release we have already seen some new features added to the operating system which were not ready for July 29^th.

It’s a new model, and some people may be apprehensive about losing some control over their updates. It’s a valid argument too, since as recently as August of last year, there was some Windows Updates rolled out which caused a lot of issues for a lot of people. Microsoft is going to have to earn their user’s trust in order for this model to work.

Windows 10 could very well be the last version of Windows ever released. There is nothing on the horizon yet for a Windows 11, but we shall see how this new Windows as a Service model works out over the next couple of years.

Windows Update Changes

I’ve already mentioned that Windows Update is no longer able to be disabled or deferred at all on Windows 10 Home, and only feature updates can be delayed on Pro. This is a pretty big change over Windows in the past, which offered plenty of options in regards to updates, including the ability to disable them completely.

The one exception to this rule is if your computer is on a metered connection. Wi-Fi and cellular network connections can be set to be metered connections which will limit background data usage on those networks. Ethernet connections cannot be set to be metered at this time.

But Windows Update has also changed in its delivery mechanism. Windows 10 now includes the ability to obtain updates from devices that have already downloaded them. This includes devices on the internet as well by default on all versions except Enterprise and Education. What this means is that if your LAN has several devices, only the first has to get the updates from the internet, and all other devices on the LAN can get them from the first device, which should not only noticeably increase the download speed, but also save a lot of bandwidth as well in the event that you are on a capped network. This mechanism can also be used for Windows Store apps.

The computer downloads the updates and then keeps them in a cache for a short amount of time, and the downloads are subject to the same security measures as Windows Update would be meaning the updates should be signed which should prevent someone seeding bad updates. If you want to stop your computer from uploading data, be sure to set this to LAN only in the advanced options of Windows Update.

These changes are likely the biggest changes to Windows 10 overall as a platform. Disabling security updates is generally not a good idea anyway, but Microsoft is going to have to ensure that they deliver solid updates. I think the Windows as a Service idea has a lot of upsides, but a couple of bad updates will sour people for good, so it is pretty important that their testing is solid. They also need to be careful not too deliver too many updates in too short a time, and force a lot of reboots. Right now, it seems to be about one per week, and that is too often. We've gotten used to Patch Tuesday once per month and accelerating that right after launch is likely accepatble but it is a bit much to ask people to have to deal with this many updates for a long period.

It is also somewhat surprising that after the Windows 10 testing through the Insider Program that the updates that have come so far have been very non-descript. I don't think it's too much to ask that there were some sort of a list of changes that are being implemented, even if it is just on the web rather than in the description. If Microsoft wants buy-in on the new Windows as a Service, it needs to be an open relationship with the end user and not one of "take this update and like it" which is unfortunately how it has started out.

Windows Insider Program

Certainly one of the biggest testing programs around was the Windows Insider Program, which was launched when Windows 10 was first unveiled in September 2014. It has allowed a huge number of people to test and guide the development of Windows 10, and it has been so successful that Microsoft has no intention of stopping the program now.

People will be able to opt into the Insider program from within Windows Update, where you can set your machine to get updates from the Fast or Slow rings. This will give you pre-release access to new features coming to Windows 10, such as browser extensions in Edge. At last count, there were over six million registered people in the Windows Insider program, which is going to cover a pretty diverse range of devices and configurations. They will also be looking for feedback on the changes in order to shape the end product.

The Insider program gave us a glimpse into the building of Windows 10 to the level that we have never seen before, and those in the fast ring would often get updates with known issues. If you are the kind of person who wants bleeding edge, it is still going to be available, but for those that just need their computer to work, it’s likely best to wait for the end product.

Just to give a brief summary of being in the Windows Insider program from day one, it was pretty fascinating to see the different builds of Windows 10 come along, all with new tweaks and changes. Some would be good, and some would be bad, and the product really did evolve in front of my eyes. It was a pretty great experience, although certainly not for the faint of heart. There were plenty of times where my system would be almost unusable when a new build came along, and although I expect that will taper off with the post-release Insider program, it was pretty interesting to see Windows 10 built like this. In fact, only a couple of months before launch I was certain there was no way they could launch in July with the outstanding bugs in Windows 10. Although not every bug was squashed for release, most of them were. Once the launch feature set was complete and they switched to tuning the experience, Windows 10 really started to settle down and get stable.

