Windows 10 is a reflection of a company at a crossroads.
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STARTUP
Installing Windows 10 is as much of a pleasure as Windows 8. The screens are inviting and full of helpful guidance. Plus, if you already have a Microsoft and OneDrive account, you can restore your profile and find all your stuff (stored files, folders, photos) just where you left it.
The Windows 10 desktop, complete with taskbar, will look familiar to anyone who’s owned a Windows PC in the last 20 years.
After more than a few years of head-faking users, the Windows logo regains its rightful role as the Start button. A click on it brings up 2015’s answer to the Start menu. It bears little resemblance to, say, Windows 7’s Start menu, but there are recognizable visual metaphors.
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You’ll see a list of frequently used and recently added programs up top, and clean-looking text links to File Explorer, Settings, Power and All Apps.
Microsoft prefers to call programs “apps” these days (thanks so much, mobile). Click on that and you get a vertically scrollable, alphabetical list of apps.
To the right of these lists is a grid of live tiles (mail, calendar, news, etc.), remnants of the Windows 8 ecosystem. You can choose which tiles appear on the grid and if they update in real time. This grid, which is broken into two parts (“Life at a glance” and “Play and explore”), also scrolls vertically.
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The Start menu no longer includes search because it doesn’t need it. Sitting next to the Start menu in a permanent place of honor is Cortana’s “Ask me anything” bar. Cortana is, like Apple’s Siri and Google’s Google Now, a virtual digital assistant designed to answer any question you ask her, either verbally (the window includes a little microphone icon) or in text.
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Like the universal search that’s existed since Windows 7, Cortana can look though the local contents of your drive, your cloud-based OneDrive, system apps and the web (through Bing) to answer virtually any question you throw at her.
She starts by trying to give you a snapshot of all the things that interest you, like your schedule, the weather and news, but her real power lies in answering natural-language queries.
Cortana can be smart and sassy. When I told her to "turn on Bluetooth," she perfectly interpreted my speech and, because she has access to system-level tools, told me (in her Halo-esque Cortana voice) that she had turned on Bluetooth.
And when I asked Cortana, “Flights in Denver,” she correctly interpreted it and launched a webpage featuring MSN Travel results for flights. Later I asked her if she would marry me and she responded: "Among a handful of challenges, I don't think the Supreme Court would approve just yet." She's such a card.
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Likewise, much of what I typed into the Cortana box returned an accurate result. It was also useful for quickly launching apps: I’d type in “Word,” and “Word 2013” would appear at the top of the results box. I only had to hit enter to launch the app.
When I typed in “When is my next meeting,” Cortana showed me I had no meetings today. But when I asked her “When is that video meeting,” she didn’t know I had one on Monday. This is an issue with all these digital assistants. They’re uncannily smart, to a point, but they’re not going to be able to parse out every natural language query.
There's also a feature called Windows Hello, which lets you sign into your PC by scanning either your face, iris or fingerprint. It's an extra layer of security, but you'll need hardware that supports it, like Intel's RealSense 3D Camera.
I couldn't test it. The Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga 15 I had updated to Windows 10 is supposed to support Windows Hello, but alas, the feature wasn't available for some reason.
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FEATURES
Next to Cortana is the taskbar of open apps. You can pin apps here, too, and if an app is running, a bar appears below the icon. Just to the left of them is the new Desktops icon.
Desktops are virtual spaces where you can keep multiple instantiations of the same app or different groupings of running apps. This works similarly to Mission Control on Apple's OS X. You can even use a three-finger sweep up gesture on your trackpad to access all the Desktops and apps running in each desktop.
When all your virtual desktops are in view, you can drag-and-drop running app windows — any of them — into the desktops. It’s a great organizational and productivity tool, though I do miss the ability to sweep my fingers from the left edge of my touchscreen to page through windows. Now when I do that, I see all the open windows and can pick the one I want to use.
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Windows 10 also offers an excellent way of organizing your desktop for multitasking. While you’ve long been able to grab an open window and snap it against the edge of the screen to make it share the space with another open window, Windows now shows you thumbnails of the other open apps in the unused desktop space.
You can click on one to have it share the split screen with your open app or draw a couple into the top and bottom corners for more multitasking. Of course, this works best on larger screens.
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On the far right is the system tray that includes your battery life monitor, network connectivity, a notifications indicator and access to the touch keyboard. If you tap the Notifications button, the tall, narrow and fairly busy Action Center slides in from the right.
On touchscreens, you can also access it by sliding your finger from the outside right edge of the screen in toward the middle. Action Center replaces Windows 8’s app-specific charms. Some of you who grew to like Windows 8 will miss the easy access to these settings.
