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

Автор: Woody Leonhard

Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited

Жанр: Зарубежная компьютерная литература

Серия:

isbn: 9781119680581

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#fb3_img_img_6dcbdba5-ead3-5ac8-a429-7cc07de8caaa.png" alt="Remember"/> Here’s the big picture, from the Windows 7 perspective: Windows 10 has a desktop, and it’s more or less analogous to the desktop in Windows 7. It doesn’t have a Windows 8/8.1–style Metro view. Doesn’t need a Metro view: The gadgets (or Metro apps or Windows 10 apps) now behave themselves and run in resizable windows on the desktop.

      In Windows 10, you can switch from a finger-friendly view of the desktop to a mouse-friendly view and back. The finger-friendly view — called Tablet mode — has larger app tiles, opens the apps at full-screen, and hides most of the text. It takes three clicks to change modes. Or you can plug or unplug your keyboard on a 2-in-1 such as the Surface Pro, and Windows 10 will ask if you want to switch modes.

      Here’s the ace in the hole: Programmers who write programs for Windows 10 app can have their gadgets run, with a varying amount of modification, on Windows 10 for PCs, Windows 10 for tablets without a keyboard, Windows 10 running on mobile-phone-like ARM chips (primarily from Qualcomm) and even Xbox One. At least, that’s the theory. It remains to be seen how it works in practice.

      Exploring new stuff in the old-fashioned desktop

      You’ll notice many improvements to long-neglected portions of the Windows 7–style desktop. For example, if you copy more than one file at a time, Windows actually keeps you on top of all the copying in one window. Imagine that.

Snapshot of the new and greatly improved Task Manager.

      FIGURE 2-8: The new and greatly improved Task Manager.

      

File Explorer (formerly known as Windows Explorer) takes on a new face and loses some of its annoying bad habits. You may or may not like the new Explorer, but at least Windows 10 brings back the up arrow to move up one folder — a feature that last appeared in Windows XP. That one feature, all by itself, makes me feel good about the new File Explorer. Explorer also now offers native support for ISO files. About time.

      

Storage Spaces requires at least two available hard drives — not including the one you use to boot the PC. If you can afford the disk space, Windows 10 can give you a fully redundant, hot backup of everything, all the time. If a hard drive dies, you disconnect the dead one, slip in a new one, grab a cup of coffee, and you’re up and running as if nothing happened. If you run out of disk space, stick another drive in the PC or attach it with a USB cable, and Windows figures it all out. It’s a magical capability that debuted in Windows Home Server, now made more robust. 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.

      

If you ever wanted to run a Virtual Machine inside Windows, Microsoft has made Hyper-V available, free. It’s a rather esoteric capability that can come in very handy if you need to run two different copies of an operating system on one machine. You must be running a 64-bit version of Windows 10 Pro (or Enterprise), with at least 4GB of RAM. See Book 8, Chapter 4.

      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.

      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.

      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.