Windows 8 was a bold move by Microsoft, with some radical changes. But they were rejected by many users, who saw the system as focusing on tablets and touch at the expense of the desktop.

Windows 10 Technical Preview is Microsoft’s most comprehensive response so far. It’s an early preview of the next generation of Windows, something which tries to combine the best of both interface, and, crucially, gives users far more control over how they use their system.

The build is focused on a few major features: the Start menu, apps running in windows, virtual desktops. There are few radical changes elsewhere.

Those core features are hugely important, though, and there are a few other items to explore, so we downloaded an ISO for a closer look.

Start Menu

Yes, it’s true, the Start Menu is back. It’s not exactly the same as before (some Windows 8-like twists give it extra power), and the Start screen is still available if you prefer it, but at least users now have a choice.

Clicking the Start button presents a familiar left-pane menu with shortcuts to applications and folders, an “All Apps” menu, a search box. The logged-on user is listed top-left, and a click here gives you options to lock the system or sign out. And next to this is a power button where you can shut down or restart your PC.

The Start Menu has live tiles, and can be resized (a little) as necessary

Most of this works as you’d expect, although the Search box is an improvement on Windows 7, and now searches the web as well as your PC. (A search button on the taskbar displays trending searches, too.)

The right pane is arguably more interesting, as it displays various live tiles and Windows apps. Clicking a tile launches that app, right-clicking displays options to remove or resize it, and you can drag and drop individual tiles to rearrange them.

Better still, the Start Menu can now be resized manually by dragging up, and it’ll automatically expand to the right as you add more shortcuts.

The end result is a very flexible system, a clever combination of the Start Menu and Start screen which may at least begin to satisfy fans of both.

If you’re not quite happy, though, there are various customisations available (right-click the taskbar, select Properties > Start Menu).

At a minimum, you might click Customize to play around with the menu, maybe add Control Panel and This PC.

But if you’re no longer interested in the Start Menu at all, clear “Use the Start menu instead of the Start screen”, click OK and the Start Screen will be on hand whenever you need it.

Windowed apps

Being able to view and launch apps from the Start Menu is good, but what’s really smart about Windows 10 is they now run in an (almost) regular window, just like any other desktop application.

Click the Store icon on the taskbar, for instance, and it runs full screen. But there’s a title bar at the top, familiar minimise/ maximise/ restore/ close buttons, and the window can be resized to a degree (individual applets will place their own limit on that).

Apps now run in a regular window and can be resized, minimised or closed just like anything else

Windows stores app sizes and positions, too, so if you’d like an app to live in the top right corner of your screen, move it there, click the close button, and that’s where it’ll reappear in future.

One immediate advantage of this scheme is that you can now have more apps running side-by-side, and there’s support for this in a smarter snap system.

At a minimum you can use the Win+left, right, up or down arrows to position up to four apps or desktop programs, one in each corner of the screen.

In theory a new Snap Assist tool should help you with this. Once you’ve snapped your first window, this displays thumbnails of other running applications, even selecting what it thinks is the best match – you just click something to snap it into place.

This didn’t always work for us; at one point we could snap manually, but there was no sign of Snap Assist at all. It’s just the kind of odd issue you’d expect with such an early build, but after rebooting Snap Assist was working normally again.

Task View

If you’ve lost a particular application in a mass of open windows then you might use Alt+Tab to switch to it, and that remains an option in Windows 10.

You can also launch the same function with the mouse, though, by clicking the “Task View” button on the taskbar. Thumbnails of each window appear, and you can switch to any of them with a click.

There’s built-in support for virtual desktops. At last.

If your system still seems to cluttered you might use Task View’s “Add a desktop” button to create a virtual desktop. Click its thumbnail and you’ll start again with a clean, fresh desktop which you can rearrange as you like.

Yes, virtual desktops. At last. This is good news, but it does bring some complications. Pressing Alt+Tab, for example, switches you between applications on any desktop, which can make for some jarring changes in layout.

Click Task View or press Win+Tab, though, and you’ll see only running tasks on the current desktop, as well as thumbnails of every other desktop: just select whatever you need.

Tasks can also be moved from one desktop to another as required (launch Task View, right-click the task thumbnail, select “Move to…”).

This isn’t the most feature-packed of virtual desktop solutions, which is probably no surprise at this early stage.

Task View’s “Move to” feature stopped working a couple of times, too, although like Snap Assist a reboot restored normal operations.

But the core technology looks good, is effective and easy to use, and we’ll be interested to see how it develops.

Interface tweaks

Explorer looks a little different now. The right hand pane of the opening Home page displays “Favorites”, “Frequent folders” and “Recent files”, a simple but time-saving tweak.

The Charms bar seems to have disappeared from the desktop, too – or at least we couldn’t activate it by moving our mouse cursor into the top right corner. The configuration setting was still present on our system, though (right-click the taskbar, select Properties > Navigation), and if you liked the concept then you can recall the bar manually by pressing Win+C.

Some Charms bar functions are now available from a new app menu

A new menu on app windows brings easier access to some Charms and other functions. Clicking the ellipsis icon to the left of the title bar displays options including Search, Share, Play, Print, Project, Settings and Full Screen.

Application windows in general look cleaner, as they don’t have borders any more: just shadows.

We like the new look, but if you preferred things as they were, a quick experiment with the relevant Registry settings (HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\WindowMetrics\BorderWidth and HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\WindowMetrics\PaddedBorderWidth) suggests you might be able to bring them back.

Elsewhere, Windows 10 brings some “experimental” changes to the command prompt. You can now paste commands with Ctrl+V, for example, and if the output of a command is too long to fit on the screen, it’ll wrap to the next line.

These worked just fine for us, but apparently they may cause issues and are turned off by default. If you’d like to try them yourself, launch a command window; press Alt+Space; select Properties > Experimental; check “Enable experiment console features”; check all the boxes, click OK and restart the command prompt. Just remember to disable them again if you notice problems.

Bits and pieces

This is a very early version of Windows 10, and there will be plenty of smaller features Microsoft hasn’t mentioned yet. Look around, though, and you may find clues to what could be coming next.

New energy-saving technology might be on the way

It looks like there’s going to be an “Energy Saver” mode to reduce power demands when the system is idle, for instance (see Power Options > Change Plan Settings > Change Advanced Power Settings > “Energy Saver settings”).

There are new Registry references to an “Energy Estimation” scheme, too (HKLM\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\Power, HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Power), which seem to be widely supported by drivers, suggesting smarter power management is on the way.

There are a lot of new services. Contact Data, for example, indexes contact data for faster searching, while User Data Storage and User Data Access help to store and retrieve your details. Check the Services applet (services.msc) for more.

Chkdsk looks like it’s become a little simpler with two new command line switches. /freeorphanedchains frees orphaned clusters rather than recovering them, and /markclean marks the volume clean if no errors were detected, without having to specify /F.

We found a new DiskSnapshot.exe program in the \Windows\System32 folder. We’re not sure what it does but an intriguing DiskSnapshot.conf file (in the same folder) seems to list all key system and user folders.

And if you’re impressed and can’t wait for the next release, it might be easier to install it than you think. Go to PC Settings > Update and Recovery and you’ll find a new “Preview builds” section, where you can check for new preview builds on demand: very convenient.

Windows 10 Technical Preview ISOs are available now.