As everyone knows by now, the new version of Windows will ship the end of July. I signed up and placed some earlier beta build (through the insider program) on a machines back in January but then had to move on to other efforts, so I never really got back to look at it closely. Over the weekend, I downloaded the latest prerelease and loaded it on an eight year old tablet I had sitting in a closet (an HP 2710P with 3 GB of RAM). Since this machine only had 3 GB of RAM, I loaded the 32 bit version.
I was shocked at how well it ran on this old hardware. All the features seem to function well: Cortana, OneDrive (in its new and slightly lobotomized form), Spartan … and even an enclosed version of OneNote. In fact, the machine seemed to work better than I ever remember it running under Windows 7! The pen interface worked well and the calibration capabilities were better than under Windows 7.
Overall, I am anxious to get my hands on the real thing. If it will only run on my Steam 7 (since I don’t have the ‘Get Windows 10’ icon on that tablet).
illustration courtesy of Microsoft
Beyond the intersection of technology and life 