Windows 9 is now Windows 10

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martindtanderson
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Critique wrote:Has any further light been shed on how PC, Phone, Tablet and Xbox are all going to run the same OS? I assume PC will be the only one which has a traditional desktop, with all the other ones just focused on the Modern UI as is the situation currently with Windows Phone, Xbox and one of the flavours of the Surface tablet? If it works and Modern apps can run properly across the lot I think it'll be a really good move, as it means that platforms like Xbox won't be neglected for apps like you could argue they have been previously - I'm not sure what the Xbox One app store is like but I remember on Xbox 360 there weren't many and the 'important' ones like iPlayer, ITV Player etc either took a while to get there or weren't appearing on the platform any time soon, and the Facebook app specifically was a relic from many a year ago, using the UI style of a long-gone dashboard, which sort of showed that apps were not exactly top of the agenda on the platform!
Microsoft will be holding an event in January to announce the consumer preview of Windows 10. This will include the Tablet and Phone builds - so we will have a clearer idea then.

Microsoft are developing a "tablet mode" called Continuum - this is designed for hybrid devices like the Surface Pro devices, and the Lenovo Yoga etc. When a keyboard/dock is detected, a prompt will appear asking to go into "Tablet Mode" which will change the Start Menu to a full screen version. Run all the modern apps in full screen instead of windowed. And will adjust the taskbar and other UI elements to make them touch friendly size.



The OS will be the same across the form factors, in that they will all share the same code for common elements like drivers, filesystem, network, audio, media stacks, Direct X 12, the WinRT APIs, etc. But the shell which runs on each form factor will be different. On the desktop this is the DWM and explorer.exe - Phone will have the Start Screen and possibly include the old Windows Phone 8.0 silverlight platform and APIs. And Xbox has the dashboard.

"Universal Apps" can be developed that will run the same code on all the windows form factors with a common set of controls which adapt to the form factor, as well as making it easy to offer tailored UI designs if you want to. These should also allow you to buy an app once and get it installed on each of the devices you have.

Along with Windows 10, will be the Modern UI/Touch friendly version of Office for Windows, Phone, Tablets etc.
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cwathen
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(Yes this is a long post)

It's been a while, but the 4th officially available build, 9926, has now come out. The trial product is now branded 'Windows 10 Pro Technical Preview' - the first time Windows 10 has been officially used within the OS. Internally the NT version number has been knocked up to 10.0 too, it looks like 'Windows 10' will actually be version 10 and not version 6.3 after all. With this version, the licence expiry date is now set to October (the previous builds have all been April), so it looks like as long as you keep up to date with the trial builds, there is no risk of the OS expiring before the final version is released.

Microsoft shed a bit more light on the OS this week, including ending the speculation on whether or not it will be free. It will not be generally free, however there will be a free upgrade available for 1 year after launch to legitimate users of Windows 7, 8 and 8.1. Excluded are Enterprise and any volume licenced version, which will cut out most corporate use except small enterprises using consumer level kit with a non-enterprise version installed and very large ones who have Software Assurance and so already have the right to upgrade to any new version released. Other details about the offer, such as whether the upgrade version will support clean installs or if you'll have to install the original version first, and whether users of 32 bit builds of the existing OS will be able to get a 64 bit build of WIndows 10 have not been released.

Curiously, Microsoft also announced that users who take up the free upgrade will receive free updates 'for the lifetime of the device'. What exactly they mean by this isn't clear, as previously the availability of free WIndows updates are tied to the age of the operating system and it's place in the support lifecycle policy, not the age of the particular device Windows is installed on. I have wondered if free updates will run only up until the end of support date for the original operating system, potentially leaving those upgrading from Windows 7 - which will be 6 years old at the time 10 is released - out in the cold only 4 years after launch. Alternatively, it may have just been a throwaway line which meant nothing.

Moving on to the build, one word sums it up for me: disappointment. I have been very impressed with the first 3 builds, they felt almost feature complete and almost ready to release with just a bit of spit and polish needed. They were snappy and stable and although I've only been using it on a test netbook, I was beginning to consider upgrading my main PC up from Windows 7 too. After this, Windows 7 is going nowhere from my desktop for the time being. This new build is a bit of a mess.

