Windows 10 is officially available. I was up all night installing it and here it is. Now I know I’m not the only one but I get so giddy for fresh new software. It’s kind of ridiculous, a little bit sad. But hardware is one thing, software is a whole new playground.
So this is what Windows 10 looks like on the desktop. The most apparent new change is, of course, that new start menu that rises up from the bottom left hand corner. You still have that elegant tile interface but it doesn’t take up the entire display. It’s much more minimal. You have your Most Used apps on the left hand side and various other apps on the right hand side. There’s also a search bar where you can search the web and your Windows PC. Cortana is also baked into the search functionality. You can have her deliver you news based off your interests or just have her deliver you various pieces and bits of information like weather, sports scores, you can set reminders—I really like how I can easily type my questions or even verbally ask Cortana my questions using the microphone button here or simply by just saying “Hey Cortana.”
As you can see on the bottom, we have a much more minimal task bar that’s black and the new stock Windows 10 wallpaper that is also pretty dark here. It’s all made of light apparently. This is a very dark user interface overall but I really like it. It’s different and it just looks very sleek and modern.
We no longer have any hot corners like we had in Windows 8 but we do still have some touch-based specific functionality. So for example if you have a touch-based PC, you can swipe on-screen to the right to open up a new desktop. This is really a much appreciated feature that will really help me stay more organized as I can edit videos from one desktop and browse the web on another without getting too messy and having layers of Windows open. If you swipe on-screen to the left, you can open up Action Center and from here, you can have some pretty useful quick settings and notifications. So if you want to turn on Bluetooth quickly or Wi-Fi, you can just swipe in from the right and open up Action Center.
But that’s really it in terms of menus and the functions that are hiding with touch-based controls. Of course, you don’t need to use touch to access Action Center or lead new desktops. You can still use a keyboard or even a mouse but compared to Windows 8, we had all sorts of touch-activated menus and functions so it’s pretty clear that Microsoft is no longer pushing touch as heavily as in Windows 8.
Microsoft Edge is also a new addition. It’s not just updated and renamed Internet Explorer. It’s a completely new web browser. In fact, Internet Explorer itself is still found on Windows 10 as a desktop app. But this new browser is very minimal but provides some very neat features baked into it. So you can ask questions in the address bar and without pressing enter, it’ll just deliver you results based off the questions you asked. Whether it’s factual-based or weather information, you can just enter it here on the address bar. You can also add stuff to your reading list, you can use web note to literally draw on the webpages you were viewing and share them with your friends. I will add that it’s not very polished though. For example, if I draw on a webpage and click exit, it kind of reloads the page making me lose my spot in a video or webpage so that kind of sucks. But it is a pretty unique feature and I can see it being pretty useful actually.
The other neat little feature is that Cortana is also integrated specifically into this browser and she’ll deliver information based off what you are viewing. But overall, I will need to use it more before I determine if it’s any better than Chrome, which is what I typically use. But it does definitely seem better than Explorer already. But I guess that’s not really saying much.
We also have improved split-view functionality so you can drag programs to the side to create a 50-50 view of each running app. or you can drag each open program to a corner and successfully have four open apps at once at each quadrant. I really love this new feature a lot as it maximizes my workflow and just keeps me much more organized.
But the feature that I want to end with and one of the coolest features of Windows 10 in my opinion is the Xbox streaming functionality. So I can stream all of my Xbox One games to any one of my Windows 10 computers on the same network and best of all, there is no lag at all or no noticeable lag which is fantastic. I can’t wait until I can stream games from my PC to my Xbox One which is a feature that Microsoft is apparently working on.
So there are some of the biggest new features of Windows 10 but there are a lot more so let me know if there’s anything you’d like me to test and cover and talk about in detail. If I receive a lot of feedback, I’ll make a follow up video about say the Edge browser or whatever feature you’d like to see.
If you’re running Windows 8, I think it’s pretty safe to say to go ahead and upgrade now. You might want to hold off though if you’re skeptical about driver support because it is a new OS and it’s probably not going to support all the drivers you currently have on your system so you might want to hold off a little bit.
With that said, let me know what your thoughts are of Windows 10 so far.