The top of Action Center is a list of new emails and other system notifications. Below that is a grid of oft-used system settings including screen brightness, networking connectivity, airplane mode, a quiet time so notifications don’t pop onto your screen (as they often do), tablet mode (more on that later), Bluetooth, access to all settings and more.
It’s not pretty, but it is very useful.
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MICROSOFT EDGE
For as many changes as Microsoft has made in Windows 10, none may be more important than the decision to demote Internet Explorer in favor of Microsoft Edge, the company’s first new browser in 20 years.
The version of Windows 10 Pro I used for this review was just shy of final code, but nothing showed its beta nature more than Microsoft Edge. Yes, it is quite fast, thanks to a new engine that leaves behind support for Active X and other legacy technologies.
It also has more than its share of crashes and could stutter badly on some sites. On Twitter, it struggled to keep the feed updated and worked only haltingly when I tried to direct message someone.
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Visually, Edge is a lean machine and Microsoft’s effort to put web content front and center shows. Menu items do not include any text and the default color palette (you can change it) is a dull gray that seems to almost fade into the background when you’re viewing a webpage. Edge offers a Reading View that strips everything off a webpage except for the text and graphics.
It is only supported on a subset of websites, but if you can find one that supports it, use it, because it makes reading on the web a pleasure.
When you open Microsoft Edge, it displays an address bar below the text “Where to next?” Below the box is a list of top sites. If you want, you can fill the rest of the page with your news feed.
That address bar is another sneaky hiding place for Cortana. In fact, she permeates Edge, watching address box queries and offering suggestions when she can. Even on webpages, if you select a word and right click, you’ll see the option to “Ask Cortana.” The results pop up fast on the right side of the Edge screen.
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Microsoft seems to think people like to annotate and share webpages. I think they’re half right. I share links on Twitter all the time, but rarely find the need to “ink” a site. The Web Notes annotation tool is fun if you have a Surface and Surface Pen, but it may not be that useful for everyone.
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The sharing area is limited right now to OneNote, Fresh Paint and Mail. OneNote adherents will love this and I know mailing pages is pretty popular. Each time I tried to save an annotated page, Edge crashed.
For now, there are no social sharing options. They won’t appear until Facebook and Twitter update their Windows apps to work with Windows 10.
Microsoft Edge also lacks extension support (it’s coming in the fall). For me, this meant installing Google Chrome on Windows 10 as well, so I could still use LastPass and log into critical work apps.
APPS
Microsoft also updated the apps that come with the system, including Mail, Calendar and Photos. The latter has a cleaner, vertically scrolling interface that auto-organizes your photos into days and albums.
It also auto-enhances your photos, and does a good job of it, too (while keeping the originals untouched on OneDrive). I like it, but wish they would add more precise cropping tools so I could better measure aspect ratios and final pixel size (I'm a little spoiled by Google’s Picasa).
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The app has a decent collection of editing tools that should satisfy most casual users. It also illustrates the smoother integration among Windows' disparate system apps. It is, for example, exceedingly easy to share images directly from Photos; the Share button is now part of the app. I invariably shared via email (since the only other option was Fresh Paint, which, by the way, has gotten an excellent overhaul).
Speaking of mail, I do not typically use desktop OS-level mail because I typically manage all my Gmail accounts (and even Hotmail) in Chrome. I made an exception for Windows 10.
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The new Mail app has a similar look and feel to the last version, but with more lines and, somehow, less life. At a glance, it's hard to tell what you have and haven’t read.
Mail is better in a touchscreen environment, letting you sweep from right to left on email messages to archive them. Yes, just like the mail app in iOS 8.
Calendar now looks like a real and useful calendar. Maps got an overhaul and now does a better job of surfacing search options like Hotels, Restaurants and Shopping. There are also a handful of 3D-rendered cities to explore.
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DEVICES
I tested Windows 10 on a Microsoft Surface Pro 3, one of the best convertible PCs on the market. Microsoft’s original solution for convertible devices like the Surface and Lenovo Yoga was to smash a touch interface together with the traditional one. Going back and forth was jarring. With Windows 10 and Continuum, the transition is far smoother and only occurs if you want it to.
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Continuum basically changes Windows 10 into a touch-friendly interface. The change is, to be honest, pretty subtle. The taskbar boils down to the Start button, a back arrow (to return to the last thing you were doing), a Cortana circle, the Desktops icon and, on the far right, a slightly simpler system tray.
The biggest change comes when you click the Start button and are thrown back into the live-tile-filled Windows Design screen, which makes perfect sense in the world of touch.