So, what's changed this time:

The beautiful new start menu about which Microsoft hyped so much, and which was perfect as was as well as very snappy and responsive, is gone. Yep, gone. In it's place, the full screen start screen now has a button to toggle between running full screen, and running in a sort of 'start menu mode', which essentially just scales it down to start menu size and puts it in a start menu part of the screen (fortunately this is default behaviour however). It is as sluggish as hell, it has less functionality and the organisation of it is poor (in it's defence, they currently have not implemented any way of adjusting it). I've already found myself hitting Win+R and typing path names/program names in to launch things rather than use the 'start menu'. This change apparently was made to implement 'continuum', a way of changing automatically from desktop to tablet mode on hybrid devices. It's still better than Windows 8 (assuming they manage to make it run more smoothly), but as a purely desktop OS what they've done is a retrograde step from the dedicated (and perfectly implemented) start menu that was in the earlier builds.

Cortana is now in Windows, replacing the previous search functionality. It's added a lot more functionality from the previous search tool, but it is also very sluggish and unresponsive, although hopefully this will be sorted in time. How much the voice commands will be used on a desktop, which haven't come with microphones as standard kit for about the last 15 years, remains to be seen. One thing I found curious, when searching for things and executables are found, Cortana tells you if it's a cross platform modern app or a PC only classic app - except classic apps are called 'Windows Applications', an odd name indeed given that it means Microsoft will now be releasing versions of Windows which can't run Windows Applications!

The traditional calculator accessory is gone, only the huge modern app version is left. Whilst it has been a bit stupid for Windows to have two calculators, I wish they'd kept the traditional one, it's much quicker and takes up less screen real estate, which surely is what anyone using a calculator on a computer would want in a computer calculator program as presumably you'd be using the calculator as secondary to whatever else you're doing? But if you are someone who boots up windows just to use the calculator as a primary task, you'll be happy.

There is an xbox app, which I can't trial because I'm not an xbox user.

The PC Settings app has been completely overhauled, taking on more from Control Panel, I would say it's pretty much a given that Control Panel will be no more by the time of the final release. Curiously, the re-organisation looks strikingly similar to a re-implementation of Category View from the old Control Panel. Controls for things like Wifi and Bluetooth are also a bit smoother now (although they are still using a huge modern app for simple things like entering a Wifi password which in Windows 7 just appears as a small box in the bottom of the screen). Windows Update now has the option to schedule a convenient time to reboot after updates, rather than wanting to do so immediately and then bugging you continually until you do it.

As has become a tradition, yet more new Window animations, also some more new icons and some pretty new wallpapers.

The UI chrome has been modified a bit, until now it's just been the same as Windows 8. Title bar text is once again left-aligned a la Windows 95-Windows 7, rather than centred. The minimise/maximise/close buttons have been changed to quite hideous huge things, these are clearly designed to be better for touch screen use, but look very inelegant on a desktop PC. Modern apps have a 4th control button on the title bar itself to toggle between full screen and windowed modes when previously this was in a menu (this is very useful).

More work has been done on the notification centre, it now has tabs for different types of notifications.

The maps app now has the ability to download maps for use offline. This I can see as being very useful for mobile users - previous users of Symbian based phones may remember that it's map applications had the option to download an entire set of maps for the country for the device to use offline (which were periodically updated and until an update could be supplemented with more recent online data about changes to layouts and road closures etc), rather than pulling them all down in real time as Google Maps and (until now) Microsoft Maps does. This makes the device much more usable as a GPS since it doesn't rely on a working data connection (nor does it need to eat into your expensive and limited mobile data). For desktop users, well Microsoft is essentially now giving you a free version of AutoRoute - just as well since AutoRoute was discontinued at the end of 2014.

Curiously, despite the big launch event this week, Microsoft hasn't included everything demonstrated this week in this build. The most obvious absence is Spartan, Microsoft's new web browser which will be replacing Internet Explorer which was demonstrated this week. Instead, the variant of IE11 with 'a new rendering engine' (presumably Spartan's engine) from the previous build is still there, still with the Sad/Happy/Indifferent face to rate the abilities of the engine compared to standard Trident-powered IE. In terms of the engines, I have to say that I'm finding no appreciable difference between this Spartan-driven IE and the standard IE on my Windows 7 desktop machine.

Until this build, I was struggling to understand quite why it would take until late 2015 to get WIndows 10 out when the early builds didn't look too far off a release candidate version, and despite being pre-beta builds were perfectly viable operating systems for day to day use. After this one, there clearly is a lot of work to do.

