Later on this year Microsoft will launch their latest operating system – the thing that makes your computer work. This time they are calling it Windows 10 – no I have no idea what happened to Windows 9 either! I guess we shouldn’t be too suprised about the lack of consistancy in numbers given that their previous operating systems (in order) consist of Windows 3.1 followed by Windows 3.11, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Millenium, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 (back to numbers then!), Windows 8 and 8.1 and now Windows 10.
Anyway, Microsoft are, as usual, offering a preview version of Windows 10 to people in order to receive feedback to help them ensure that the finished product isn’t as badly as Windows 8 (my statement, not theirs). If you are brave and fancy giving it a go, you can get your own technical preview version of Windows 10 from the following link..
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/preview-iso
…of course you shouldn’t simply download and install this lightly, although I found the process of upgrading very easy, there is certainly a risk involved and you should ensure that you have all the relevant backups in place before you start the process. I upgraded about a month ago from Windows 8.1 and the process was very simple. All of my settings, data and applications were retained – the whole process took me only 20 minutes, although I admit my computer is pretty powerful and has a solid state hard drive.
So whats new, well the first and most noticable change is that the start button is back on the desktop screen. The Windows 8 tile screen has been integrated into it rather well and there is also a new search function built into the task bar (the bit at the bottom of the screen) called Cortana which allows you to search for pretty much anything regardless of whether its on your computer or on the Internet. It is planned that this will also allow natural speech searching which would really be nice – think about simply talking to your computer to search for things on the Internet.
If you would like to see more about what’s new in Windows 10, then here is a really handy You Tube video available…