A little off photography topic today. Today’s post will be about my experiences with moving my working computer (on which I edit all my photos) over to the Windows 10 technical preview operating system. Some of you may have already noticed that the screen-shots in the blog posts started looking a little differently. This is of course because Windows 10 uses a little different theme.

But first a little background. I quite like playing with new software, and I don’t mind it being a early version. I think at one time or other I had all available versions of Windows installed on my PC (and even Linux and MacOS at one time, but those never stuck around fro long). I even had Longhorn at one time, for those who still remember that system :) So when the technical preview for Windows 10 came out, I wanted to try it right away. But since I also have to work on the PC I did so only in a virtual machine. But as luck would have it, few weeks ago, the main HDD in my PC had a hardware failure, and while replacing it, I decided to go with a new operating system.

 
And here I my thoughts on it. Windows 10 works wonderfully for it being only a technical preview. It’s almost on par with the stability of Windows 8. I did run into few crashes, but what I could find out, there were caused by the graphic card drivers, which are of course also beta version. And since a lot of graphic editing is quite demanding on this, this is a cause for problems.

My biggest problem was with Nik plugins, especially Color Efex Pro, which crashed almost constantly. Luckily there is a simple fix for that, it’s enough to disable GPU processing in the settings. Secondly, Photoshop froze randomly in the earlier builds, especially when I opened multiple images. But that disappeared in the latest build. From a non-working point of view, I seen few games having problems with the same beta drivers, causing crashes.

Other than that, I had no real problems. One finds stuff that is not finished yet, features that don’t work properly or just a work in progress stuff. But for a normal day to day work, nothing from this really influenced my work at all.

What I like on the Windows 10 technical preview, and why I will probably stay with it is:
– it’s really fast, especially from the SSD hard-drive.
– modern apps work the same as normal programs. There are few that I like to use (Nextgen reader, Hyper for Youtube, Mail) and it’s just easier to have them in a window.
– snapping now work also for normal programs. Again, especially on a huge screen this is a big help. And it’s even intelligent, that if you resize a snapped window, and then snap another one next to it, it will fill the remaining space.
– it now supports multiple desktops and a much nicer Alt-TAB dialog. This all helps a lot with productivity overall.
– it shows notification (I can’t wait for Win 10 for my phone, so it synchronizes them between my phone and PC :))

 
Than there are some other nice features, which still need work. For instance the new browser Spartan, is currently just so much faster than Chrome or Opera, it’s just still missing some basic functions, and it’s quiet a memory hog. But the moment they correct this, it will be the browser I’m using.

So overall, my few weeks with Windows 10 were great. I was expecting so many more problems after the articles I read about it, and I seen very few. So if any of you want to try Windows 10 out, I can only recommend it. It will be, once it’s finished, a nice (free) upgrade to windows 8.

 
For those curious on what PC I’m running the system, here are the basic specs: Intel i7 3.4ghz, 16.0 GB ram, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660, Samsung SSD 850 EVO 250GB HDD, LG 34UM95 34 inch display.