JorgeA

LOL It's clear that jumping two numbers (from 8 to 10) is an attempt to manufacture additional psychological space between the current OS and what truly should be considered a minor, hardly earth-shaking, revision. Forget all the talk about "one OS", blah blah blah. What the user experiences is the UI and the underlying functionality. Windows 95/98 was a vastly different experience from 3.11. XP constituted a major change from 98. Vista beautified the computing experience and Win7 improved on it with Jump Lists and a perfected Media Center that could work with U.S. cable systems. Windows 8 was a deep regression toward the tiling system and visual flatness of Windows 2 -- heck, IIRC it doesn't even have native optical disc playback -- and 8.1 only slightly undid the regression. Windows 9 10 is a bigger step toward recovering the UX advances made from 95 to 7, but to judge from what I've seen, then in terms of what meets my eyes as I get my work done it still has a long way to go to even approach 98 with regard to the esthetics. I'll be installing it sometime in the next few days, work permitting. Nodding to @MagicAndre , I'll post where he suggested if the thread seems to be gaining traction, or maybe in one of the other new Win10 threads that have just started. Or I may keep doing it here -- it depends! --JorgeA

That EOL only applies to Home Premium and Ultimate. As of this moment, there is no EOL announced for Professional SKUs. Cool, so Windows 7 can continue to climb and 8 can keep deflating. I did not know that. Thanks for the information! --JorgeA

The reviews on Windows 10 are starting to come in: Windows 10 review - A good Start Windows 10 Technical Preview, hands-on --JorgeA

"You would think that Microsoft would have learned from their Windows 8 mistakes of forcing terrible features down people’s throats, but it looks like they’ve integrated a positively awful Search button / panel into the Taskbar. Here’s how to hide it, although we haven’t figured out how to completely remove it yet ..." How to Hide the Stupid Search Button on the Windows 10 Taskbar Amazing -- how many days did it take for someone to start coming up with tweaks to the new operating system? Two, three? Wow. --JorgeA

Thanks for the info about naming the computer, that's a relief. About whether one needs to sign up for the Windows Insider program in order to download Windows 10, I found this direct link to the download page. Despite what it says are the steps to follow in order to get the OS, I scrolled down to the downloads and it allowed me to download Win10 no problem. As to whether I'll be able to actually install it without opening some account or signing up for anything, we'll see. I do want to give them feedback and so what I did was only an experiment. I thought that it might ask me to go back and sign up before proceeding with the download, but it let me just get the ISO without hurdles. BTW, I read somewhere (might be able to find the source again if necessary) that you don't actually have to enter the license key for the Technical Preview to work? --JorgeA

While Microsoft readies its next OS, the current one loses ground to previous versions: [source] Compare to last month's pie chart: [source] Window 8.1 went up by LESS THAN what Windows 8 went down. XP held steady, Vista actually went up a little bit, and Windows 7 was the big winner, up a full point. No doubt 7 will start going down and 8.1 will register steady gains as of the end of October, when OEMs are no longer allowed to sell systems with 7 preinstalled. But the market's verdict, when it had a choice, is clear. --JorgeA

Fabulous! The insight about the available area to grab the edge of a window for resizing may seem insignificant, but I do that almost every day and it sounds like it could be harder to manually resize windows now. Have you put the VM on a network? If so, what name for it do you see when looking at the network in Windows Explorer from another computer? I'm wondering if you can give the computer a name other than "This PC." If all the computers on a Windows 10 network are called "This PC" by default, then how could one tell which is which? Another question: is it necessary to open (create) a Microsoft account in order to download and use the TP, or is that only necessary if you intend to provide feedback? --JorgeA

That's a great point, calling it merely "Windows" forever does bring up exactly those possibilities. Wonder how long it'll be before the MSFT marketing geniuses pick up on that. Maybe we'll never get to versionless Windows, after all. --JorgeA

Obviously. But then there's the Windows OS vs Star Trek movie rating trend. But as pointed out, if this trend were to continue, Windows 10 is going to be "crap" as the "good" Windows 9 was shelved. Lastly, large image in a spoiler... source: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/subcultures/windows That's pretty funny! A plausible explanation has emerged for why Microsoft skipped the "Windows 9" label: Why Windows 10 isn't named 9: Windows 95 legacy code? If true, in my book that would be a praiseworthy decision, even if it leads to the strangeness of jumping from 8 to 10. (It doesn't seem so praiseworthy to have lazily used "Windows 9" to stand for 95 and 98 back then. People more qualified than me to comment on that -- please speak up! ) --JorgeA