Let's hope Microsoft doesn't wait over 2 months this time before bringing another build out.
cwathen
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The latest build, 10041, is out. When this whole party first started, Microsoft was delivering new builds every few weeks. Then after the November build, we had a delay of a couple of months waiting for the next one. When it finally came out in January, Microsoft apologised for the delay and promised to deliver future builds more quickly…and then they didn’t. We’ve waited around a couple of months again – and Microsoft has again apologised and promised to deliver future builds more quickly, promising ‘1-2 builds a month’ for people on the fast ring but with a disclaimer that certain teams can prevent new builds from being released if a new feature is deemed too unstable for public consumption. Time will tell what that will actually translate into.

On top of their free upgrade offer, Microsoft pulled another surprise last week – upgrades would be available to users of pirated copies of 7/8/8.1 too. This would be available worldwide but was claimed to be aimed at reducing the Chinese piracy market, which is partly blamed for XP's continued refusal to die (and as an aside - one wonders why as one final attempt to kill XP off Microsoft didn't include XP and Vista in their free upgrade offer too?). Nevertheless, offering a free OS to people that have never paid for the older version (or allow situations like genuine users of 7 Home Premium to bittorrent a copy of 7 Ultimate and upgrade to the top-whack version of Windows 10 rather than the one they would otherwise be entitled to) would seem to be just a little bit too generous and a kick in the teeth to those users who had paid for legitimate copies. Microsoft quickly did a partial U-turn on this, stating that whilst they will permit unlicensed users to upgrade, those copies of Windows would still be unlicensed and subject to restriction unless the user pays a fee to licence it.

They still haven't answered the big question - which is how exactly the free upgrade offer will be delivered. If you can download an ISO to burn to disk then fine, but if it's just going to be pulled down from Windows Update on top of your existing 7/8 installation, they need to explain what will happen if you later need to do a clean install, particularly if this is after the 1 year upgrade offer has expired. Personally, I also want to know whether those on a 32 bit version of the older OS will be able to change to a 64 bit version of Windows 10 or whether they will be stuck on 32 bit - when I bought my copy of Windows 7 back in 2010 I opted for 32 bit at the time, but given the choice I'd opt for 64 bit now if I am able to.

The final release is now slated to be ‘in the summer’ – I would hazard a guess that they have late August in mind for an RTM release, with more general availability following in September.

Away from the PC builds, Microsoft is developing a technology to deploy Windows 10 on Android devices, and have apparently achieved this on a Chinese device. Architecturally, an Android device isn’t much different to a Windows Phone/RT device (or an iOS device for that matter) so it’s certainly conceivable that Microsoft may plan to knock Android off it’s perch not just by pushing the development of Windows devices, but by taking over existing Android devices too. It may also be that if exactly the same hardware can run either Android or Windows 10 then device manufacturers will start officially supporting a choice of OS on the same device rather than having every device dedicated to a particular OS as is the case now. I firmly believe that Windows 10 is make or break time for Windows on mobile devices, if it doesn't become a dominant platform at this point then it never will, and it'll be interesting to see how this pans out and how aggressive Microsoft will get in pushing this.

Moving on to the changes in 10041:

First off, something which hasn’t changed. Several months have passed since Microsoft demonstrated Spartan, their new web browser to replace IE. Yet it *still* isn’t in Windows 10. Instead the special version of IE11 ‘with a different rendering engine’ continues to be present.

The upgrade process itself still takes several hours to complete as usual (something I don’t understand when a clean install from DVD takes less than an hour), but at least now there is a more descriptive installer with a progress bar rather than you just being left to look at a busy icon for hours wondering if anything is happening.

There is a new lock screen (which finally tells you what you’re supposed to do to unlock rather than leave you to guess) and a new login screen. There are also new screens for hibernate/resume.

As usual, more new icons (including the much-publicised and mush-hated new recycle bin icon).

When viewing the taskbar in ‘small’ (i.e. 'pre-Windows 7 style' mode, the date is now permanently on screen in that mode (previously you needed to view it in ‘large’ mode to get that), and the start button itself is bigger.

