This is the afternoon of the third day since installing it, and ever since then, I've been using this exclusively as my main computer program, even though we're cautioned not to do that. I want to compare this to the early betas of Windows 7 and Windows 8, and so far, this is running great! It's doing everything I'm trying, and while I'm no 'expert' (defined as anyone more than ten miles from home!) I haven't yet found any major problems or difficulties.
It is accepting the third-party programs I know and love, at least one of which, PhotoStudio 5.5, goes back to the days of Windows XP. I made a point of installing that one, because I wanted to see how Win-10 Tech Preview handles older programs - and I'm pleased to report that it accepted PhotoStudio without any of the grumbling I got from Win-8 Pro when I did the same thing in it. Win-8 gave me a lot of flak about its compatibility problems and made me choose to "Run it anyway" before I could get it going. This Tech Preview gave me none of that, and just simply installed it, and ran it normally like any other program. And yet this also runs the latest stuff coming down the pipe, like a new graphics driver from nVidia released just last week. Color me impressed!
It also runs happily with a couple of my favorite security programs, and there doesn't seem to be any conflicts between those and Defender. I've also installed and run Auslogics Disk Defrag, which does a very quick yet informative defragmentation of any or all drives on the computer. In this case, I only ran it on the Tech Preview partition, because I had defragged the other two partitions just prior to installing Tech Preview into a third partition. Auslogics found 1,450 fragmented files, which seems fairly normal for a newly installed system with other programs added into it, as I've been doing. And it did that in a little over three minutes - and I love watching the little dancing colored squares, as it gets all its ducks in a row. But the good news is, the system seemed a little faster afterward. That also figures, because it can find things quicker when asked.
The Tech Preview also accepts my home-built icons (you should try IcoFX for that! It can make an icon from almost any image) and it also works fine with Windows Themes from Windows 8. I haven't yet tried making my own for it, as I did for Win-7 and Win-8, but I don't expect any problems doing that. The folder is still found in C:\Users\yourname\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Themes, and the procedure will be the same as for Win-8.
And being the Desktop Gadgets lover that I am, I'm really pleased that those are once again officially sanctioned. I never did swallow that excuse about them being a 'security hazard' because the same security that protects everything else on here certainly will include the gadgets. I know, however, that some of those, like ones receiving changing information from the web, such as weather gadgets, might possibly pose a greater risk. My solution for that would be the Premium version of Malwarebytes, which not only provides real-time protection, but blocks attempts by malware to get onto your machine, and while it is doing that, it shows you a little pop-up containing the IP Address of the offender as well as telling you it is trying to get in. With that feature, you can discover where the 'bad guys' are coming from. You still can't fire anything back at them, but at least you can find out who they are, and add them to your blocked list.
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