Windows 10 Review
Windows 10 Review
It's also integrated with Cortana, Microsoft's voice-based personal assistant that offers
contextual information and lets you organise and plan your day in addition to voicebased search. Cortana is not available in India but you can get a taste of it by changing
your Country to US in the Region & language settings. We found it to be pretty accurate
in terms of recognising our voice and offering answers to our questions. It also displays
cards for weather and trending news stories when you click on the Search box.
Even without Cortana, the Search box is a much needed relief from the complicated
charms-based search feature of Windows 8/8.1 and we found ourselves using the feature
frequently. It's convenient and makes search less cumbersome. You're only limited to
Bing search for web though.
Improved user interface
Windows 10 follows the minimalist philosophy when it comes to the visual aspects of the
user interface. By default, the Start menu and Action center are translucent and unlike
Windows 8 elements like icons and text labels don't feature basic labels with tiles
reminiscent of Windows Phone and Windows 8. System apps like File Explorer still
feature toolbars in tabbed ribbons but look more refined with frameless title bars,
minimal maximize, close and minimize buttons and new icons. While Microsoft has
retained the Control Panel (which is a good thing for users familiar with older versions),
the Settings interface has been overhauled and gives complete control over the PC. Again
the iconography is minimalist and the only coloured element is the system-wide accent
that you choose. Toggles and drop-down boxes also look different.
Action Center
If you've lately used Apple's OS X, you'd be familiar with Notifications Center. Windows
10's version is known as Action Center a hidden pane that can be displayed at the right
side of the screen by swiping from the right edge or by pressing a message bubble icon in
the system tray. It displays notifications for unread emails, calendar and from other apps
and displays toggles for commonly used settings such as battery saver, tablet mode, VPN,
All settings, Quiet hours (DND) and Airplane mode among others. We mostly used it for
directly going to the settings menus and using settings toggles. While you can choose the
four settings toggles that appear in the 'collapsed mode' in the Action Center, we wish
Microsoft would have given us the ability to add our favourite settings toggles.
The Good:
- Start menu is back!
- Seamless switching between desktop & tablet modes for 2-in-1 devices
- Easier to use compared to Windows 8
The bad:
- You may encounter some bugs related to activation, updates
- Privacy settings need to be changed if you use 'Express' set-up
- Edge browser is good but lacks extension support, other system apps are basic