Even More New Features: Miscellaneous Additions to Windows 10

When I sat down to write this review, I had been using the new operating system on and off since October of 2014. New features would come on over time, but now that you sit back and look at the big picture, there is just a huge number of changes and features that have come to Windows 10. Not all have been excellent, with OneDrive as the big example of that, but many of the changes have been quite welcome.

Here are a few more features which I feel are worth discussing in short detail. There is even more than I haven’t discussed, but I have to draw the line somewhere.

Groove Music

First it was Zune, then it was Xbox Music, and now it’s Groove, or Groove Music. Microsoft has had a fully featured music service for what seems like forever, but no one knows about it. Groove is really well done in Windows 10, and I think the app is quite nicely laid out and easy to use. It can manage all of your music on your PC, and if you copy your music to your OneDrive folder, you can stream it for free on any other Windows device, as well as within the Groove Music apps on iOS and Android. I’ve been a subscriber for a couple of years now, and as I’m sure anyone would say that has tried subscription music, it really does change the way you listen to music. New music discovery is much easier. I’d like to see a bit more social added to Groove, such as the ability to easily share playlists.

Family finally comes to Windows

Windows has for some time offered the ability to enable an account as a child account, which puts certain restrictions on the account as well as keeps track of what is going on. Windows 10 has revamped this quite dramatically. Child accounts must now be Microsoft Accounts, and not local, but before you get upset it is for a good reason. You can now configure a child account online, and the settings you configure will now be applied across all devices that you set up to allow your child to log in to. This is a huge amount of work saved because previously it had to be configured on a per-device basis. Child accounts in Windows 10 will have limited access to the store based on age, and things like Cortana will not work.

The other thing that is new though is the idea of an adult account. You can set up more adult accounts, and they can also approve things for the child accounts to do. The entire management is now much easier.

What I hope to see is that this construct will be expanded over time to all of Microsoft’s services, so that you can then have things like a Groove Music subscription which applies to the entire family – even if it costs more than a single subscription.

WIMBoot Evolved

In Windows 8.1 Update, Microsoft introduced the concept of WIMBoot, which was aimed at very low cost devices with limited onboard storage. The idea was that you could save space by doing hard links to the recovery partition, and therefore using it as your system files. The concept was good, and it did save some space, but over time it quickly showed it had some flaws. Since the recovery partition could not be updated, any time there was a Windows Update for a system file, the new file would replace the hard link to the recovery partition. The space savings would quickly evaporate and my experience with WIMBoot is that it fills up all of your storage very fast.

For Windows 10, the concept is now a lot different. The recovery partition is now gone, and instead when you do a system reset it will leave the system files in place, and wipe out everything else. This also means that as updates occur, the original file will be overwritten and you won’t run into the issues with WIMBoot where you end up using a lot of space for this. The other big benefit is that when you do a system reset your system will now already be up to date, and you won’t have days and days of patches to apply.

The potential downside is if your system gets to the point where it won’t boot, there will not be a recovery partition to recover from. These are early days, and I haven’t seen a system with the new version of WIMBoot yet, so I’ll hold off judgement for now. I think it will certainly fulfill its goal better than the original version though.

Print to PDF

This almost seems unreal that you could not do this before, but Windows 10 now supports printing to PDF with no third party software. Rejoice!

MKV support

You can now natively play MKV files. Enough said.

Windows Media Center: RIP

This is not so much as a new feature, but a feature that has been removed. Windows Media Center has been around since the days of Windows XP, and it was updated all the way up to Windows 7. But, due to lack of use, and high costs to support, the popular DVR software has been removed completely from Windows 10. If you are a heavy user of this, there is no option but to stick with Windows 7 or 8.1. I was a big fan of Windows Media Center, but its time has come. As a replacement (and a weak one at that) there is now a DVD player in the Windows Store which you should get for free if you upgrade from a device with Media Center, and if you want it as a standalone piece, it costs too much to purchase so please don’t.

The Free Upgrade and Activation

For the first time ever, Windows is being offered as a free upgrade to existing users. In this case, anyone with a valid Windows 7 or 8.1 is entitled to the free upgrade, which means the majority of Windows users are eligible. This is really unprecedented. Windows 8 had a brief lower cost upgrade, but it was still $40. It’s hard to beat free. This offer is valid for one year, meaning you have until July 29, 2016, to take advantage.

