I’ve been longing for some sort of new tech for a while, except that my nearly 3 year old sony vaio remains fabulous. It’s still one of the lightest laptops around (870g), superfast, and excellent graphics. It’s only weakness is that it has a 256GB SSD and I need to explore at some point whether it’s possible to upgrade it. I’ve still got my Nexus 7 (2013) tablet too as it’s still going strong. Instead I have finally gotten round to upgrading from windows 8 to 10. I was happy enough with 8 though ran it in desktop mode not tablet pane mode. Ultimately that was the annoying thing about 8, it had different desktops depending on whether you used it in latop or tablet mode.

Windows 10 seems to have successfully integrated both versions into a single interface. I’ve been playing with it for a week and it’s fun…and works. Search has improved which is important as win8 search felt clunky, whereas win7 was almost right. I think win10 may be the first version of windows where I don’t need to install launchy as well. The upgrade from 8 to 10 was flawless, everything went smoothly and all my bits and pieces survived. Mostly. I had to force it a few times to default to irfanview for image viewing vs its inhouse version but that’s been the only stumble so far. On top of that microsoft seems to be making a lot of the right sort of noises regarding the developer community including bash and releasing their text editor as open source.

The best thing I’m liking about the win10 environment is that it feels more comfortable using the touch screen of my lappy. Win8 in desktop mode wasn’t particularly comfortable for using the touch screen on the vaio. The desktop of win10 seems to have bigger targets and is friendlier to screen touching. I’m starting to return to the joy I had with the ASUS Transformer Prime which fully integrated keyboard and touch screen. The downside was that android didn’t support a full desktop, multi-tasking environment. So I bought the vaio which handled the desktop but windows didn’t really handle laptop keyboard with touch screen. Win10 seems to be managing the marriage of the two.

So far so good.