Windows 10 All-in-One For Dummies. Woody Leonhard
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See Book 7, Chapter 4 for more on Storage Spaces.
Backup gets a major boost with an Apple Time Machine work-alike called File History. You may not realize it, but Windows 7 had the capability to restore previous versions of your data files. Windows 10 offers the same functionality, but in a much nicer package — so you’re more likely to discover that it’s there. See Book 8, Chapter 1. Unfortunately, Windows 10 drops the capability to create whole-disk ghost backups — you need to buy a third-party program such as Acronis if a full backup is in your future.
Power options have changed significantly. Again. The new options allow Windows to restart itself much faster than ever before.
What’s New for Windows 8 and 8.1 Users
You’re joking, right?
Windows 10 is a no-brainer if you already have Windows 8 or Windows 8.1.
Okay, I’ll backtrack a bit. If you’re a big fan of the tiled Metro side of Windows 8 or 8.1, you probably won’t be happy with Windows 10, at least at first. There’s no Charms bar, the taskbar always takes up part of the screen, Metro apps aren’t completely immersive because they have title bars, and the full-screen tablet mode in Windows 10 isn’t exactly comparable to the Metro side of Windows 8.
But if you use a mouse, even a little bit, or the desktop side of Windows 8/8.1, there’s absolutely no question in my mind that you’ll be happier with Windows 10.
Here’s what you’ll find when shifting from Win8 to Win10:
The Start menu — need I say more?
Big new features (detailed in the next section), along with a bunch of small tweaks really make life easier. Even in tablet mode, you’ll find all sorts of things to love about Windows 10.
Windows 10 apps are updated and greatly improved, although Windows 10 has only a few more apps than Windows 8.
OneDrive is built-in and it works better. You don’t need to install a separate app.
Windows 10 is, in many ways, what Windows 8 should’ve been. If Microsoft had been listening to its experienced Windows customers, Windows 8 never would’ve seen the light of day.
What’s New for All of Windows
Permit me to take you on a whirlwind tour of the most important new features in Windows 10 — of which there are many.
The Start menu
Unless you’ve been living on an alternate Windows desktop, you know that Windows 10 sports a new Start menu, with shortcuts on the left, a list of all your apps and programs in the middle, and Windows 8–style tiles on the right.
Figures 2-2 and 2-6 earlier in this chapter show the Start menu. In Figure 2-9, I show you the Start menu with the phone-dialer style index; you get to it by clicking the Start icon and then clicking one of the headings for the app groups (A, B, and so on).
You have very few customizing options for the Start menu — for example, you can’t drag entries onto the Most Used list in the top left, or drag items from the list on the left and turn them into tiles on the right. Tiles on the right can be resized to small (one-quarter the size of a medium tile), medium, wide (two single-size slots, as with the Store and Mail tiles in the screenshot), and large (twice the size of wide). You can click and drag, group and ungroup tiles on the right, and give groups custom names.
FIGURE 2-9: The Start menu, with the index that lets you jump to apps quickly.
Although it’s possible to manually remove all the tiles on the right (right-click each, Unpin from Start), the big area for tiles doesn’t shrink beyond one column.
In tablet mode, Start looks quite different, although many of the options are the same. See Figure 2-10.
I talk about personalizing the Start menu in Book 3, Chapter 2 and working with tablet mode in Book 3, Chapter 3.
Microsoft Edge
Microsoft Edge (Figure 2-11) finally sheds the albatross that is Internet Explorer. Edge is a stripped-down, consciously standards-compliant, screamingly fast shell of a browser, ready to take on just about any website anywhere. Microsoft Edge may see Microsoft taking back the mindshare it’s been steadily losing on the browser front for the past decade or so. As of this writing, though, Google’s Chrome rules the roost.
FIGURE 2-10: The Start menu in tablet mode.
FIGURE 2-11: Microsoft Edge finally lets you cut the Internet Explorer cord.
Edge is a Windows 10 app (formerly Universal app, formerly Metro app) that runs inside its own window on the desktop, like every other WinRT API-based Universal Windows app. In contrast, Internet Explorer is an old-fashioned desktop app, and the difference is like a Tesla 3 versus a 1958 Edsel.
Adobe Flash Player is turned off by default for enhanced security; there’s a reading view as well, which helps on smaller screens. Click the OneNote icon in the upper right, and all the OneNote markup tools become available. And you can Print as PDF.