As part of the process, Microsoft has rolled out updates to users with Windows 7 and 8.1 which puts a Windows icon in their system tray. This lets them “reserve” a copy of Windows. Once reserved, the app will scan your system for potential hardware issues, and if you are clean, it will download the files for the upgrade. Once it is ready, you will be prompted to upgrade. You can defer this of course, but it will always be there, waiting, waiting, for you to hit yes.

Windows 10 will be rolling out in waves, and as of now that is very much underway. With a huge Windows Insider program, Microsoft has a lot of data on what configurations have a good experience with Windows 10, and known good hardware combinations are going to be the first to get the ugprade through the pop up. Devices which may need a driver update from the OEM will not get the upgrade pushed to them until it is ready, which should help with people having issues post upgrade. I have personally had a good experience with the upgrade process on all of the devices I have tested, but even though I have more to test than most people, I am sitll a pretty small sample size. If you are an owner of a device with WIMBoot and very low amounts of storage, the upgrade may not appear automatically if you do not have enough free storage to download it, and WIMBoot is offering some challenges for the entire upgrade experience as well which is likely compounded by the WIMBoot devices having little free space anyway. If you want to force the issue, you can always do that as well by downloading and installing it yourself.

Although I’m not a huge fan of the pop-up, Windows 10 is a big bet for Microsoft, and part of that bet is to get as many users onto the platform as they can. The entire Universal Windows App strategy depends on getting a large user base.

In the end, it’s hard to complain about a free upgrade, especially when it’s optional.

But what happens when you do install?

The upgrade

When you are prompted to install, you will have the option to keep your existing files, or keep nothing. There seems to be some confusion out there about keep nothing, but it really means keep nothing. You will get a clean Windows 10 install if you choose the latter, but you will also lose all of your software including any OEM installed drivers or utilities. If you choose to keep your files and programs, this won’t be the case.

It’s going to depend on your hardware how long the upgrade takes, but it is generally pretty quick. If you choose to keep nothing, it is very fast because it doesn’t have to migrate any of your data around on the disk.

Any accounts on the computer will be kept intact, with their user data migrated.

The process is surprisingly easy, and robust as well. I’ve upgraded several machines and found no issues doing an in-place upgrade.

For those that want to do a clean install of Windows 10, be aware that in order to get a valid Windows 10 key, you first have to upgrade from 7 or 8.1 (to take advantage of the free upgrade offer) but once you do that, your product key is tied to your hardware and kept my Microsoft. Any future reinstalls on the same hardware will not need to be activated again.

As always, you should ensure you do a backup of your system and especially your data before undertaking this, but then again you should have a backup regardless so please make one. Windows 10 will let you know during the upgrade that you can roll back for up to 30 days after the upgrade, in case you have a bad experience. This also means that you will have extra storage used up with a Windows.old folder in your C: drive. This will be automatically removed after the 30 days, but you can also get rid of it with the disk clean-up tools. If you do want to roll back, you can find this under the Recovery section in settings.

Performance: Windows 10 Follows in the Footsteps of Windows 8

There have been a lot of changes to Windows performance over the years when a new version comes out. It was pretty much a given than any new version would require more hardware than its predecessor. Things started to change with Windows 7, which had basically the same hardware requirements as Vista. Windows 8 took that even further, by having the same requirements initially, but working on making things like boot time much quicker. Windows 8.1 update actually lowered the hardware requirements over Windows 8 with things like WIMBoot.

Windows 10 does not have any major changes to the underlying platform this time. Yes, there are some new things like DirectX 12, and WDDM 2.0, but overall it has been a pretty stable set of requirements. In fact, the base system requirements are exactly the same as Windows 8:

• 1 GHz Processor
• 1 GB RAM (32-bit) or 2 GB RAM (64-bit)
• 16 GB Storage (32-bit) or 20 GB Storage (64-bit)
• DirectX 9 capable graphics with WDDM 1.0 driver
• 800x600 display resolution

Now, granted, these are minimums, but the system will run on that. Even low cost tablets are going to have slightly more than these minimums so Windows 10 should be no issue for even older machines.

On that note, one new feature not currently available on Windows 10 but will be rolling out in a future update is memory compression, which is an evolution of the memory deduplication added in Windows 8. With memory compression, when the memory subsystem is pressured by too many active pages, the system will compress some of the pages rather than page them to disk. The CPU power required to compress and decompress the pages will of course be increased, but the overall system speed should feel a lot snappier than when having to recovery pages from disk. This will be of most benefit to the lower cost devices such as tablets which come with the minimum memory specificatioins.

