Forget about your fancy graphics cards and elaborate water-cooled computers nothing screams excitement like a new operating system release right anybody now well elated as you may or may not be Windows 10 is already available for user testing and feedback and it brings some big changes to the table so big in fact that Windows 9 was skipped entirely for reasons unknown now for those of you not using tablets the biggest addition will be the appearance of something very old indeed the Start menu windows 10 gives a much appreciated nod to keyboard and mouse and trackpad users for that matter by keeping the full screen modern UI as an option but otherwise making live tiles and also optional part of what otherwise looks like a much more traditional Start menu speaking of tiles it's also much easier to title different windows on your desktop with Windows 10 when the Aero Snap feature was introduced with Windows 7 it allowed users to quickly see two things side by side windows 10 improves on this concept by giving you the option to tile windows and quadrants making keeping your screen organized a snap oh come on I've done worse than that anyway you'll also be able to manage and switch between apps more easily metro or modern UI style apps will allow you to change settings and execute commands from the title bar instead of relying only on the charms menu and windows 10 also introduces a new task view that will clearly show everything you're working on side by side kind of like Mission Control on Apple OS 10 tasks you will even allow you to have multiple desktops open at once so you can switch between a number of different workspaces quickly a huge productivity booster for notebook users or anyone else who is limited to a single display but what else is going on besides UI enhancements don't worry Windows 10 has got some stuff going on under the hood as well most notably Cortana and I'm not talking about that weird holographic chick from halo although I guess kinda I am since she's like named after her and stuff but no she's different Cortana was originally meant to be a personal assistant that was Microsoft's answer to Siri she first debuted on Windows Phone and now be waking your way to the desktop to help you find things quickly organize your life voice control your PC and she even promises to preemptively give you info before you even search for it by digging around in your personal details not that she can know anything you tell her not to know very cool stuff you can manually turn stuff off like don't know about my fetishes also Microsoft is shifting its focus away from Internet Explorer and will be including an entirely separate browser in addition to Internet Explorer with Windows 10 its codename Spartan and features a new design philosophy better compatibility with modern websites a new rendering engine that they're saying is like blazing fast and support for browser extensions finally but wait there's more Windows 10 will ship with DirectX 12 which is designed to allow games to communicate more directly with your graphics hardware resulting in theoretically better performance and more realistic visuals and to delight your other senses Windows users are finally getting native support for flack lossless audio as well as a TV see a new video codec that can support 8k video the good news with all of this stuff is that you won't need any additional hardware to run Windows 10 if your PC already supports Windows 7 or 8 but Linus how much is all of this going to cost me well although Microsoft has been known to charge relatively high prices here's my feeling with the golden in Microsoft please give me Windows um that looks to be a thing in the past an upgrade to Windows 10 is going to cost you nothing if you have Windows 7 or 8.1 you can upgrade to ten for one year after its release for the low price all free though you'll still need to buy a full version if you're building a new rig but if you're upgrading your existing PC the extremely low cost interface enhancement DirectX 12 and all that great stuff makes Windows 10 about as interesting as an operating system release can be speaking of interesting
