Windows 10 now available as a free upgrade

Windows fans may be happy to find that Windows 10 will be bringing back the start menu, mixing it with the flair of the live tiles from the Metro start menu.

Wall Street Journal’s Geoffrey Fowler said Windows 10 fixes most of the issues with Windows 8 and improves on Windows 7, Microsoft’s most popular OS in recent years. Microsoft launched its Windows 10 operating system on Wednesday.

In New Zealand, upgrade programs are now available through key retailers, with Windows 10 software becoming broadly available in retail stores between mid-August and September around the world.

“Windows 10 is going to run on everything from a Raspberry Pi to phones to tablets to PCs to Surface Hubs and to even the HoloLens”, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said earlier this month at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in Orlando. If you have newer hardware running Windows 7 or 8.1 the free upgrade to 10, a noticeable improvement in performance as well as new tools and apps should make most Windows users happy. One major difference you may notice in the new release is that Microsoft’s voice assistant Cortana is now available on PCs with Windows 10. There are a few new features you might want to get your hands on in the new release.

Microsoft have also continued with their philosophy of providing a system that works on all sizes of devices from smartphones to large monitor PCs.

If a user has reserved a copy of Windows 10, Lenovo says the operating system will be downloaded onto their system, and to give users consistent experiences across devices and operating systems, the preloads include a suite of Lenovo-written applications.

Windows 10 is the very happy medium. It is also without a doubt that the launch of the new Windows 10 operating system is a huge milestone for not only the company, but the industry as a whole. And with all the positive reviews that the Windows 10 OS has gotten thus far, our guess is that this new software will be just as worthy than its previous iterations.

Its imitation of Apple’s “personal assistant” Siri, which Microsoft calls Cortana, invites you to invoke its presence by saying, “Hey Cortana” out loud. Microsoft hopes to upgrade a total of one billion people in the coming years. But Microsoft plans to phase out maintenance and security support for Windows 7 over the next five years, and for Windows 8 by 2023, as it did with the older Windows XP.

In case you haven’t heard, Microsoft killed its infamous Internet Explorer and replaced it with Edge.

After users have checked for compatibility, they would need to reserve their free upgrade.