But, despite the lack of differences in minimum requirements, it could still be the case that Windows 10 is going to use more or less of the hardware that is available. Is it going to offer more performance than Windows 8, or less? Let’s take a look.

Boot Time

One area where a lot of effort was spent in the Windows 8 days was boot time. There were some pretty dramatic improvements made here over Windows 7, and the proliferation of UEFI in new systems has helped to speed this up the point where we now measure boot time in seconds rather than minutes.

Overall, the system boot time is not significantly different in Windows 10. For most devices, it was within a second either way. The ASUS G751 that I tested may be an outlier here, but on this one device I did see a big gain. There could have been software loading at launch which was removed as part of the upgrade, but regardless, Windows 10 boots at least as fast as Windows 8, and sometimes even faster.

Power Consumption

Another area where it is important to measure is power consumption. Windows 8 made some good gains here over Windows 7, and while this was not the focus of Windows 10, it will be important not to lose ground here either.

To test this, Ganesh ran his standard idle and load test on the Intel NUC with the Core i5-5250 processor. Load is running Prime95 and Furmark at the same time, which is really going to show the maximum power consumption of the platform.

As we can see here, both levels are practically identical, which in this case is not a bad thing. There were no promises of better power usage, but ensuring there was not a regression is important.

Battery Life

Another test which I felt was going to be quite relevant is tablet battery life. I upgraded the Surface 3 to Windows 10, and ran through our tablet Wi-Fi battery life test with the display at 200 nits.

Here we see a slight improvement in overall battery life. I got 16 minutes more time on Windows 10 than I did on Windows 8.1. There is always a bit of a variance in this test, but once again not having a regression is a positive. Although impossible to directly measure, using Edge as the browser over Internet Explorer 11 could also provide some of this time gained since the new browser performs so much better, it can race to sleep quicker after loading the page.

One test that will have to wait is the tablet video test. I’ve run it, but I need to test a few other devices before I am ready to give out the results.

System Performance

As far as system performance, I also ran the Surface 3 through the PCMark 8 suite which simulates real life workloads.

Looking at PCMark is interesting since the benchmark is really a comprehensive look at the entire system. As you can see, both the Creative and Home scores have jumped up. The workloads in both of these include gaming, and the Work test does not, so it is possible this is due to new Windows 10 graphics drivers. Other media capabilities are also tested whereas the Work test does not include media at all.

I also ran some tests on a much more powerful system to see how it performed. The ASUS G751 laptop is a gaming laptop with a quad-core Haswell mobile i7, 24 GB of memory, and a NVIDIA GTX 980M GPU.

Again on PCMark we see a substantial gain, as we did on the Surface, even though this is PCMark 7 compared to PCMark 8 on the Surface 3. The ASUS G751 would crash the PCMark 8 workloads in Windows 10. This is a substantial gain though. Windows 10 does have some memory management improvements but it is difficult to believe this would affect a system like this with 24 GB of system memory. Updated graphics drivers for Windows 10 may explain the gain here.

Cinebench is a purely CPU benchmark, and Windows 10 shows the exact same scores for this benchmark. There is no loss of performance though which is really the main concern.

Overall the gaming results are very similar from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10, but unlike PCMark, there is a slight decrease in overall frames per second. Some of the games are very close and within the margin of error, but DOTA 2 saw a 5% decrease in performance which is significant. Civilization: Beyond Earth dropped 8% from moving to Windows 10. Unfortunately the laptop does not have integrated graphics or an AMD card to see if this is consistent across other cards or just a driver issue with the new NVIDIA drivers for Windows 10.

Desktop Gaming Performance

Shifting gears, let’s take a wider look at gaming performance on our GPU testbed. To better quantify the performance impact of Windows 10 we’ve gone ahead and tested a selection of games across GPUs from all of the major discrete GPU generations from both AMD and NVIDIA. This means Radeon R9 Fury, R9 290X, and R7 370 for GCN 1.2, GCN 1.1, and GCN 1.0 respectively. And for NVIDIA, GeForce GTX 980 Ti, GTX 750 Ti, and GTX 680 for Maxwell 2, Maxwell 1, and Kepler, in that order.

Despite being the biggest graphics stack overhaul since Vista, gaming performance is remarkably consistent on our GPU testbed, even more than on our laptop testbed. Performance is on average unchanged, and the results we see are typically within the +/- 3% variability we see when benchmarking GPUs. No game and no vendor sees an improvement from Windows 10.

