Windows 10 Technical Preview

[vwl]

After only a couple of hours with the Technical Preview of Windows 10 on my weakest computer, which used to house Windows 8.1 as its operating system in desktop mode, I find already that several of my major gripes with Windows 8.1 have been fixed. One is the new ability to put Metro Apps into Windows (instead of crowding out everything else). The second is that it loads, apparently completely, all 15 of the websites in one of my Favorites folders. Currently, many of the websites only partly load and require a refresh. Windows 10 seems to be more like Windows 7 than Windows 8 and its spawn.

The upgrade went very smoothly, and all my devices work.

However, the Technical Preview is subject to changes over the next few months that might screw it up.

For anyone contemplating an upgrade from Windows 7 or Windows XP, skip over Windows 8 and wait for Windows 10 -- at least from what I can see of it.

[Chris James]

I do imagine the next time I buy a PC it will come with Windows 10....anything but Windows 8. Let's hope I don't have to face that soon.

[vwl]

By the way, for those who don't follow the OS worlds, there will be no Windows 9.

Windows 10 looks to be a few months away.

[Lugnutz]

8 is alright. I miss my XP tho.

[Cole Parker]

This is way out of my area of expertise -- which assumes I have one of those -- but after XP, they seemed to be intent on taking away our ability to easily make the computer our slave, and instead tried to make us the computer's slave. I liked the control I had with XP. Each successive version seemed to take more of that away.

C

[DesDownunder]

I agree Cole. With every new version since Windows 3.11 every new feature was accompanied by the demise of two or three older features. This is not to say that overall, the losses and the gains did not balance each other, and that XP was a kind of pinnacle of appropriate advances, but thereafter the end user was indeed made to suffer unwanted, unneeded and ever more extraneous ways of achieving the simpler and most common of computing tasks.

It must also be observed that many hitherto, easy, rewarding and functional connectivity tasks have become as useless as trying to configure the older more complicated procedures just to get on the Internet. This is what I mean when I say that for every advance there is at least one retarding new feature that just doesn't work anywhere near as well as its predecessor. (Think online collaboration on joint editing, or simultaneous writing of a document.)

The pop-up ads are bad enough without the operating system dementia popping up as well.

Barriers to productivity seem to be arranged to not just thwart end results, but to keep us busy trying to understand what the blazes is going on so that we don't achieve anything at all.

I need to go have a nap.

[Lugnutz]

They took the games away with the new versions.

[DesDownunder]

They took the games away with the new versions.

No wonder no one knows anything, games are the foundation of computer didactics.

[Hoskins]

It's a technical preview/beta release, the final version is months away. It's really common to remove features during beta and put them back nearer to the release date (I ran the Win 8 preview for several months, it didn't have games either - and when I got the RTM version, they were back).