Since Microsoft announced the Windows 10 for both desktop and phone, I read several introduction to the new features that introduced. Over the weekend, I decided to give it a try myself.
1. Get Windows 10 Image from Windows
Microsoft is providing Technical Review version of Windows 10 through so called “Windows Insider Program“. You can sign up for free.
Once you signed up, you can download an ISO image of your desired version of Windows 10.
2. Install Windows 10 from the USB/DVD
You will need to copy the ISO image to a bootable USB or DVD. I used a tool called “Windows USB/DVD Download Tool” to do the job.
The installation is straightforward. If you have an old Windows OS installed, it will copy the old one to a separate directory “Windows.old”.
3. New Things In Windows 10
3.1 Metro blocks in a window
First thing you will notice is that the annoying (personal view) metro windows in Windows 8 is finally confined to a window. It feels like the start menu.
And if you are a fan of the Metro thing, you can expand it to full window.
3.2 Cortana To Your Assistant
Cortana is the voice recognize engine Microsoft provided to compete with Apple’s Siri and Google’s Google Now. I tried a couple of phrases, it seem to recognize pretty well.
One thing is that it can not distinguish the “purpose” of my request. For example, when I ask “open excel”, it always showed me the excel files in my computer. While if I ask “open Powerpoint”, half of the time it give me a Bing Search result instead.
3.3 “Project Spartan” Gives You Extra Edge?
One of the big selling point of Windows 10 is that it will use a brand new web browser with code name “Project Spartan”. Even though the full new browser is not yet available in the Technical Review version. You can test out the new rendering engine in Internet Explorer 11 by navigating to about:flags and enabling “Experimental Web Platform Features.”
Overall, the experience on Windows 10 is positive. It runs smoothly in my 3 year old test laptop (with 4GB RAM and Intel I3 processor). I am really looking forward to the official release.
Tell us what is your thought.