10, and as of the May 2020 update, it is a separate entity. It no longer takes over Windows 10’s search, and you can ignore it if you want. However, if you do enable it, it sits in the background, listening for your commands.
I tell you much more about Cortana in this book — she has a chapter all to herself, Book 3, Chapter 5 — but I’ll drop a little tidbit here, tailored for those Windows XP fans among you who may just be a bit intimidated by a talking helper-droid.
You see, Cortana has a history.
FIGURE 2-5: Cortana sits, listening, and watching, waiting to help you. That should either make you skeptical or scared — or a little of both.
Back in 2001, Microsoft released a game called Halo: Combat Evolved. In Halo: CE, you, the player, take the role of the Master Chief, a kinda-human kinda-cyber soldier known as Master Chief Petty Officer John-117. Cortana is part of you, an artificial intelligence that’s built into a neural implant in your body armor. After saving Captain Keyes, Cortana and the Master Chief go into a map room called the Silent Cartographer, and … well, you get the idea. Cortana is smooth and creepy and omniscient, just like the Windows 10 character.
Other improvements
Many other features — not as sexy as Cortana but every bit as useful — put Windows 10 head and shoulders above Windows XP. The standout features include:
The taskbar: I know many XP users swear by the old Quick Launch toolbar, but the taskbar, after you get to know it, runs rings around its predecessor. Just one example is shown in Figure 2-3 earlier in this chapter.
A backup worthy of the name: Backup was a cruel joke in Windows XP. Windows 7 did it better, but Windows 10 makes backup truly easy, particularly with File History (see Book 8, Chapter 1).
A less-infested notification area: Windows XP let any program and its brother put an icon in the notification area near the system clock. Windows 10 severely limits the number of icons that appear and gives you a spot to click if you really want to see them all. Besides, notifications are supposed to go in the Action pane on the right. See Book 2, Chapter 3.
Second monitor support: Although some video card manufacturers managed to jury-rig multiple monitor support into the Windows XP drivers, Windows 10 makes using multiple monitors one-click easy.
Easy wireless networking: All sorts of traps and gotchas live in the Windows XP wireless programs. Windows 10 does it much, much better.
Search: In Windows XP, searching for anything other than a filename involved an enormous kludge of an add-on that sucked up computer cycles and overwhelmed your machine. In Windows 10, search is part of Windows itself, and it works quickly.
On the security front, Windows 10 is light years ahead of Windows XP. From protection against rootkits to browser hardening, and a million points in between, XP is a security disaster — Microsoft no longer supports it — while Windows 10 is relatively (not completely) impenetrable.
Although Windows 10 isn’t the Windows XP of your dreams, it’s remarkably easy to use and has all sorts of compelling new features.
What’s New for Windows 7 Users
Three years after Windows 10 hit the ether, Windows 7 was still riding strong. Depending on how you count and whose numbers you believe, at the three-year mark, Windows 7 was still driving about half of all Windows computers in the world. That’s staying power, and it’s worthy of your respect.
Nonetheless, Windows 7 is clearly on the way down, and Windows 10 is on the way up. One big reason for that is that Microsoft has stopped providing updates and support for Windows 7. That’s as it should be, nostalgia notwithstanding.
Don’t be worried. Anything that works with Windows 7, 8, or 8.1 — and almost everything from Vista — will work in Windows 10. Programs, hardware, drivers, utilities — just about anything.
That’s a remarkable achievement, particularly because your Windows Desktop apps/Legacy programs (there’s that L word again) have to peacefully coexist with the WinRT API-based Windows/Universal/Modern/Metro apps.
Windows 10 does have lots going for it. Let me skip lightly through the major changes between Windows 7 and Windows 10.
Getting the hang of the new Start menu
By now, you’ve no doubt seen the tiles on the right of the Start menu (refer to Figure 2-6).
FIGURE 2-6: The Windows 10 desktop and Start menu.
If you’re coming to Windows 10 from Windows 7 — without taking a detour through Windows 8 — those tiles are likely to represent your greatest conceptual hurdle. They’re different, but in many ways they’re familiar.
In Windows 10, you have a layout that’s more or less similar to Windows 7, but it has fantastically good gadgets. Microsoft rebuilt all the plumbing in Windows to support these really good gadgets. Those updated, enormously powerful gadgets are now called Windows 10 apps.
FIGURE 2-7: Windows 7 gadgets — at least from the interface point of view — work much like the new Universal Windows app tiles.
The new gadgets/apps run in resizable windows on the desktop. They can do phenomenal things. In fact, Microsoft Edge is quite superior to Internet Explorer, even if it doesn’t yet have all the bells and whistles. Edge, which runs as a gadget/Windows 10 app, has become the new default browser.
Tiles for these gadgets/apps appear to the right of the list
