All hail WINDOWS 10

It has been anticipated and expected. It has also hit more than 27 million downloads around the world since its release. This for sure is Microsoft’s best so far in a long time. I personally didn’t try the technical preview but I got the windows 10 OS few days ago, did a lot of troubleshooting and research before I could say anything about it. In the next few posts. I’d be sharing my discoveries, knowledge, tutorials, warnings, red and white flags, hints and tips and most importantly, the best ways to get windows 10 if and if you don’t want to keep your files. But first, I’d like to explain some of the features embedded in windows 10.

CORTANA

Cortana is the almighty personal assistant designed by MICROSOFT. It is their answers to similar questions such as Siri of Apple and Google Now of Android. I’ve seen lots of videos about the power of Cortana on the web, I’m yet to have a firsthand trial but believe me, she blew Siri and Google Now out of the water, I speak for no one here. Bad News is, when I installed the Upgrade, I didn’t get Cortana as well. This is because Microsoft said that it doesn’t support my region and language selection. Cortana is a major part of the OS with deep integration as it studies your every action on the pc, social network, Locations, friends and networks.

Cortana, the Windows Phone assistant, shows up in Windows 10 as a search pane on the taskbar, which you can also trigger by saying 'Hey Cortana' – and when you start searching the Start menu. That gets you apps you have installed, documents you have access to, apps you could install from the Store, search results from the web and a range of other information – including from apps and services that integrate with Cortana.

You can set reminders for different times and places that appear on other Cortana devices, so you can get your Microsoft Band to remind you to take the rubbish out as you walk up to your front door.

WINDOW SHORTCUT

Most Windows users don't know the Alt-Tab keyboard combination to see and switch between all running apps, so as well as having a redesigned task switcher with bigger thumbnails, Windows 10 also puts a task view icon in the taskbar to help them find it.

SPLIT SCREEN

Because all your apps and programs run in windows on the desktop, instead of modern apps from the Store being in their own space, you can no longer drag across the left edge of the screen to bring another app on screen and get a split view. Instead, you drag windows into the corners of the screen to get the familiar Snap view.

You can now use all four corners of your screen if you want each window to take up a quarter of the screen instead of half, and the space that isn't filled by the window you just dragged shows thumbnails of your other windows to make it easier to snap the next one into place. Good News, Metro apps no longer take up the whole screen at all times, they can now be resized. Yaaaay!

START MENU

The full-screen Start screen of Windows 8 is back to being a Start menu in Windows 10 that tries to combine the best of both options. You get a scrolling Start menu that's restricted to a single column, with jump lists and fly out menus for extra options, divided into frequently used and recently installed programs, with the option to switch to a scrolling view of all your applications, sorted alphabetically.

But you also get an extra pane where you can pin Windows 8-style tiles, complete with 'rotating 3D cube' animations of live tiles. You can drag the Start menu to be a larger size or even set it to be full screen.

The start menu has been completely redesigned. I sometimes hated the start menu on windows 8 and 8.1 but this start menu on 10 is so fabulous. It combines the start menu from 8.1 and pins it side by side with the native start menu from windows XP, Vista and 7. The search function still works straight from the start menu, you can also access power menus and setting straight from this new start menu. The User icon can also open the user account setting s.

TABLET MODE

this picture shows windows start screen on Tablet Mode.

With evolution of mobile PCs,we have seen PCs that can be remodeled into tablets in 2 seconds. This devices simply detach from the keyboard and become more portable and more flexible but so does windows 10. The OS can be put in a tablet mode so as to make windows more touch friendly. Gestures are incorporated to make usage a breeze. Do you have a device that can be split from the keyboard or a foldable device, does yours just simply has a touch screen, then you should try out this mode.

You can change the look of Windows 10 on a touchscreen PC by turning on tablet mode – either as a setting or by removing or folding away the keyboard on a two-in-one or convertible PC. That takes away the normal taskbar, giving the user one with just a Windows button (which opens a full-screen Start menu that shows the tiles and hides the scrolling list of programs), a back button, Cortana and the task switcher button.