It’s not quite the same as the one in Windows 8, though. The task bar remains present, and instead of scrolling sideways, the new Start screen scrolls down. You’ll also find the complete apps list just above the Start button.
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THE LOOK
Windows 10 is like a newly renovated house where the upper floors and surface look shiny and new, but the basement is largely untouched and full of all the clutter you tried to clear from the rest of the home.
As usual, it only takes a bit of digging to see the classic operating system underneath. There’s still an inscrutable Registry, a Devices and Printers interface that’s changed little since Windows Vista and a Device Manager that will look familiar to Windows 2000 fans. Microsoft has slightly updated many of the classic icons, like File Manager, File Folders and the Recycle bin.
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I often wonder why Microsoft can’t drive its redesigns down to the core of Windows, but the reality is it’s probably not necessary. The more work Microsoft does on the surface, the less attention they need to pay to the stuff underneath that most users — if they’re lucky — will never see.
To be fair, some stalwart Windows elements, untouched for years, look completely different.
The calendar you access by clicking on the day and time in the lower right hand corner is new and definitely an improvement. Similarly, the Windows 10 calculator is cleaner and more powerful, with options for weight and mass, temperature, programmer and scientific.
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EVERYWHERE ELSE
With Windows 10, Microsoft hopes you’ll stop thinking of Windows as a desktop operating system and more as a service that runs on whatever screen you’re using at the moment.
Windows 10 includes a rich Xbox app that connects to your Xbox profile. My Xbox profile is tied to my Windows profile, so it was instantly populated with my gamer stats (such as they are), activity alerts, achievement and messages.
The highlight was the promised and much-ballyhooed ability to stream games directly from your Xbox One to the Windows 10. This was easier said than done. I couldn't get it to work at home, but did, after numerous fits and starts, finally get it working in the office. Note that I did have to enter the Xbox One's IP address to get the app to see it. I also had to connect a wired Xbox controller to my Surface Pro.
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With all this done, I finally could remote control my Xbox One and even see and navigate the interface. I even got gameplay going, streaming an old-school game right to the Windows 10 system and playing using an Xbox 360 controller. The images were sharp, but stuttered a bit and then the app crashed (repeatedly).
I'm sure Microsoft will keep working on this and when it works consistently, I want my son to use it and occasionally not fill our living room with the sounds of violent gameplay.
Windows 10 also has DirectX 12 support, but there are no DirectX 12 games. So there’s that.
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IS IT FOR YOU?
I’ve been running Windows 10 beta, on and off, for months. But now, having spent weeks using it consistently, I am generally impressed.
Leaving aside what I consider pre-release bugs, it’s a stable platform that plays nicely with others. I worried about installing apps like Picasa and Google Chrome, but Windows doesn’t sweat outsiders. As expected, Windows 10 gets the essentials right: It was easy to connect it to external screens (to extend my desktop), a Bluetooth mouse and network and wireless printers. It also generally feels leaner, starting up super fast, going to sleep in an instant and waking up without a hint of grogginess.
Microsoft Edge shows potential, but as long as I have to keep switching to Chrome to do my work, it will never be a big part of my life. That’s a shame, because it is fast and not once during my tests did it suffer a Flash/Shockwave meltdown.
The collection of upgraded apps, including Maps and Photos, all represent improvements, sometimes vast, over previous versions.
Cortana, the ever-present virtual assistant, is impressively intelligent. Placing Cortana in the Start area and making her a part of Edge means users are going to get very familiar with her. They may even grow to love her.
Should you upgrade? If you’re running Windows 7, yes, absolutely, take advantage of this worthy — and free — upgrade that will add so much functionality to your PC.
If you happen to own a touchscreen system or convertible, the benefits are even greater. Continuum is, without a doubt, a better way to handle the transition from standard desktop existence to a multitouch one.
Windows 8.1 users will have a tougher choice. On the whole, Windows 10 is a better operating system (service) than Windows 8, but it’s also more clearly a compromise. Yes, you get the Start menu back, but visual innovations like the charms bar and Windows Design (if you liked them) get demoted or removed altogether.
Some users may find Windows 10 less attractive than Windows 8. Others will appreciate that Windows 10 does away with visual flourishes in favor of a higher degree of utility.
The Good
The Start button is back • Cortana is smart and everywhere • High degree of utility • Free to all Windows 7 and Windows 8/8.1 users for the first year • New web browser
The Bad
Design took a back seat to utility • Charms bar is gone
The Bottom Line
Windows devotees should be pleased with this update that represents a return to form for Microsoft.
