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Vanished blog posts? Enterprise gaps? Welcome to Windows 10

The riddle that will satisfy Win 8 haters, at least

It's a team effort... right, guys?

Microsoft says it is collaborating with its users as never before, pushing out this preview well in advance of release so that it can gather feedback and make changes. Get your feedback in quick though, because if Microsoft is to hit its planned release of Winter 2015, there are only a few months left for meaningful changes.

What then is in the preview? It is mainly aimed at keyboard and mouse users, a Microsoft product manager explained to me, to show how the Windows 10 will work for those users, subject to any changes between now and release.

Windows 8 has a split personality, with the tiled, tablet-friendly user interface on one side, and the traditional desktop on the other. The thinking behind Windows 8 was not only to have touchable apps, but also an “Immersive UI”, apps running full screen with no distracting screen furniture.

With Windows 10, the immersive UI is almost gone – at least in the technical preview. You can use the full-screen Start menu if you want (though it is off by default), but apps always appear with a windows bar, and the taskbar always shows, unless you select full-screen view from the App Commands menu, a new drop-down menu in the top left corner of a store app window.

Start Menu

The new Start menu is two things in one: a Start menu, and Live Tiles

In other words, you are in a sense always in the desktop. This may change before final release, and Microsoft showed a video mock-up of a new tablet mode, but it is a sign that the company has backtracked substantially from the Windows 8 concept, even though Store apps remain prominent.

Remnants of the split personality do remain. There is only one browser in the preview - Modern IE (Internet Explorer) is absent - but some other apps such as Calculator appear in two versions, a Store app and a desktop app, and there is still a desktop Control Panel and a modern-style PC Settings.

Calculate to the max

If you start a Store app like modern Calculator or Maps, it opens maximised. If you resize the window, and close it, then it opens next time in the size you last used. However, if you reboot, it reverts to maximised by default. This may be anomalous behaviour since it is annoying: who wants a calculator app full screen?

The new Start menu has live tiles as well as a Windows 7 style hierarchical view. However these are really separate features. You can drag away all the live tiles and use a naked Start menu if you prefer.

The value of the live tiles is an open question. You only see them when you hit Start, so they do not work for notification. They perhaps work as a kind of dashboard, showing information like how many unread emails you have, and the latest news headline, but they may exist in Windows 10 just as a way of retaining some continuity with Windows 8.

Users obsess about shutdown menus, especially as this was hard to find in the first release of Windows 8. In Windows 10, Shutdown is at the top of the Start menu. You can also switch users by clicking your username there. Easy enough to find.

Naked start

If you don’t want live tiles on the desktop, you can expunge them completely with Naked Start

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