Microsoft christens the next version of Windows as Windows 10 There is something potentially problematic in this explanation for the "10" labeling rather than "9": Anybody else think that problems could (needlessly) arise from this attempt to put everyone on the same "version" of Windows? There are many programs (and indeed OSes ) that I decline to use because the new "improved" version actually works worse, or had features taken out, or has features I don't want, or is plain butt-ugly. Depending on how tolerant Microsoft is of such dissidents, then under the new system either (1) I would have to conform along with everybody else and do without the removed functionality, or (2) if I could refuse to install the "updates" then my numberless version of Windows would have a different feature set than other people's numberless versions of Windows, and possibly leading to massive confusion when trying to troubleshoot a problem or discuss an OS issue. Today we can speak of Windows 7 or 8, and the listener knows more or less what he's dealing with. But if specific OS designations are abandoned, then during such a discussion we can't be sure that we're talking about the same thing. I suppose we might be able to rely on the version number (6.x.yyy.zzz), but that would introduce a cumbersome additional step into the discussion. And I'm not sure what it would help, anyway -- maybe you installed a June update but not the April one, for example. What do you think? --JorgeA

Sure. That was extremely helpful, thanks! The link you gave did address the subject exactly, as you said. And I even understood everything there! Seeing as I'd be installing the Technical Preview on a machine curently running XP, that would seem to meet the requirement that the older OS be installed first, so I should be OK. But I will turn off Hybrid Boot anyway. I suspect this is the reason that so may folks out there think Win8 is so wonderful because it boots so fast. Well yeah, if you put your Vista or Win7 computer to hibernate instead of actually shutting it off, you'd get that effect too. OTOH (and correct me if I'm wrong), hibernation doesn't clean things up internally and, as we know, sometimes it's necessary to do that in order to restore a sluggishly acting machine to full speed. The default Windows 8 shutdown setting prevents that from happening! BTW, did you notice that the images in the TechNet article are from a pre-RTM version of Windows 8 (CP or RP) -- although the window corners are already square, they still feature the 3D window buttons. --JorgeA

Of course, but in a VMware virtual machine. Multiple booting is getting to be a bad idea, with Microsoft thinking they don't actually have to leave the file system in a stable state any more. -Noel Can you fill me in on the part about leaving (or not leaving) the file system in a stable state? If there's no time to explain, a link or search term will do and I'll take it from there, thanks. --JorgeA

It's pretty neat that the new OS will be able to tell whether it's being used on a PC or a tablet, and change its look accordingly on the fly. But I'm hoping that the concept of adjusting the UI to the hardware will extend as far as reviving Aero Glass so that people with powerful enough machines have the option to enjoy a more pleasant working environment. And... why jump over 9 to call it "Windows 10"? I don't get the reasoning there. --JorgeA P.S. I forgot to mention the universal search from the Start Menu. I hope that one can disable this -- if I want to look up references to baseball on my PC, I don't want to be inundated by millions of irrelevant results from the Web. Even if they're somehow listed in separate categories, I'm not sure that I want to deal with mentally processing one type of result vs. another. If I want to look up something on the Web, I'm competent enough to launch a browser, thank you. If made the default value, this "feature" has the potential to annoy and turn off further millions of people from Windows.

Heh, heh... this is rich in more ways than one -- take your pick: Apple still uses Windows XP in its production factories -- It's time to upgrade guys --JorgeA

Windows 9: Telemetry data will be near real-time I'm not sure how much of an opportunity testers will have to put into actual words any concerns they might have, but one thing I intend to do is to repeatedly type "Aero Glass" in the Search function. And any time I accidentally find myself in the Metro environment, I will leave immediately. Wonder how much and how closely Microsoft will be watching. Maybe I'll try to install Office 2000 and the CompuServe Information Manager to see what happens... --JorgeA

Windows Technical Preview weighs in around 4GB, here's where the download will be Wondering if I should quintuple-boot on the machine where, in addition to the original Windows 7, I also have the Windows 8 DP, CP, and RP. Prudence suggests I should install it somewhere else... Anybody else planning to give the Technical Preview a spin? --JorgeA

That IS a nice link, thanks. It led me to a bunch of other oddities. You're right, time-zone issues aren't limited to Microsoft. Maybe the simplest solution is to put the whole world under UTC, so that wherever you are located it'll be the same clock hour... even if it means that 14:00 will be in plain daylight in one place and in the middle of the night somewhere else. And presto! no more time-zone difficulties. IMHO clock tricks like changing from standard to daylight savings time need to be abolished, too. It leads to so much confusion, and not just of the computer kind. Although it does have its benefits sometimes: I remember a few years ago, some terrorists died when their car bomb went off an hour early because they forgot to factor in the "spring forward" time change. Other time-zone weirdness includes the "Further-Eastern European Time" in Kaliningrad (Koenigsberg) where it can be an hour ahead of countries that lie to the east; or "Iran Standard Time" that's a half-hour different from countries directly to the north and south; and Venezuela, which put itself a half-hour behind the Caribbean islands straight north of it. There are even some time zones that are 15 or 45 minutes off from the neighboring areas. --JorgeA

Thanks for the details, jaclaz. I see that three of the issues affect Microsoft OSes as late as Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP. Another problem discussion dates from 2002 and refers to one of those three issues. Another link shows issues that were live "over 7 years ago." That leaves one which involved Vista and Windows 7, and that one "can occur" if I dunno, it just doesn't seem like a big deal, at least not any more. --JorgeA

