Windows 10 Technical Preview

Windows 10 will be released some time in 2015 (not sure what month, i don't follow this very closely).

I installed a technical preview build of windows 10 on a vmware virtual machine so i could see what it is like. I think it is an improvement from windows 8.1. The "start menu" is back, which makes it a little more keyboard friendly. It seems like they are trying to integrate the touch user interface with the traditional windows UI which is cool.

On the other hand, it really doesn't feel like anything new, it looks how windows 8 should have looked but not much more as far as i can see. As with any version of windows, you still only really get one option of GUI to control the desktop.



above is how the desktop looks inside my vmware tag. you can click on it to make it bigger. it basically looks like windows 8 with a start menu. it is not yet known how this will be released other than it is scheduled for release in 2015, whether it will be an update to windows 8.x or if a license will have to be purchased seperately. microsoft also plans to unify the windows, windows phone, and windows embedded product families around a common internal core. as you can see, this is TP build 9841, not a release candidate

installation was easy, mostly consisting of clicking "next" a few times. one dissappointment with this that is also an issue with windows 8.x installs is that the installation will not allow you to create an offline account for the system unless you disable your network adapter. if it detects an internet connection, it will make you sign in with a microsoft live account, or have to create one before you can continue (which of course requires submitting personal information).

any thoughts?

 

That doesn't look very interesting at all does it..

 

it looks like ... windows. like i said, the only thing that seems to be new is the start menu. people who prefer using windows 7 for this reason may be happy about this but i can't say i'm really impressed.

this definitely doesn't warrant spending money on a new license. it should be offered as a free update.

windows seems to do a lot of information gathering, anything you type into that search bar in the start menu not only seems to search the computer for software installed (as it should) but also seems to submit search queries to the internet. i have some privacy concerns about so much information being submitted to microsoft services.

and the nonexistant option to create an "offline account' (a normal user account) when you install for some reason is concerning to me. they want you to enter all this information and stuff. i know that windows 8.1 makes you enter a phone number, and then verify it by entering the code that they send as a text message, which should not be necessary. i guess they're just trying to keep track of all they're ducks .. or sheep or whatever. you only get the option to make an offline account if you disable your internet connection, but otherwise the option does not appear. as if they never expect that anyone would ever want to do that, or not be constantly connected to the internet in every way, all the time.

edit: if this is all the developers have done in ..what.. 2 years or so ... i wonder what the fuck they've really been doing all this time.

 

hiding

 

I'm a linux man through and through.

But actually, I think I like it. The start menu, having a single place to command and control things. instead of flop through a million icons like a mac. Powershell keeps getting better, so by the time Windows 10 comes out they'll probably be Powershell 4, maybe it'll be almost as good as a terminal.

What happened to Windows 9? Did Windows 8.1 eat it?

 

idk why it skips from 8 straight on to 10, i was kinda wondering the same.

i don't know any powershell, maybe i'll learn some one day. i think bash is the best shell, at least Macs come with bash.

i think the software management in windows needs to be reworked, i think that's part of the reason windows users are plagued with so much malware.

 

It's really got nothing on bash, but it's getting closer. Really they've made a lot of efforts to make it somewhat linux like, including having alternate names for functions. You can type ls now too rather than having to remember dir.



You know it does say something about Windows Software managment. You sort of have to brave the internet and hope you're not downloading a virus. 95% of what you need can in linux can be gotten from APT or RPM. It's clean. Like 3 weeks ago I downloaded a windows drivers from the manufacturers site that chrome warned me was malware.

 

people get in those bad habits of googling drivers which is very likely will give you more hits for malware than the legit thing....probably even likely that the top Google hit is malware, especially if they've already got browser malware. why not take it to the next level and load some more straight into the kernel, little more won't hurt.

another thing is for some people have this mentality that having malware is normal and acceptable so long as everything isn't completely broken ... just ignore it. many times the purpose of it isn't to actually fuck ur computer up but something even more sinister, it just happens a lot of it isn't particularly well put together and does that as a side effect.

when people download warez tho sometimes it's hard to tell if maybe something was slipped into it as a Trojan horse ... the scariest malware is the shit that would go unnoticed because it has no obvious bad effects. if I was gonna make some malware/spyware I think I'd try and make it as stealth as possible so they don't find out about it.

 

Well, macs have "os ten".

They had to catch up.

I dunno, really.

The account thing is concerning, but what part of computing currently doesn't work that way?

 

Yup. This is why my work machine NEVER connects to the internet. NEVER.

I always wonder about this. Everybody keeps reiterating that basically everything is web or cloud based today. Well it isn't. I really don't need to be connected 24/7 to work efficiently. It's complete bullshit. I don't need software updates and all kinds of other notifications to disrupt me every 3 minutes. And I certainly don't need to install every software update as soon as it comes out because more often than not it will put my work at risk.

MS has been having a hard time moving forward. They spend too much time trying to figure out what's gonna be cool in two years.

By the time they actually DO figure it out those two years have passed and other people have already made those changes.

 

When it works like it should I don't really care if it doesn't feel like anything new.

Hear hear!

It is just the logical thing to do if you care about your personal files and privacy. Very sane.

 

It's actually my client's files. If they go missing there's hell to pay.

 

keep at least one backup if it's really important, it sucks to learn the hard way. hard drives don't care about ur shit and when they get ready to fail, it's game over. and what sucks is that you know all of your files are on the magnetic platters but you can't get to them. you can have the data recovered by a procedure where they open the drive in a clean room and replace the read/write head assembly but it costs about $900 to do.

ive only ever lost one hard drive due to failure (a WD my passport external), WD is supposed to be one of the most reliable brands but it depends on individual models and sometimes it's just random. i had years and years of pirated music and movies on that one, so im pirating it back i just cant remember everything that was on there. all the other drives ive ever had lived long enough to become obsolete.

 

more consumption of memory?

 

the newest leaked build [9901] is showing 1.3GB usage out of the 2GB memory I gave to this virtual machine, that's with the task manager and the properties of the C drive open and the code::blocks IDE open but minimized.

It's showing 11.5 GB disk usage on the C:\ drive for a fresh install except for having installed VMware tools and the Code::Blocks IDE. if I remember correctly it seemed like a completely fresh install used 9.5GB of disk space before installing anything else but I would have to do it again to be sure. they've added a search bar to the right of the "start" button in the taskbar which says "search the Web and Windows" which when typed into can locate programs on the system or perform a web search for the phrase entered immediately returning results.

so the memory usage isn't too bad, and disk usage as well. internet explorer at up another 100megs of memory right off the bat, and I know that any web browser will eat up lots of memory, a few gigs even with lots of tabs open. what's more important is that the kernel allocates memory efficiently and when programs are closed the memory becomes available again. it's kinda hard to tell without a hard look how this is actually being accomplished and what get's cached for the next time you launch the program and how long, and when the cache get's flushed. it seems to run okay tho on only 2GB of memory in a virtual machine. I might try increasing the amount of memory to see what windows does with it (does it consume more if you give it more?) but I would have to repost that later, since im posting this from the VM. if I was running it on bare metal as my main OS I would suggest at least twice as much memory i.e. at least 4 GB cuz the kernel will do too much page swapping to disk with lots of programs open but it will run on 2 gigs, I wouldn't suggest any less tho.

also, like lode said above ls is an alias for dir in powershell, however, trying to use it with the switches like you would in a Linux shell ie. "ls -l" doesn't work because it's not actually the same ls utility and doesn't take the same command line arguments.

after opening internet explorer, at that point I'm really out of physical memory with 2GB so in order to load anything else the system would have to swap something out to disk.