The Start Menu is now transparent. Curiously, when in full screen mode it goes even more transparent (a bit too much IMO), so it looks like they are breaking down more barriers between the modern and classic UIs. Otherwise, save for a few cosmetic changes it’s the same redesigned start menu introduced in the last build which continues to have all of it’s shortcomings – it’s still slow, the apps are still in a strict alphabetical list with no distinction between shortcuts and folders (and still with an unnecessary letter key), the useful feature which could expand a shortcut to show the recent documents used in that program still isn't back, the search box still doesn’t properly double up as a run box in the way that the search in every start menu from Vista up to the earlier Windows 10 builds did, which means what had become the deprecated feature of the separate run box is now necessary again, and there are still no ways of controlling the behaviour of it. With the last build, a registry hack was quickly uncovered to restore the earlier version of the start menu as the code for it was still there, this doesn’t work for this build but hopefully an alternative will quickly be found. There’s so much negative feedback about this new start menu on the feedback app, I’m amazed Microsoft didn’t re-instate the earlier implementation for this build.

Cortana is now in more languages.

Multiple desktops are improved – applications can now be dragged between them and each desktop now has a separate taskbar so that you will only see the apps running on that desktop on it’s taskbar. This makes a lot more sense than the old way when the taskbar was shared and showed everything running on all desktops.

Network access has improved – when connecting to wifi you no longer get thrown into a big modern app to enter a password, instead a small window appears on the desktop similar to Windows 7 (although what they’ve come up with is still unnecessarily large IMO)

The PC Settings app has had some more tweaks with yet more features moved over from Control Panel, which is now well on the way to becoming deprecated, it still exists but obvious links to it have been removed, you need to go out of your way to access it now.

Otherwise that’s about it. Aside from my gripes with the Start Menu (the original implementation of which was far superior IMO), this is another very polished build all in all.
Alexia
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cwathen wrote: it’s certainly conceivable that Microsoft may plan to knock Android off it’s perch not just by pushing the development of Windows devices, but by taking over existing Android devices too. It may also be that if exactly the same hardware can run either Android or Windows 10 then device manufacturers will start officially supporting a choice of OS on the same device rather than having every device dedicated to a particular OS as is the case now. I firmly believe that Windows 10 is make or break time for Windows on mobile devices, if it doesn't become a dominant platform at this point then it never will, and it'll be interesting to see how this pans out and how aggressive Microsoft will get in pushing this.
I think it would take a hell of a lot of marketing and nous from Microsoft to achieve anything like the market dominance (85% of smartphones) Android has right now. Android is an open-source, editable, customisable OS which, as we have seen, has fragmented into numerous versions and subversions built by OEMs to suit their needs. A hindrence to development sure but a godsend to brand-conscious companies who want individualism with little effort. I can't imagine Samsung or even HTC embracing a non-customisable closed-source OS even as an alternative option.

Also I'm not exactly au fait with how it works but do companies have to pay MS to have Windows Phone software on their device, or do MS take a cut of the cover price of a Windows Phone device? If so, that would have to be competitive enough to outweigh the benefits Samsung et al are getting by tying their products to the Google Play store or having non-Google marketplaces.

Also the Windows Phone app store would need significant improvement. 340k apps vs 1.43m for Android and 1.4m for Apple is pitiful, frankly.
cwathen
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Alexia wrote:I think it would take a hell of a lot of marketing and nous from Microsoft to achieve anything like the market dominance (85% of smartphones) Android has right now.
Certainly it's hard to conceive of anything which may knock Android of it's perch, but stranger things have happened - there was a time when 75% of smartphones ran Symbian, and it's fall from grace was unbelievably rapid; until mid-2010 it was still the most popular mobile OS, less than 2 years later it was dead. I would say this happened because Symbian never properly embraced the switch from physical keys to touchscreens - it felt like the touch functionality in later versions had been hurriedly bolted on rather than developed properly and as a result Android which provided a vastly superior experience cleaned up very quickly. If there are developments in the future which take Android in a different direction to how it's being done now which Google don't seriously embrace then I would certainly say it's possible for Android to go south at some point.
Android is an open-source, editable, customisable OS which, as we have seen, has fragmented into numerous versions and subversions built by OEMs to suit their needs. A hindrence to development sure but a godsend to brand-conscious companies who want individualism with little effort. I can't imagine Samsung or even HTC embracing a non-customisable closed-source OS even as an alternative option
And this could be the very problem which threatens Android. Android's pull to the manufactuers is that it lets them become lazy. For many years now they've all been knocking out hardware that's substantially the same and relied on creating a custom UI and suite of custom apps to differentiate their device from someone else's. Yet Increasingly things like TouchWiz, HTC Sense and custom bundled apps are mattering less and less to the consumer, there is increasing demand for Android to be the same across devices, which even the manufacturers are acknowledging now by things like 'Google Play' (i.e. non-customised) version of devices. As such, in the future they will have to do things the hard way and spend more time on the hardware to get their devices noticed.

