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The verdict after one full day of using Windows 10 Technical Preview:

Survivable. Windows 8 minus Metro. Windows 7 plus live tiles.

I don't quite know what I was expecting to happen today. Maybe I wasn't really expecting that anything would. Regardless of what I expected, maybe the weirdest part of the experience today is this:

Nothing did happen.

Well, it's not that nothing happened today. Plenty happened today. I installed big programs and little programs, I listened to music, watched videos, and fine-tuned some device drivers. And through it all, I was struck by how mundane the whole experience was.

Not once did Windows 10 freeze. Not once did it crash. Not once did it give me a blue screen, or experience problems with any of my devices. (Speaking of devices, Windows 10 actually made a device on my laptop work that Windows 7 never could--a Bluetooth transceiver.)

But, as usual, I'm getting ahead of myself.

The first thing I did this morning was plug in the laptop, attach the Windows 10 drive, and start the boot cycle. To speed things up--and make my life easier in case a crash and auto-restart did happen--I configured my BIOS to start with the USB drive in the boot cycle, meaning that before it looks for an operating system on the computer's internal drive, it goes to the USB drive, essentially meaning that Windows 10 now becomes the default OS. (In case anyone's wondering why I didn't just set it up to dual boot between Windows 7 and Windows 10, this laptop already dual boots between Windows XP and Windows 7, and I didn't want to push it by trying to pull off triple-booting.)

Even coming off a USB drive, the boot cycle for Windows 10 seems pretty fast, right on par with that of Windows 7, if not faster. (I'll caveat that by saying that at the time, Windows 10 still had very few non-stock device drivers, which may have had an impact.) When Windows finished loading, the by-now-familiar lock screen from Windows 8 came up. Fortunately, having used Windows 8 extensively on my tablet, this didn't pose a problem, though I remember when Windows 8 first came around, seasoned system administrators were confounded for tens of minutes at a time by this. As it was, I just swiped upward with the mouse--this laptop doesn't have a touch screen--and was then prompted to log into my Microsoft account. When I did that, I got to the desktop.

Unlike Windows 8, which goes to the much-maligned Metro start screen, Windows 10 goes to a very familiar-looking desktop, complete with a Start button resembling the Windows 8 logo in the lower-left. I customized my desktop to add the icons I use, and the process is unchanged from Windows 7. I'd installed Firefox the previous night, but hadn't copied over any of the AppData folders (where all your settings are stored) over to the Windows 10 partition, so the first step was to do so. I navigated to the AppData Local and Roaming folders on my Windows 7 partition, and then copied those over to the Windows 10 drive. If you've used Windows 8, the copy process functions in an identical way: it groups all disk operation progress windows into one, and like Windows 7, it seems to size up the two folders before it does anything. It was actually some time--maybe two or three full minutes--before I was asked what I wanted to do about the fact that the files I was copying seemed already to be in the destination folder.

Speedwise, once it began the copy process was just about as fast as I'd have expected it to be. When it was done, I opened Firefox, which was when I got a couple of surprises.

The first was that it actually pulled up the page it was supposed to. (Which is a good thing.) But you'll notice that nowhere in my description of what I did after I got to work did I use phrases like "Connected to WiFi" or "Entered security key." It took me a little while to figure out why: along with everything else it imported from my Surface, it also seemed to have imported the credentials for the wireless networks I use. It's a fairly obvious innovation in retrospect, but still unexpected.

Anyway, as the page loaded, I was greeted by surprise number two: the page loaded faster than it usually does. Considering that there's no difference between the versions of Firefox I'm using on Windows 7 and Windows 10 on the same machine, I can only conclude that Windows 10 is more adept at handling Internet traffic, and thus that there's less overhead from the operating system in transferring data from the network port to the browser. What exactly was changed or removed to make way for those improvements, I couldn't tell you, but it is noticeable and it is a nice touch.

Now I mentioned that last night I copied over my music collection, but what I didn't do was install my music player, which I also took a few minutes to do. I still use Winamp, because it's lightweight and efficient, and has an equalizer that lets you easily tailor the sound to your liking. (My favorite setting, perhaps predictably, is "Full Bass & Treble.") As I expected, the install completed successfully, and the program opened without so much as a hiccup. I loaded in my music collection, and started it playing. I was slightly disappointed when, instead of playing through my laptop's full 5.1 sound system, sound only came from the main two speakers, without benefit of the bass tube. I chalked it up to a lack of a proper driver from Realtek, and made a mental note to do a full install of proper drivers from Acer when I got home. (Note: I did that, but the sound system still offers only "Stereo.")