First thing we wish to thank you for this question. Besides changing light bulbs and tagging as by design anything they had no idea how to fix : http://reboot.pro/topic/3541-how-many-microsoft-programmers-does-it-take-to-screw-in-a-light-bulb/ and publishing either misleading or plainly wrong documentation: http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/170497-whats-it-going-to-take-to-restore-previous-versions-from-shadow-copies/page-2#entry1086058 (and shuffling it a lot around their site), a substantial amount of them used last 13 (thirteen) years to solve (maybe) a small issue created when - in the course of bettering the Operating System - they managed to worsen it by removing support for an already existing feature: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/mswish/ut-rtc.html jaclaz The stuff on that last link comes off to me as neurotic hand-wringing: I don't know about other countries, but in the U.S. the time change takes place at 2AM local time. How many computers ever need to be rebooted at 2 in the morning?? I haven't had to manually update a computer clock for daylight savings since I moved my work from Windows 98 to Vista. But if the hardware clock runs in UTC, then for the sake of the user the OS will have to convert UTC into local time. How is that simpler? A conversion still needs to take place. In any case, if I'm in New Delhi, why would I need my PC to convert from UTC to New Delhi time at any level (BIOS or OS)? I'd rather have everything shown in my local time. UTC doesn't come into play at all and there's no need to convert anything in either direction. People in certain specialized computing environments might have a use (although I can't think of any) for what the guy proposes, but for 99.999% of users out there, it seems to me that running the BIOS clock in UTC is not only unnecessary, but also a source of potential confusion (and maybe even alarm) at those times when they do need to go into the BIOS for whatever reason, and then see a different time than they expect. Maybe I just need my morning coffee , but to me this really seems to be a solution in search of a problem. --JorgeA

Looks like Windows Phone is struggling to grow past even the moribund Blackberry: Smartphone market share and usage by country Score another one (another fiasco) for the hideous Metro tile interface. --JorgeA

I was intending that for @TELVM since he said he wouldn't be interested in anything past Windows 7 (including Windows 9), but of course everybody can add their own perspective. That would be good enough for me! And you're right, Win9 is looking like not much more than Win8.2. There was supposed to be an Update 2 back in August (including the revived Start Menu), but word is that many of the things that were intended to go into it got pushed back to Win9, possibly so as to beef up the "improvements" factor of the new OS relative to Windows 8. And so Update 2 fizzled out to almost nothing. I'll be happy with Windows 9 if: I don't have to see anything (in the Start Menu or PC settings) that looks like Metro; I can get native Aero Glass back; I can stay out of the cloud and the cloud stays out of my OS; I don't have to open a Microsoft Account in order to operate or maintain the OS; and I don't have to pay a yearly fee to use the OS. Not necessarily an exhaustive list! What else? --JorgeA

Like living the last years of a golden age, 'cause I'm certain by now that Se7en is the last non-retarded not-sucker-bait OS that Microshaft will ever release. It'll had to be Linux or whatever else after 2020. No chance, thanks. Let's assume that the limited previews that we've seen of Windows 9 are representative of what Microsoft is thinking of releasing next year. Based on those previews, what would you like changed in Windows 9 to make it worth using? (A sincere question, I'm curious to find out if my impressions of Win9 are similar to yours.) --JorgeA

Uh-oh, check out this little passage: Microsoft is looking to 'fundamentally change the way Windows is shipping' Found in a Microsoft job description for a "Mission Control Team": I don't like the sound of that... --JorgeA

Windows 9 (Threshold) will feature a Start menu that embraces the theme of your desktop More tidbits coming out about the new version of Windows. A First Look at the Windows Technical Preview [emphasis in original] Good, definitely an improvement. This might be an opportunity for us Aero Glass lovers to keep reminding them that we value choice in that regard, too. I'm thinking of installing the Technical Preview so that I can sign up for that program and tell them about Aero and any annoyances that are still left over from the Win8 fiasco. How do you guys feel? Care to join me? Of course this assumes that Microsoft will actually listen this time, but I get the sense that the worst offenders are gone from the company. --JorgeA

JorgeA, don't take it the wrong way , but you clearly have no idea on how things go in a company like MS. Julie Larsen-Green (or any other self-proclaimed UI guru in the high ranks of MS) decided that people didn't need the Start Menu and later used (real or faked) telemetry data to support the theory. jaclaz Haha -- you're right, that probably IS the way they did it. Time was when businesses sought to please their customers and provide the goods or services the customers wanted. In fact this still happens in most traditional industries. But in the tech industry, the deveolopers or executives all-too-often take the attitude that THEY know what's best for everybody else and WE, their customers, are the ones who must accept and adapt to THEIR preferences. It even happens in non-profit enterprises, as we've seen with Mozilla Firefox. --JorgeA