What all these different flavours of Android has also done is caused a huge amount of fragmentation between the version on different devices (and even between the same device supplied by different carriers). There is increasing resentment that when (and even if) Android updates come through depends on your manufacturer/carrier. There is a demand (which I will believe will only grow as the OS matures) for Android to be the same thing for everyone, for all hardware of the same class to be able to run the same version of Android and not for it to simply be a base on which the manufacturers can apply their own bits to as it has been until now.

Windows 10 would provide that, and if the demand materialises in a big way and Android doesn't rise to that challenge, it could well fall just as hard as Symbian did.
Also the Windows Phone app store would need significant improvement. 340k apps vs 1.43m for Android and 1.4m for Apple is pitiful, frankly.
It's a vicious circle there - one of the reasons Windows Phone usage is so low is because there is poor app support, but the app developers will never worry too much about developing for the platform if few people are using it. Now that Windows will share the same app store across all devices, I would imagine this would push app support up as the developers would have access to all the PC users as well as the mobile users.

As I said above, this I believe is make or break time for Windows as a mobile OS, I don't believe Microsoft are prepared to allow it to continue as an outfielder any longer, either the big push will work and it will become the dominant OS, or it won't and it'll be quietly killed off.
cwathen
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Since announcing a faster release schedule, Microsoft have been as good as their word - there are now new builds coming down every couple of weeks (sometimes more quickly than that), to the point that it's hard to keep up with them. As expected, since the builds are getting less testing before being rolled out, there have been some clunkers - there was build 10049 which had a buggy installer (I couldn't get it to install at all, others reported installed times of approaching a day), there was 10061 which had a broken start menu which wouldn't launch programs (even allowing for the pre-beta nature of the OS and limited testing, how that got out the door I can't begin to imagine) and now we're up to 10074. 10074 is a milestone build which is also available on the slow ring (which I think was still on build 9926?), as an ISO for clean install, as well as the usual in-place upgrade. Spartan finally made it's appearance in the previous build 10049, but more about that later.

Windows 10 is now slated for a July RTM release with the hope that it will be on new devices by August/September.

I am noticing that as these builds progress, the OS is getting slower and slower. As mentioned before, I am testing on low powered hardware, an old Atom netbook with 2GB of RAM. This came with Windows 7 but it ran like treacle and was quickly downgraded to XP to get acceptable performance. I was impressed by how well this could run the Windows 8 previews and also how the early Windows 10 builds performed, but as Windows 10 moves closer to completion it seems that it certainly isn't trying to win any nimbleness awards and is likely to require relatively decent hardware.

With this build, the OS has been renamed (again) to 'Windows 10 Pro Insider Preview' - it would seem there are no more technical previews.

CHANGES THIS TIME

New system sounds - the Windows 8 sounds are gone, to be replaced with new stuff which is a bit more dramatic. Kindof reminds me of Windows 2000 actually.

Aero is back! - Sort of. In order to appease those who liked aero glass from Vista/7 and don't like the flat Windows 8 UI, there are now aero-style blur transparency effects on the start menu and task bar (although some people need to use a registry hack to enable them).

Changes to alt-tab appearance

Updates to Cortana (you can now ask it more things)

In an attempt to move to cloud-based logins, by default it will try and get personal PCs signed in using a Microsoft Account, and business PCs signed in using an Office 365 account. Traditional domain-based authentication for networks is still there, as are simple local accounts, but you need to dig for these options.

Oh, and there is still no personalisation options for the start menu, I am still mourning the original version from the first two builds.