All your windows switch to full screen, although you can drag things around so you can have two windows side by side (but not three). And you get the same interface when you plug a screen and keyboard into a Windows 10 phone – the Start screen to launch apps, the back button and task switcher to navigate between them, and universal apps will use the interface they'd have if you were running on a PC.

MICROSOFT EDGE

Believe me, that name must have fallen from the vaults of heaven as t does have an actual EDGE over all other browsers I’ve seen on the windows OS. It makes Internet explorer look like an explorer without a map and compass. It is faster, simpler and safer as I have read in recent reviews and reports across the web. This browser is nothing you can imagine till you have actually tried it out.  If you want to move on from where you stopped, you can simply import your bookmarks and favorites. 1 part of the browser that I like is the MAKE A WEB NOTE. It allows you to edit content of a website to a note that you can edit and save . To catch up with fast-moving browsers like Chrome and Firefox, Microsoft took its browser back to basics, ripping out years of code that didn't fit with web standards and making a lean, fast browser.

It's a work in progress – it won't get support for things like ad-blocking extensions until a while after Windows 10 launches – but you can do plenty of neat things here. For example, you can scribble notes on a web page to send to a friend (if you're trying to decide what hotel to stay in on holiday, for example) and Edge has Cortana built in to pull useful information out of web pages, like the phone number of a restaurant, or the opening hours.

Sites like Medium that didn't work properly with IE should look better and have more features in Edge.

NOTIFICATIONS

If you've used Windows Phone 8.1 (or Android and/or iOS), you're used to a notification centre you can drag down from the top of the screen. Windows 10 puts that on the right of the screen, where the charms bar was in Windows 8, with notifications from various apps at the top and your choice of various settings buttons at the bottom for quick access.

COMMANDer PROMPT

Those of us that use the command prompt have been stuck with pretty much the same experience since the 1990s, but in Windows 10 you can finally resize the command prompt window and use familiar keyboard shortcuts to copy and paste at the command prompt. It's far from ground-breaking but it's a very welcome improvement after years of frustration.

MISCELLANEOUS

1.      No more having Windows announce that you have fifteen minutes to get everything done before it restarts to apply an update. Instead of leaving Windows 10 to decide when to do that, if there's an update that will need a restart you can have Windows ask when you want to schedule that for.

You can only do that once the update has been downloaded. If you want to have certain times off-limits for restarts, you'll need the features in Windows Update for Business (for Windows 10 Pro and Enterprise) which lets you block restarts so they don't happen in working hours, or on certain dates.

2.      Windows 10 gets a new Windows Store, where you can download desktop programs as well as modern Windows apps. Many of those apps will be universal apps that are the same code on a PC, a Windows phone, an Xbox One and even on HoloLens, with the interface changing to suit the different screen sizes. The Office for Windows apps like Word and Excel are universal apps, as are the Outlook Mail and Calendar apps.

3.      The Windows 8 Settings app has taken over many more of the settings that used to be in Control Panel, and it has a Control Panel-style interface with icons to navigate with. But the old Control Panel interface is still there, for settings that aren't in the new Settings app (or if you're just used to finding things there).

4.      As well as the usual fingerprint scanning support, Windows 10 can use your face or your iris to log you on to your PC. Windows Hello will work with existing fingerprint readers, but it needs a new 3D infrared camera in your PC to use your face – it needs the infrared to know that you're alive and the 3D camera to get the contours of your face, so it doesn't work if someone holds up a photo or wears a mask.

So far there are only a few notebooks from Asus, HP, and Dell that have the right camera, and an all-in-one PC from Lenovo. Once you log in with Hello, Windows can do secure authentication with sites and apps that use the FIDO standard (and with Azure Active Directory) instead of you typing in a password.

Do you know about more windows 10 functions or have more questions on aforementioned ones, use the comment section. up next is how to download and properly install Windows 10 on your PC. stay tuned