I have just installed the Windows Technical Preview (Build 9841) on a Dell Studio 1555 (Late 2009 model). Here I will detail my experiences with the new software on this machine.
First, about the computer.
Dell Studio 1555
Intel Core2Duo P8600 2.40GHz
4MB RAM
128GB SSD
ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4500 discrete graphics
1920x1080 15.6" panel.
If you want to try out the Technical Preview for yourself you can get it here: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/preview Remember this is a technical preview, and Microsoft will warn you about this but it is worth repeating. Being a preview it is not recommended to be used on a production machine; it should be used in a virtual machine, or on a computer that you do not need for everyday use that meets the system requirements for installation. Remember as well that your recovery partition of your hard drive will not be active, so if you want to go back to your previous OS, you'll have to do a clean install from recovery or installation media. Also being so new you will be using the drivers built into Windows (which are pretty good by the way), or drivers for Windows 8.1 or 7. I have some Windows 7 drivers on here from Dell (the ATI card and the touchpad) and they work just fine. As stated below these extra drivers were not required for installation; Windows detected all hardware and installed appropriate drivers during initial installation.
Installation of the software from .iso file was no problem at all. Everything on the computer was detected by Windows, including the wireless adapter; basically it worked "out of the box". Upon first boot the resolution defaulted to 1366x768, but before I could even get to the Dell site to download the native driver for the video card, the display updated to 1920x1080, nice!
I installed Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Sea Monkey with no issues. Chrome was blurry appearing at first; changing the option on it to run in compatibility mode for Windows 8.1 and disabling display scaling for high DPI monitors solved that problem. This is a similar issue that occurs in Windows 8.1 so I kind of expected it.
One issue I did note was that there was no scrolling with the touchpad, and no option to enable it using the default driver. I installed the Dell driver for the touchpad and now I have scrolling capability, but I cannot turn off tap-to-click. Also I cannot get to the touchpad properties by right clicking the touchpad icon in the system tray and selecting "Touchpad Properties", it just doesn't work. You have to go through Control Panel>Hardware to access those functions, or Device Manager. Also the "Click to Change" function on the Dell Touchpad tab flashes as if it wants to open another window, but it does not.
The "charms bar" will not appear when placing the cursor at the top right of the screen, even though that option is selected, but pressing the Windows Key + C will bring it out.
I have not seen any error messages yet, and other functions such as sleep when closing the lid work fine. I can adjust screen brightness by the keyboard, but brightness adjustment is listed as "unavailable" in the settings menu.
In general the Windows Technical Preview is quite responsive on this hardware. Everything loads quickly, and programs open fast as well. Boot times are low and it makes this 5 year old machine perform as well as a new machine. I am quite pleased with the responsiveness of the OS.
More to come as I use the software.
10/4/2014
High DPI scaling is still a bit off on Mozilla Browsers, so I had to go into default.css.dev and change the scaling from -1 to 1 to make things look proper on this monitor. Of course I could have changed the default scaling for Windows itself, but I like the larger display boxes for My Computer and the like.
10/5/2014
Decided to try more robust software than simple web browser, so I installed Photoshop CS6. There were no problems during installation; no messages indicating that I was installing Photoshop on an unsupported version of Windows or the like.
Photoshop performed as expected for a computer of this vintage, there were no errors of any kind when doing tasks such as image rotation, level adjustments or applying filters. I was able to open multiple images to edit, and save/save as worked flawlessly.
Also installed Dashlane, a password manager that I use, with no problems. It installed extensions in all the browsers that it supports and works as intended.
So far so good; I have not had any errors using the Windows Technical Preview.
10/6/2014
Everything is still working fine, no errors of any kind to report. It works a lot like Windows 8.1, but the touchpad does not create gestures that affect what you see on the screen, which to me is a good thing. So far it works much better on a laptop that Windows 8.1 did, in my opinion anyway.
I did play a few games from the Start Screen, which now appear as tiles on the Start Menu. All of these games functioned flawlessly. This particular laptop is not touch enabled, so I had to use the keyboard for the games, which was no problem at all.
10/7/2014
Windows Technical Preview is still going strong, no errors from Windows itself. I have had a couple of Flash errors while playing online games; this just may be a case of Flash not playing well with the new Windows. I kind of expected little nuances like this, as Windows is a new platform and developers have not had time to work out everything. Besides since this is a technical preview and not a release candidate I wouldn't expect a lot of changes to 3rd party software when they don't know what the final version will be like exactly.
10/11/14
Skipped a few days because there really is nothing to report! Windows Technical Preview is functioning flawlessly, and with the exception of those minor things such as the inability to turn off tap-to-click, there really are no issues. Nuances such as these are to be expected in preview software; this is really noting different than what I experienced in the early days of Linux distributions, so it's really no problem at all. I'm confident that all of these minor annoyances will be corrected in upcoming versions of Windows. Besides this is a 5 year old laptop, and really I am impressed that the new Windows runs so smoothly on here.
11/10/14
Haven't updated this blog in a while because basically everything has been fine. No issues, no errors, but there has been a change, Windows Technical Preview has been updated to Build 9860. The upgrade process was very easy; I was presented with a dialog that stated it needed to update Windows Preview, and that the computer would restart several times during the upgrade, which it did.
As far as I can tell all of the files that I had on the machine (Downloads, Documents, Pictures, etc) remained intact and unharmed. The few applications that I tried tonight after the update (it just completed 4 minutes ago) worked properly; with the exception of Firefox. It seems some of the text characters are jumbled, going to try to re-install Firefox to see if that corrects the issue.
11/13/14
So I attempted to update Firefox; first by simply re-installing over the existing installation, then by remove and re-install, but nothing worked. Come to find out it is a global issue that several testers have experienced with the update. Running Windows Update, and installing all of the available patches for this build fixed the issue.
