Microsoft announced Monday that Windows 10 will arrive on July 29.
It also offered a panoply of details about the July 29 release, which
has clarified dozens of unknowns about the “final” Windows 10. Windows
10 Insider Preview build 10130, released last Friday,
contains a handful of worthwhile improvements, but still suffers from
more than a few glaring omissions and bugs galore. As we get closer to
the July 29 general availability date, the improvements need to
accelerate, and stability needs to improve -- two goals at sharp odds
with each other.
The way things look right now, the first version of Windows
10 to hit the streets won’t have many of the killer features we’ve been
hoping for. The apps, in particular, aren’t so much best-in-class as
they are barely-good-enough or even not-really-good-enough, like the
first round of Windows 7 Live apps or the current crop of Windows 8.1
Metro apps.
Here’s an overview of Windows 10 to date, incorporating what
we just found in build 10130, as well as Microsoft’s details about the
“final build” and its release on July 29. If you don't have the time --
or the interest -- to keep up with the details, this report will keep
you posted on how things stand. Like, right now. And we'll update it as
Microsoft fleshes out more of Windows 10.
In my experience, build 10130 is the most stable build to
date, but it isn’t without problems -- exactly what you should expect
from a beta build.
The Start menu
The Windows 10 Start menu, with Windows 7-like links on the left and
Windows 8-like tiles on the right, has a number of new prebuilt links.
Tiles no longer flip as the “live” data on them changes; instead, they
shutter-slide. The Power link is very easy to hit accidentally.
Start Menu: Windows 10 Build 10130 default Start menu for a new Microsoft account
Where the Start menu stands
There are a few customizing options
-- for example, you can drag entries onto the pinned list in the top
left, or drag items from the list on the left and turn them into tiles
on the right. Tiles on the right can be resized to Small (one-quarter
the size of Medium tiles), Medium (as in Calendar, Mail, and so on, in
the screenshot), Wide (two single-size slots, as with the Search and
Weather tiles), and Large (looks like two Mediums stacked on top of each
other). You can click and drag, group, and ungroup tiles on the right,
and give groups custom names.
You can resize the Start menu. You can adjust it vertically
in small increments, but trying to drag things the other way is limited
to big swaths of tiles: Groups of tiles remain three or four wide,
apparently dependent on the screen width at installation, and you can
only add or remove entire columns. You can drag tiles from the right
side of the Start screen onto the desktop for easy access.
New in build 10130, you can add common locations chosen from
a predefined set (Documents, Downloads, Music, Pictures, Homegroup, and
so on) to the left side of the Start menu. The All Apps list also has
an alphabetic index matrix, to make navigation faster.
While it's possible to manually remove all the tiles on the
right (right-click each, then choose Unpin from Start), the big area for
tiles doesn't shrink beyond one column.
Transparency on the Start menu and task bar are “On/Off” settings,
with a bit of fuzziness (reminiscent of Aero Glass) when it’s On. You
can stick with a black background on the Start menu, as shown, or opt to
have Windows pull a color from your desktop.
Remarkably, the old Windows 7 backup and restore programs,
File History and the Windows 7 Backup and Restore tool, are available in
the Settings app. To see it, Start > Settings > Update and
security > Backup > and click Go to Backup and Restore (Windows
7). That’s going to make a big difference to people moving from Windows 7
to Windows 10.
There are also changes in the way Windows 10 sets default
filename extension assignments, particularly for old-fashioned desktop
programs. Aul’s post goes into great detail on the topic.
What's likely to appear
Expect to see small, cosmetic changes, but it’s unlikely we’ll see any significant improvements until after RTM.
What we'd like to see
Power users would benefit greatly by seeing at least some of
the extensive customization available in the Windows 7 Start menu make
it through to the final version of Windows 10. Win10's Start menu
doesn't have the moxie of Win7's because it has been rewritten in XAML,
and the bells and whistles fell off in the process.
At a minimum, Win10's Start menu should have a hierarchy on
the left, with customizable menus. The All Apps list should also be
customizable with easily defined folders and entries. (If all else
fails, bet on Stardock and other add-on manufacturers to come up with a
Start menu replacement that's modifiable.)
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