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Windows 10 – Tech Preview
As we all known, recently Microsoft released their technical preview of their latest bells and whistles operating system. Although there have been leaks and screen shots put out there in the wild, a lot of what is there has been a complete unknown to most people, but you can rest assured that as soon as they released their Technical Preview, the servers used to host the disk image file usually grind to speeds equivalent to an old dial up connection as everyone from school kids to the network administrators out there want to see what the latest release is all about.
Microsoft, as well as other know companies e.g. Apple, has for the last few years been steering their operating systems to use a shared core and interface for seamless integration between the different devices, be it either a desktop operating system, a tablet, or a mobile phone, and as each iteration of them progresses, then the closer to the unified operating system seem to be.
Above are images of Windows 8.1 Metro screen and a Windows Phone interface
As we have seen, with Windows 8 and 8.1, along with Windows Phone 8.1 (images inset above), the interfaces have become evolved together so much so as the PC version on the monitor looks almost like an oversized mobile phone screen.
Quite a lot of people took issue at first with the look and use of the Metro Start Screen, and couldn’t get used to how it worked or looked, and so reverted back to using Windows 7, some people even went as far as ordering their new PC’s come with Windows 7 installed instead of Windows 8.1 due to the interface differences and the missing Start Menu on the desktop.
Microsoft has listened to their customer’s criticisms and issues with this latest release, and has now implemented a blend between the 2 interfaces of the two afore mentioned versions of their operating systems.
The new start menu is just one of many cosmetic differences the user will now see in this new OS, some of the advances this brings to the user is the Live Tiles that the user can choose from and snap or pin to the start menu, but for those who want the Start Screen of Windows 8.1, it is just a couple of clicks away from being implemented.
Of course we get the usual assortment of new desktop backgrounds, but so far the screen savers are still the same (if that sort of thing interests you). The system requirements are still on par with the requirements of Windows 7, so not much has changed with regards to that but with it being the latest version of Windows, this promises to support the latest hardware out the box, although it didn’t detect my ROG Striker GTX 760’s and the Maximus VII Hero’s hardware, but more on this shortly.
The integration with the online services Microsoft provides has gone a step further in this, their latest release, again like in Windows 8 / 8.1, it is tightly integrated with your Windows Live account, although now it is starting to be referred to as Xbox live or a plain and simple Microsoft account, as the services which wasn’t already integrated are now merging together to provide a more unified front for the users, but with this latest version of Windows, it is now having more integration with Office 365 for those who subscribe to the service, including the design elements of Windows Explorer etc., WordPad, Paint, and all those other apps that come with Windows.
Drivers
As always with every new release of Windows, it promises to provide support for more of the latest hardware out of the box, so as the basic user will not have to worry about searching for drivers to update, but for those who are, let’s say more adventurous with their computers, the latest release of a new version of Windows always brings about problems with driver support. As of yet NVidia nor AMD have released any beta drivers specifically for Windows 10, which in itself is unusual as with every public beta release prior, they have released their beta drivers tuned specifically for the latest Windows OS within a matter of a couple of weeks, but so far neither has seen reason to release specifically tuned drivers to take into account the under lying technologies that Windows 10 brings to the marketplace.
Upon installing Windows 10 on my own PC (Specs are in Sig below this post), I found that most of the Maximus VII Hero’s on-board hardware, including the Intel network adapter was not supported out of the box, and neither was my GTX 760’s, but what we have to remember is this is still beta software, and things may well be different in the final version.
Running Asus’ installer for the drivers off the DVD resulted in an error saying that the version of Windows is not supported, so we will have to also wait for Asus to release updated drivers to take into account this new operating system, but I was able to manage to get all the drivers installed after a short amount of time either bypassing the installer and pointing device manager directly at the needed drivers, or running the setup program instead of the included Asus one that silently installs the drivers.
Performance and compatibility
After Windows was setup and I installed my usual array of program, (Eset Security Suite, MS Office, Plex Media Server, Chrome, BS Player etc.) I went about installing Steam Origin and µPlay, having experienced no issues installing any of the software, I went about trying to play a few games to put my feet up for a while whilst Plex was indexing all the media files stored on the hard drives.
First game I loaded up, WarFace, this ran with the same performance and no lag as it does in Windows 7, 8.x, although I do have to say it did seem to load up slightly quicker, whether this was my imagination or not, to this day I still do not know, but the games are all loading off a Samsung Evo 840 SSD.
The next game I tried was Far Cry 3, now this I did find I had issues with. Everything seemed fine at first, it loaded, I picked a random save point I had which turned out to be just getting out of Sitra’s Temple, so off I trotted and headed for the nearby car, and next this I know, I was back looking at the desktop with a popup appear saying Far Cry 3 has encountered a problem, so back into Steam I went and the fired off the file check for it, and came back with no problems there, so I rebooted my PC, and tried it again, this time I made it as far as getting inside the car and I thought great, looks like there isn’t no problem now, must have been one of those gremlins that appear every now and then for no reason, of course, that must of cursed it because this time, I got a BSOD saying IRQL not equal to zero or something, the same one I used to see when I used to deliberately crash the original Pentiums with the divide by 0 bug!!
So I gave up on Far Cry 3, and as Alien Isolation had just been released, I went and downloaded that and started to play, well after 3 days of no issues, I have come to the conclusion that there must be some sloppy programming in Far Cry 3 for it to bug out like that randomly that Windows 10 doesn’t agree with. So I assume those who are still reading this are now wanting to see some hard numbers in regards to Windows 10 performance?
As we can see from the above, using the same hardware, using the same drivers (GeForce Driver 344.11) running the same test (Alien Isolation Benchmark), there is quite a bit of difference between the two operating systems, which no doubt will be due to the drivers not being specifically tuned down to Windows 10’s under the bonnet stuff that effects these things, so no doubt in the future, this will be addressed and the performance of this will improve no end.
There are no end of other features and improvements to Windows 10 which I have yet to unearth myself, and will continue to do so at some point, but for me, I have gone back to using Windows 7 for the time being. So the question which some people will no doubt ask out there…
“Is it stable enough to use as every day OS on your PC?”
Well the answer to that is, it depends on the user and what uses you do. If you are willing to put up with the occasional crash and blue screen and possibly lose any work you are doing at the time, and report these crashes to Microsoft, then yes by all mean use this as your everyday OS, but for most people the answer is a resounding NO, it is nowhere near ready for an everyday OS for most people out there.
Please don’t get me wrong in with what I have just said, this OS holds a lot of promise, and makes up to those users out there who want the desktop and Start Menu back, it also has the added benefit of complying to those users who love the Metro interface of Windows 8.x and are looking for the next iteration of this when it is released. I for one can’t wait to see what the finished product will hold for us, because as it stands, it has a very good chance to replace Windows 7 for those who refused to upgrade from that to 8.x because of the Metro interface, and could very well be the next “Windows XP” that businesses out there adopt, but we shall just have to wait till next year to see what the final spit an polished version brings to us as there will be a lot of changes to it between now and then.
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