Windows 10 All-in-One For Dummies. Woody Leonhard

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      FIGURE 2-5: Cortana sits, listening, and watching, waiting to help you. That should either make you skeptical or scared — or a little of both.

Back in 2001, Microsoft released a game called Halo: Combat Evolved. In Halo: CE, you, the player, take the role of the Master Chief, a kinda-human kinda-cyber soldier known as Master Chief Petty Officer John-117. Cortana is part of you, an artificial intelligence that’s built into a neural implant in your body armor. After saving Captain Keyes, Cortana and the Master Chief go into a map room called the Silent Cartographer, and … well, you get the idea. Cortana is smooth and creepy and omniscient, just like the Windows 10 character.

      Other improvements

      Many other features — not as sexy as Cortana but every bit as useful — put Windows 10 head and shoulders above Windows XP. The standout features include:

      On the security front, Windows 10 is light years ahead of Windows XP. From protection against rootkits to browser hardening, and a million points in between, XP is a security disaster — Microsoft no longer supports it — while Windows 10 is relatively (not completely) impenetrable.

      Although Windows 10 isn’t the Windows XP of your dreams, it’s remarkably easy to use and has all sorts of compelling new features.

What’s New for Windows 7 Users

      Three years after Windows 10 hit the ether, Windows 7 was still riding strong. Depending on how you count and whose numbers you believe, at the three-year mark, Windows 7 was still driving about half of all Windows computers in the world. That’s staying power, and it’s worthy of your respect.

      Nonetheless, Windows 7 is clearly on the way down, and Windows 10 is on the way up. One big reason for that is that Microsoft has stopped providing updates and support for Windows 7. That’s as it should be, nostalgia notwithstanding.

      Don’t be worried. Anything that works with Windows 7, 8, or 8.1 — and almost everything from Vista — will work in Windows 10. Programs, hardware, drivers, utilities — just about anything.

That’s a remarkable achievement, particularly because your Windows Desktop apps/Legacy programs (there’s that L word again) have to peacefully coexist with the WinRT API-based Windows/Universal/Modern/Metro apps.

      Windows 10 does have lots going for it. Let me skip lightly through the major changes between Windows 7 and Windows 10.

      Getting the hang of the new Start menu

By now, you’ve no doubt seen the tiles on the right of the Start menu (refer to Figure 2-6).

      FIGURE 2-6: The Windows 10 desktop and Start menu.

      If you’re coming to Windows 10 from Windows 7 — without taking a detour through Windows 8 — those tiles are likely to represent your greatest conceptual hurdle. They’re different, but in many ways they’re familiar.

Do you remember gadgets in Windows 7? See Figure 2-7. They actually started in Windows Vista. Many people (who finally found them) put tiles for clocks on their desktops. I also used to use the CPU gadget and on some machines the Weather gadget.

      In Windows 10, you have a layout that’s more or less similar to Windows 7, but it has fantastically good gadgets. Microsoft rebuilt all the plumbing in Windows to support these really good gadgets. Those updated, enormously powerful gadgets are now called Windows 10 apps.

      FIGURE 2-7: Windows 7 gadgets — at least from the interface point of view — work much like the new Universal Windows app tiles.

The new gadgets/apps run in resizable windows on the desktop. They can do phenomenal things. In fact, Microsoft Edge is quite superior to Internet Explorer, even if it doesn’t yet have all the bells and whistles. Edge, which runs as a gadget/Windows 10 app, has become the new default browser.

      Tiles for these gadgets/apps appear to the right of the list СКАЧАТЬ