This if anything is a testament to the work put in by Microsoft and the GPU vendors ahead of Windows 10’s launch. Though admittedly not starting from scratch, all of the relevant parties have been able to get their driver performance up to expectations by launch, avoiding the teething issues of Vista. Though we suspect the DirectX 12 code paths will still be under major development for some time to come, at this point it’s safe to say that upgrading to Windows 10 will not have a detrimental effect on current DirectX 11 games.

In Summary

So does Windows 10 perform better or worse than Windows 8.1? Overall I would say it is more or less similar, with some improvements in some tests and at worst a slight decrease in some of the laptop (and only laptop) gaming scores. There is not a major performance regression seen, at least on the devices that were tested so far. Windows 8 made some big performance gains over Windows 7 in several areas, and Windows 10 appears to continue to slightly refine things again. Despite the re-additon of things like transparency the battery life was slightly better when browsing the web, which is a good sign considering the new web browser being used.

Windows 10 does not really lose any ground to the gains that Windows 8 made, and as a result it's in good standing right out of the gate.

Is Windows 10 the Upgrade to Get?

I’ve gone through a lot of the changes to Windows 10, and hopefully given some good feedback on what is new, and how it will affect the user experience. I’ve not even come close to covering everything though, and things like new enterprise features can likely be an entire discussion on its own. Microsoft has made a ton of changes to Windows 10 in order to appease two groups of people. It needs to be an enticing offer for Windows 7 users, in order to get them to upgrade and avoid another Windows XP, and it needs to entice Windows 8.1 users. I think the latter is going to be a lot easier, since Windows 10 is not fundamentally different than Windows 8.1, and the overall reaction towards Windows 8.1 is not as positive as Microsoft had hoped.

But is this going to be the upgrade to move people off of Windows 7? In my opinion, yes it is. Windows 10 should bring enough of the familiarity with Windows 7 to 2015 that the majority of users should have a great upgrade experience. The Start Menu is back, which is one of the big reasons a lot of people avoided Windows 8 so loudly. Yes, it is a different Start Menu, and yes, it could still use some improvements, but as an application launcher it is a much more consistent and less jarring experience than Windows 8.1 ever was, and that alone is a boon. There are actually a lot of good reasons to upgrade from Windows 7 besides the Start Menu. Windows 8 had brought about a lot of great performance enhancements which were overshadowed by the Start Screen. File copies are now much quicker and much more robust, with the ability to pause and resume a file copy as an example. The task manager which debuted in Windows 8 is quite a bit more usable than the Windows 7 version, and Resource Monitor is still available if you need a detailed look at what is happening on the system.

Windows 10 definitely takes a step back on the touch-first mantra of Windows 8, and it actually ends up with a platform that is almost as good for touch, but far more usable with more traditional input methods. The compromise is always going to be a balance, and the overall balance is much better struck with this release. There are a couple of minor issues with the touch interface, with the most glaring being the full screen Start Menu not displaying enough app icons, and you can no longer swipe to the left to go back in Edge where you could in Internet Explorer, but the introduction of the task view button makes switching apps much easier than Windows 8 ever was. A system wide back button is also there, and should make the experience with mobile devices more consistent.

The big story on both sides though is the Universal Windows App platform. For the desktop user, the new Universal Windows App platform actually makes the Windows 8 style apps usable on the desktop, and being able to resize them in windows is a feature that dramatically changes how they are used. No longer are they apps that are relegated to tablets, but now they are apps which work well on practically any size display, with or without touch. The design language has also changed, and the changes make the apps much more usable on a desktop without taking away their usability on touch devices. Windows 8’s version of their app store often had apps which were very sparse in content, and the new platform’s design language goes away from that making the apps feel much more robust.

The underlying APIs and frameworks are a huge part of this as well. It already seems like developers have been able to extract more out of what is offered in the short time with Windows 10. The promise has been for some time to finally unify the frameworks across all Windows devices, and some strides were made there with Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8, but in the end they still had their own APIs which differed. That is not the case any longer, since there is really a single platform which will power everything from the Xbox to Surface Hub to PCs to phones to even IoT. The platform is the same, but the user experiences can be unique, and that is a big change from Windows 8’s model of one UI to fit all devices.