So after taking care of some pieces of my morning routine, I went to a meeting, and was away from my desk for just shy of two hours. When I came back, my laptop was just sitting there humming along, completely unchanged from when I'd left it. Part of me expected to find a Windows Stop error waiting for me (what most people call "the blue screen of death"), or at the very least a frozen system, but when I touched the mouse, the screen lit right up, and I carried right on.

Besides Winamp, I'd also installed a number of other programs that I use on a regular basis, though it's not a complete software loadout: Microsoft Office 2010, Adobe Creative Suite CS6, Media Player Classic x64, WinRAR x64, Acer Updater, and then nVidia GeForce experience. To the last, the installs had completed without any trace of problems, and the programs themselves ran more or less normally. The only time I encountered any kind of difficulty came when I was working with Photoshop and InDesign, both of which looked a tad blurry on my screen (for comparison, they both look perfectly clear on the same machine in Windows 7, with the same video driver; I don't quite know how to explain it).

As for Media Player Classic (and for that matter, the Media Player built into Windows), not surprisingly it handled itself quite well. I have MPC-HC x64 version 1.7.7, the latest version available as of this writing, and once it installed, it played several AVI files with different codecs, different frame sizes, and different bitrates...all without benefit of having a codec pack installed. I don't know if that means Windows 10 comes with more codecs than Windows 7 or if the files I was playing were simply unremarkable, but it's still noteworthy. The actual Windows Media Player is...well, I suppose it has an unfinished appearance to it, but it played the same files without any kind of distortion, and with the kind of smoothness that comes from not dropping any frames. (I actually can't always say the same about Windows 7 on this same machine.)

Something I did notice that's interesting. Once I got the proper driver from nVidia installed, Windows 10 suddenly recognized my HDMI port, and I was able to extend my desktop onto that second monitor; unlike the old desktop though, even with the desktop extended, the taskbar extends all the way across the bottom of the second monitor. Not entirely sure what the purpose of that is, but it's still interesting.

So, overall, how does Windows 10 stack up against its predecessors? If you're coming off Windows 8 and used the Desktop mode heavily, this will be a walk in the park. If, on the other hand, you're coming straight from Windows 7, you're going to get frustrated, and I'll explain why: for everything that remained the same, there are ten tiny details that are different. Key sequences vary, locations changed, and processes are different. A quick Google search got me where I needed to go each time, but we're talking about processes that took me literally seconds to accomplish in Windows 7, that I see no reason to have changed. (Note: I've only used Windows 8 on my Surface, and never with a mouse and keyboard before, so for all intents and purposes, it's as if I'm coming straight from Windows 7 with some exposure to Windows 8.)

First, there's ALT+TAB. Since the early 1990s, that key combination has allowed Windows users to switch between open programs, and beginning with Windows Vista, was enhanced by something called Aero Peek, a nifty little function that, if you ALT+TAB'ed between programs and held on one for long enough, would actually turn other windows transparent and show you the one you were holding on. When I first got Windows 7 I thought that was annoying, but it quickly grew on me, and I'm sure its replacement in Windows 10 will too. What it does now is, when you hit ALT+TAB, it immediately turns all your windows transparent, and then gives you a miniature live preview of each window, where before you just got icons or non-animated versions. Near as I can tell, Aero Peek is a thing of the past, but that might not be a bad thing since it reduces overhead from the OS.

Second, there's the new Start Menu. I've been tiptoeing around this one because I'm still on the fence. At first glance, it looks just like the old start menu, with some live tiles added to it, but if you look closer, the options are different. Gone is the trusty "Programs" that we're used to; in its place we have "All Apps," which serves much the same function, showing you installed Windows programs as well as apps from the App Store. (Note: when I first set up Windows 10, and it imported settings from my Surface, one of the things it did was import which apps I had installed--it didn't actually install them, but their names did show up in the list, with "Install" after them in the names; getting them to do just that required only that I click the names. I've installed all the same apps that are on my Surface but I haven't tried any of them out yet.)

