After not a lot of action on the IT front (mainly due to being on maternity leave for the last two months) I’ve signed up for the Microsoft insider program to check out for myself what the hype is all about.

Microsoft don’t recommend installing the technical preview on your primary computer as it is still very much a work in progress and potentially unreliable. There were a couple of reasons why I decided to go against the advice – firstly my laptop wasn’t running that well and I would have ended up rebuilding it pretty soon anyway but more importantly if I was to do the sensible thing and install Windows 10 on a virtual machine I would never get the motivation to actually use it.

In all honesty it doesn’t feel that different compared to Windows 8. There is a start menu which I quite like and you can customize the live tiles pretty well too. I haven’t quite got to grips with the task view yet but it might be useful for some users. My favourite feature so far is being able to use keyboard short-cuts like Ctrl+V and Ctrl+F inside command prompt. Oh and I nearly forgot to mention it is now possible to turn off/restart the pc from the start menu. On a more serious note it looks like Microsoft are really interested in getting some feedback – what they will do with the information is yet to be seen but ever the optimist I have already submitted a few suggestions via the Windows Feedback app.

Windows 10 will definitely please people that were after a more Windows 7 feel but it is not as ground breaking as Microsoft would want everyone to believe unless I am missing something and that’s what the comments are for.

To sign up for the tech preview go to: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/preview.