It is still early days, but with Microsoft’s goal of 1 billion devices running Windows 10 within two to three years is their one last chance to get developer buy-in. If Windows 10 fails, it will fail because of this. The support needs to be there, and Windows can no longer be the also ran when it comes to apps. It is the key to everything and Microsoft has a lot riding on this. They have done a lot of legwork in order to entice developers from other platforms to make the leap over to Windows, including adding native code support for Objective-C which powers the iOS platform, as well as runtimes for Android apps on mobile devices. These are the carrots in order to bring development in the short term, and the eventual goal is that the platform will be large enough to sustain itself. Time will tell, as it always does, but initial developer support has been reasonable with a few big name apps already releasing Windows 10 versions of their software. Twitter, for example, updated for Windows 10 and was in the store a couple of days before launch. I think Twitter still needs to do some more work on this app, but it is already much better than the Windows 8 version. Other software like Audible is now available with a Windows 10 app as well. These are early days though, and if the developers of these apps don’t see use out of them, they may stop development.

In the end, the developer support may be the key to the long term success, but to get customers on board early there are a lot of great new features for Windows 10. Cortana is a great addition, and I can certainly see a digital assistant being even more useful on the desktop than a phone. Edge is a competent browser which has finally closed the performance gap with the other browsers, and once it gains extensions it could easily be the primary browser for a lot of people. The other Windows 10 apps are generally a big improvement over the Windows 8 versions as well, and the new design language works well. None of them are perfect yet, but they will be updated over time to add features and capabilities. We have already seen it in just the couple of weeks since launch. The Xbox app, as an example, gained 1080p/60 game streaming support less than three weeks after the Windows 10 launch.

Windows as a Service is a new concept, and one that can be very successful as long as it is done right. App and feature updates can be done through the Windows Store without interrupting the end user, and security updates and feature updates to the operating system can come through Windows Update. I think Microsoft’s policy at launch of all home users having no way to defer any patches is a bit strong, and hopefully they will give you the option to delay them even a week or two. Their track record here has been good for most patches, but it really needs to be 100% for all patches if they are going to go down this road. I think it’s pretty early to say that this has been the case, and giving some control back to the users here will fulfill their mandate of a consistent platform, while alleviating the risk that some users feel about having Windows Update run all by itself. They also have to be careful about how often they roll out patches. The Windows user base has gotten used to Patch Tuesday, and scheduling updates for once a month makes a lot of sense. In the first three weeks of Windows 10’s life though, there have been three cumulative updates which necessitate a system restart. That process itself has gotten better, since the system will do the restart based on your own usage habits, and the restart will also reopen any tabs you had open in Edge, but it can still be very inconvenient when it is your primary PC for work.

The privacy issue is something that has been brought up loudly, and for good reason. Microsoft is very upfront about what it needs your data for, and for which services it collects, but there is a group of people that are very serious about their privacy and Windows 10 changes a lot of that. They need to first off respond to the privacy complaints, and make it more obvious what you need to turn off in order to appease any worries you may have. There are a lot of settings for this, and the descriptions of some are not always very helpful.

In the end, there is a lot to like about Windows 10, and I think it has met the needs for both Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 users. The interface is so much more consistent, and morphing the UI for the device type is a much better solution than Windows 8.1 ever had. New features like Windows Hello and Passport may change the way we use our computers forever, and although that sounds dramatic, the services really can be that good. Virtual desktops has been a request for many years, and despite all of the other changes to Windows 10, they still found time to add this long requested feature even though it will likely only be used by a small minority. The new task view switcher is also more discoverable, and works well with the new Snap Assist features to let you multitask easier than ever. Action Center has been stolen right from Windows Phone, along with the new data monitoring, storage monitoring, and some other features, and while they all started out on the phone, they can be just as useful on a PC.

And of course we would be remiss not to mention DirectX 12. DirectX 12 is a big change to gaming, and one of the biggest changes to DirectX in a long while. While the first games using it won't arrive for another quarter, as we have already seen it can give developers a dramatic improvement in multi-core performance, which in the long run will help game fidelity and better scale out game performance with modern CPUs.

I have been using Windows 10 off and on since October of 2014, and as the operating system on my main computer since January 22nd of this year. I honestly could not see me moving back to an older version ever. The improvements to Windows 10 are both dramatic and subtle, and the improvements keep occurring even this shortly after launch. Better for the desktop, better for the tablet, and a platform than runs on practically any computer system. Windows 10 is here, and Microsoft has made a bold statement with it. It is the return of the old, plus the addition of the new, all in a package that works very well on a huge variety of devices.