Windows Windows 10 Technical Preview: Anyone trying it out?

Lawrence A.

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Location
New Mexico
Name
Larry
I have a fairly old laptop, permanently connected to peripherals now, including a decent 23 inch monitor,that has become my new, "desktop" machine. It was originally an i3 HP G62 laptop that has served me very well. (I know some people hate them, but all my HP computers have done very well by me, and I'm typing this on a new HP Split X2 i5 that I love.) Recently I decided I needed more "desktop" computing power, and that old HP laptop was upgradeable, as it turned out from an i3 330M to an i7 620M processor, so I bought a used i7 cpu, some Artic Silver thermal paste, and went to town. HUGE upgrade. Silver Effects plugins that used to take forever to open started opening in less than half the time. So I then replaced my 7200rpm HD with an SSD. It only runs at the SATA 2 speeds that the old interface allows (instead of SATA3), but it rocks compared to before. My system used to take several minutes to boot up, load everything, drop the cpu usage and become usable. It is now about 30 seconds from when I push the power button to when I can open my email program, which opens instantaneously. It's lovely, and for about $150 is a huge upgrade. I can't afford a new computer so it pleases me pink.

Having all this new zippy stuff, I decided to create a small partition on my new SDD and install the Windows 10 technical preview on it. I did that late last night, so have less than 24 hours experience with the new program, but I'm pretty impressed. The IE 11, which is also on my windows 8.1 ultrabook, is a nice and fast browser, the system seem overall responsive and quite fast (although maybe that's because it is on a small 50gig partition), and my initial feeling is that Microsoft has a winner if it doesn't mess things up. Lightroom and Photoshop work well on it, and I think it will be a good OS in which to work my photo files. Office 2000 premium from 15 years ago installed without a hitch and works as it should. Vivaldi, the new browser by one of Opera browser's original creators, installed and works the same way it does on Windows 7. It, too, is a technical preview, but it's pretty interesting.

Just wondering if anyone else is using the Windows 10 technical preview and what their experience of it is. So far mine is favorable. 8.1 allowed me largely to avoid the Metro interface, and I do, but I like having it integrated into a more traditional start button.

What do you think?
 
I've got it installed on one half of my spare laptop (Linux Mint on the other half). I quite like it but I haven't tried any serious applications on it yet. The look and feel is very clean and unfussy, and it seems responsive for a tech preview release. Mine is probably a level or two back from the current one as I don't want to use up my satellite data allowance downloading the latest version.
 
I haven't had any problem running my usual programs: Photoshop, Lightroom, Word, and I installed Windows Live Mail since I don't like the default email client on it. Why they killed Outlook Express, is beyond me; I still miss it.

I'm presently putting together a slide show in Powerpoint of some photo from my trip in Nov/Dec 2014, and it works like it is supposed to. It seems quite stable, so I don't doubt the final release is not too far out.
 
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