Actually, I see hardy any improvement, and far more things that could be improved. Classic Shell is still a better Start Menu. But thank God for all they can do. Imagine it was a government project all the way thru.
When the beta builds of Windows XP were first released it caused some raised eyebrows over the hardware requirements. There were Windows 98 and Windows 2000 machines running on 64meg RAM platforms with Pentium 100 processors (admittedly not very briskly!). XP prerequisites doubled that - as minimums. Lots of folks feared the hurdle required to run the new OS.
As it turned out you could load XP onto sub-spec platforms and have a fully functional computer (if not exactly a sprightly one). I know lots of people who did this instead of running out and plopping down big bucks for new machines until they had had a chance to “test drive” the new OS.
The same largely held true for upgrades to Win-7 when it came out. One could load it onto legacy platforms if they were willing to accept the performance hit.
With Win-8 the prerequisites were harsher and far fewer platforms were eligible for upgrade. The installation simply failed on lots of machines and the resolution was to buy new. Couple that with the “downgrade” option (being able to downgrade from Win-8 to Win-7) and the buyer resistance to the problematic metro-app desktop and it wasn’t hard to see that Win-8 was going to suffer a similar ignobility as Vista.
In my tests with Win-10 I’ve gone back to pre-Win-7 Vista platforms and run the install. It loads fine, even on machines that choked on Win-8. When examining the prerequisites I found the requirement that Win-8 processors had to support PAE, NX, and SSE2 (http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-8/what-is-pae-nx-sse2). I found no mention of this requirement in the Win-10 Prerequisites (They just say “look at the specs for Win-8”). I don’t know if this is by design or an omission from the Windows 10 Technical Preview.
At any rate thanks for the review - I (obviously) read it with interest. With the ever-narrowing support schema from Microsoft I find myself doing more to try to stay ahead of them (migration to Win-7 was particularly brutal for us).