My laptop has been getting a bit cluttered up with stuff so this weekend I gave it a reset.

As I am using windows 8 this was much easier than doing a format reinstall which I have done many times with previous OSes. Open settings and select recovery and after about 4 hours everything was back to factory settings.

I then installed a few updates and then installed the windows 10 preview. One of the requirements for windows 10 is Windows 8 Update (the one that came after 8.1), it took a few reboots and updates until I got that installed.

I had purchased the pro pack which gives you the same features as windows 8 pro but I didn’t notice until after I installed 10 that this hadn’t been installed. I will need to roll back to windows 8 apply the update and then reinstall 10 again. I can’t really be bothered to do that, so I will live without HyperV for now. As it is I have done a lot of sitting around waiting for things to finish installing.

I much prefer Windows 10 to Windows 8, an earlier preview had an issue with drivers for my second screen but that appears to have been resolved now. The start menu is back and I prefer it, to being taken to that extra screen of options that windows 8 had.

I prefer the email client that windows 8 had to the windows 10 version as my work emails don’t work with it. I assume this is due to how my exchange server has been configured and maybe a later preview will allow my email to work or failing that I will have to get emails at work fixed properly.

All apps now open in windows which is much nicer. Cortana is very similar to Google Home on my phone where I can talk and ask it stuff. But I never use this sort of feature apart from testing it.

The new web browser has some nice features like the option to scribble over a web page but nothing that special that I think I will change my default browser from Chrome. It will be interesting to see how it performs in browser stats.

I am part way through installing Visual Studio 2015 RC, but I think that will have to be a separate post.