SPARTAN
Microsoft have announced that Spartan, the new IE-replacing web browser, will be released as Microsoft Edge (It's still called Spartan in this build though). It's main draws are integration with Cortana so you can have a voice-driven web browsing experience (should you want such a thing) and the ability to annotate web pages directly and forward these annotated versions to other people. Woop-de-do. Obviously it's still far from finished, but it's not doing huge amounts to impress me. It's a modern app which isn't particularly spritely. It's relatively competent at loading web pages (provided it doesn't crash on you as it's unstable as hell) but it also has bizarrely missing bits of functionality - eg you can't access any web site which requires credentials to access the server (such as Exchange-based webmail) because there is no username and password box implemented (You also can't access FTP through it for the same reason). Microsoft is making much about how it can shed the legacy of old standards which IE carries around (such as ActiveX) but then that's precisely why a lot of corporate users prefer IE, because it will work with their proprietary corporate intranets and internal sites which were developed in the days of IE6 and no one wants to move on from. Certainly at present if I wanted to be free of IE's past, I would opt for Google Chrome over Edge.

Whilst I can understand Microsoft wanting to evolve the technology on, I am a little bemused as to why they want to ditch the IE brand. IE may not have the usage numbers it did a decade ago, but over half of desktop web browsing is still done on some version of IE. IE11 is the world's most popular web browser. IE8 is still used by more people than use the latest Chrome and Firefox put together. IE isn't really showing any signs of flagging, so why they wouldn't want to at least keep the name I don't know.
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Nick Harvey
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My "Get Windows 10" icon has appeared in the system tray today.
cwathen
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We now have a launch date: Windows 10 will RTM on July 29. TBH, as much as I started this whole thread very positive about Windows 10, I'm a little worried. Despite all the posts about it (mainly from me), very little has actually changed about Windows 10 since January and there's still a lot to be done to make this ready for RTM.

Comments on the windows insider program are overwhelmingly in favour of the original 'native' start menu (ie implemented in Explorer like previous start menus) that graced the first couple of builds rather than the shitty slow XAML one (ie implemented as a modern app) they've used for the past 6 months or so which is essentially just a small start screen, yet Microsoft absolutely refuse to acknowledge this view and re-instate the earlier start menu (although it does appear that the XAML variant won't be going into Windows Server 2016, as even the latest builds still have the native menu). This is worrying since the insider program was supposed to be about making sure Windows 10 was the Windows we want, not what they wanted to give us which is what caused Windows 8 to flop.

One of the centrepieces of this new OS - Spartan/Microsoft Edge, is barely stable enough to use for testing, let alone as your main web browser. And those who have tested it are benchmarking it as slower than IE11 (which I believe will still be included as a kludge to permit access to sites which require IE).

They still haven't ironed out how the free upgrade will work beyond doing an in-place upgrade on top of your existing OS - will they make available an ISO for clean install in the event of later re-installation (or people like me that just prefer clean installs)? If not, will you be able to install your original OS and then perform the upgrade again if you need to? If you're on 32 bit Windows 7/8 can you upgrade to 64 bit Windows 10 or will you be stuck on 32 bit? If you have a boxed retail copy of Windows 7/8 (which allows you to move it to another device) can you move your free Windows 10 with it too? All these questions need answering.

Windows 10 may well be a perfectly serviceable OS when judging it as an unfinished product with work to do, but when judging it as a final released product there is a distinct lack of polish on it (I don't think they've even locked down the feature set yet) which I can't see them completely nailing in the next 6 weeks. And I would hate to see it rushed through just for the sake of getting it out this year - I fear this may be the case since they've already announced an update for it next year (essentially a Windows 8 > 8.1 update AIUI) before the base OS has launched at all.
Nick Harvey wrote:My "Get Windows 10" icon has appeared in the system tray today.
Don't know about your views on it but I wasn't happy with this. They pushed out an update on last month's patch Tuesday to Windows 7/8 users which essentially installed a piece of adware to try and get people to upgrade to 10. Since it was flagged as an 'important update' this meant anyone on automatic updates (which Microsoft recommends) got it pulled down automatically. Since I always update manually I elected not to install it and my Windows 7 does not and will not have such a pop up. IMO it is an absolute abuse of process flagging adware as an 'important update' - how long till your system tray starts sporting banner ads for the newest Office if you're still on an older version?
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Nick Harvey
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Chris. You've talked about the likely demise of Control Panel and its replacement with the Settings App. Have you tried "God Mode" in Windows 10, and if so, does it work?

If it's still available in Windows 10, that will lessen the worry about Control Panel going in its current form.
Critique
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I may not be Chris, but God Mode has continued to appear in Windows 10 builds thus far, so one would assume that it will now be kept.
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Nick Harvey
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Ah, thanks for that.

We'll keep fingers crossed then.
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