The chief problem I have with the new Start Menu is the search box there at the bottom. It used to be that entering search terms there would get Windows to do a search of the local computer, and find what you wanted. Not anymore--it looks like this new one wants to search everywhere and everything, although it does show you local results first. This has the flavor of something that's still in development, so I'm reserving judgment for the time being, but it is different and it will annoy you.

Then there are those live tiles. (In fairness, not all of the tiles there are live, but some of them are.) These behave exactly the way they did on the Metro start screen--they'll update as soon as you open the Start Menu, and as of the moment I don't see any way to adjust them or modify them like you could in Windows 8. I don't find that particularly troubling, since the ones it loads do seem to be the ones I'd have the most use for--Calendar, News, Store, and Mail, along with smaller tiles for Skype, music, SkyDrive, and Media Player--but it would be nice to be able to set this up exactly the way I want it. This, too, looks and feels like something that's still in development, so I'm not passing judgment on it just yet.

Third, is the process for creating a new folder on a Windows drive. I'm accustomed to being able to hit the following keys in order to get a new folder: ALT, F, W, Enter. It's been like that since Windows XP, and so muscle memory tells me it should work. Unfortunately, it doesn't; near as I can tell, that particular key combination doesn't seem to do anything in Windows 10, so absently hitting those keys doesn't cause any harm either. To create a new folder, look up, at the ever-present ribbon at the top of the Explorer window, and there's a large "New Folder" button to get the job done.

This hits on a larger problem: some old key combinations still work, like Windows+R for to summon the Run box, while others, like ALT, F, W, Enter, don't. It takes a bit of trial and error to figure out how to get certain things done, the result of what I can only surmise are touches implemented for...well, touch. That's the only explanation I can think of for taking a long-running key combination and making it into a large button, anyway.

Another thing that frustrates me about the Windows 10 version of Explorer (I'm referring to Windows Explorer in this context, not Internet Explorer) is the absence of the old menu bar, and its replacement with a ribbon, not unlike the ones from post-2007 versions of Microsoft Office. Gone are the trusty File-Edit-View-Favorites-Tools-Help menu bars like we had in XP and 7; now we have ribbons, whose content changes based on what you're looking at. Here too, familiar key sequences have gone missing: ALT, V, L no longer switches the window to List view, for instance (again, doesn't seem like it does anything at all). To do that, you click the "View" button on the ribbon, and then select "List" from the various view options. There IS a way to get all your folders to switch to the viewing options you have for a folder, but it's not what I'd call intuitive: to make it work, you click the View tab again, and click the Options button at the far right, and then select "Change folder and search options" from the dropdown. That opens what I think of as the Folder Options dialogue box, and you can do whatever you need to, including the trusty "Apply to All" command. One mouse click later, and every window that opens in Windows 10 is automatically in List mode.

This brings me to my final critique for this part: mapping network drives. My home network includes a farm of USB drives, eleven in all, that store all my media and content; they're all connected to my main development tower, an old Dell XPS 420 running Windows XP. Every other computer and device on my network pulls content remotely over a wireless connection, which means those drives are shared with the network and, for the computers I use most frequently, those drives are also mapped as local drives. (For example, my main backup drive, which is drive O on the computer it's physically connected to, is mapped as O:\ on other computers on the network.)

In Windows XP and in Windows 7, mapping a network drive is easy. Tools, Map Network Drive, enter the network path and the local drive letter, and you're set. Mapping my eight shared volumes took no time at all.

Now comes Windows 10. Gone as I mentioned is the trusty tool bar on which you'd find the "Tools" menu. Instead, to map a network drive, it seems that now you have to open This PC, which appears to be the only location whose ribbon includes a button to "Map Network Drive." It may have only taken a few extra seconds each time I wanted to map a new drive, but it felt like it took a lot longer to do all eight of them. (I've never had much luck with mapping drives by using BAT files, which is why I haven't gone that route.)

So overall, Windows 10 shows promise, but there are a lot of elements that changed from Windows 7 and even some from Windows 8. It did get me through a full duty day though, and as I mentioned, without freezing or crashing even once. I'm not ready to make a declaration about it yet, since when it's all said and done this is still just an early test version that's the better part of a year from being finished. What I can say is that unlike Windows 8 at this stage of the game, the OS doesn't get in the way of getting things done--every so often, you do have to stop and figure out how it expects you to do something, but I didn't run into anything that was more than a brief annoyance. From what I can tell Windows 10 may not be perfect, but it's a lot less imperfect than Windows 8.