Windows 10 – First thoughts

I have been using Windows 10 enterprise tech preview for a few days now – and here are my initial thoughts

  • The new eval centre from where the eval is downloaded is odd. Apart from having to sign in multiple times, the download progress is not shown anywhere
  • A fresh install (which I opted for) is lightning fast
  • Skipping the “sign into your Microsoft account” still isn’t clear. You need to click on “create an account” then “use existing account”. Considering its meant to be the “enterprise” version, not wanting to sign in to a personal cloud account isn’t going to be an uncommon request
  • No option to skip the annoying “welcome” animation manually – but it is in group policy (and was with win8) – still, just be nice if it was available on non-policed machines
  • Option to boot to start menu or start screen is bleedingly obvious – hurrah!
  • Look and feel is still quite win-8-ish….
  • Still no option to include source files in the install. While I understand that doing so reduces the footprint, one of the nice things in win 7/2008r2 was that you didn’t have go searching for source media. Sure, the make the small footprint the default, but give us enterprise admins a setup option (/copylocalsource ?) to copy the local source, so we don’t need to perform steps in our SCCM builds
  • No media centre – at least for the moment – I hope MS realises that enterprise users like to use stuff like media centre while travelling – even if its a paid option, preventing it completely from being run like in 8/8.1 is a silly decision – and one that will hopefully be reversed
  • Client hyper-V – sure, nothing earth shatteringly different on the client side – but its just very nice to have it
  • The “multiple desktops” has potential – just might take a while to get used to it
  • The qtr screen snap can be useful on some occasions on large monitors, but not so much on laptops
  • Direct Access to a 2012 R2 DA server works with no modifications (yay)

All in all – its off to a good start. Its obviously early on in the dev cycle, lets hope that the rattling’s about win 10 being “enterprise focused” are true.

One thing I did initially leave off this list is “why oh why is there an x86 version”… surely its time to kill off x86 by now ? I understand there are still some applications which will not run on an x64 windows platform, but announcing the end of x86 Windows OS’ will, in some cases, help speed the transition of some applications – and for those that are no longer supported or have ludicrously long dev cycles, Win 7 and Win 8.1 offer supported x86 options for some time to come.

CurrentlyDownloading

“Currently downloading…” call me whacky, but a % downloaded, current speed etc. might be handy here.

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