Windows 10 one year later: The Anniversary Update

Last year's Windows 10 release was unlike any Windows release I've ever used before, and I've used most of them.

Almost every Windows release to-date had a sort of unfinished vibe that reflected the product's history. Parts of the operating system developed long ago have almost fossilized, being preserved verbatim in each subsequent release, which gives the entire operating system an overall incomplete feel.

Take Control Panel as an example. The oldest parts of Control Panel use dialogs for each group of settings, as this mouse window exemplifies. Those tabs are extensible by third parties. That SetPoint Settings tab, for example, launches Logitech's mouse app for configuring the various buttons on my Performance MX mouse. New systems to this very day continue to use this extensibility; most Windows laptops will have a tab to configure their touchpad.

While this dialog has been massaged and slightly updated over the years, it is taking a form that is more than 20 years old—it debuted with Windows 95.

A new approach to settings was introduced in Windows XP, with the control panels directly embedded into an Explorer Window. (Windows 10 uses this, too.) And then Windows 8 introduced the settings app, with yet another style and presentation for settings.

Windows 10 had that same mishmash—again, it's unfortunately something you now expect when you use Windows. This only increased the feeling that it was a work in progress: glitchier, buggier, less polished than any previous release. The system wasn't blue-screening all the time or anything like that, but the Start menu didn't show all my programs. Every browser I used crashed from time to time, and Edge crashed a little too frequently to be acceptable. Even the Store app would crash.

While I liked it, and the operating system certainly wasn't unusable, I felt that for many people it was too early to get on board. Waiting for the first update was a safer bet. With a steady stream of app updates and then the larger November Update, Windows 10 got better. Not only did the bugs start to go away, but the overall consistency of the operating system started to improve. Rough parts of the interface were polished. Windows 10 began feeling not just like a production-ready operating system, but like Microsoft was finally taking steps to make Windows feel like one operating system and not several.

Community feedback

The Anniversary Update, Windows 10 version 1607 (16 for 2016, 07 for July, when it was finalized) is the first "major" update to Windows 10 since its release. While the November Update added refinements, the Anniversary Update adds entirely new features. Important and oft-neglected parts of the core operating system have received attention, and valuable new capabilities have been added for developers. I'll focus on the new and updated aspects that the Anniversary Update offers, but much of the heart of Windows 10 remains the same from our review last year.

This is the first release driven by substantial feedback from Microsoft's "Insider" preview program. The company has released some 25 preview versions of the Anniversary Update, and the company says it has made more than 5,000 "enhancements" as a result of Insider feedback. "Enhancement" is undefined, and with a number that high almost all of the "enhancements" are likely to be the most minor of bug fixes. The company does point at some larger features that it says it owes to insiders: the work done to the Start menu, Action Center, and Taskbar was all shaped by Insider feedback. Insider responses also caused Microsoft to reject a new and really rather ugly Explorer icon.

In making these claims about the Insider program, Microsoft is deliberately creating more distance between the way Windows 10 is being developed and way Windows 8 was developed. Windows 8 generated complaints for the duration of its beta period; its approach to handling the different input modes that it supported (touch, mouse, pen) was too jarring and disjointed, and elements of its interface, in particular the way certain features were activated by putting the mouse cursor in the corner of the screen, were far too obscure and awkward to use.

Windows 8's Charms bar appeared when you swiped in from the right-hand edge of the screen on touch systems. But the mouse was more awkward: you had to put the cursor in the top right or bottom right pixel of the screen, then move it up or down.

Thus far, at least, the feedback seems to have made for a better product. But this kind of user-driven development has risks. Windows 8 may have been flawed, but it was also extraordinarily bold. The edge-based user interface, using swipes from the sides of the screen to bring up a system-wide menu or switch between tasks, was highly effective on touch machines. Windows 10, even on tablets, reverts to a more Taskbar-like arrangement. And just as I complained at the operating system's release, I don't think it's as good. Did Windows 8 need substantial work to make it more amenable to mouse and keyboard? Absolutely. But did that mean compromising on the really very effective edge-driven interface when used as a tablet? I don't think so.

An operating system that's guided heavily by user feedback is always going to tend to be more conservative than an operating system that's driven by a small design team. That's the nature of trying to please 7 million Insiders all at once; there'll be pushback against bold new ideas even if those ideas are sound. Winding the clock back and making Windows 10 work more like Windows 7 was always going to be the easiest option to get people on board, but I think it was an overreaction. More thought should have been given to ensuring that the parts of Windows 8 that worked well—especially in its tablet interface—were preserved.

Going forward, I hope Microsoft has the courage to continue to be bold. Use feedback to refine and enhance that vision, sure, but the company must not let the Windows 8 experience leave it gun-shy and afraid to try significant new things.

Free as in stuff that doesn't cost any money

While the free Windows 10 upgrade for Windows 7 and 8.1 owners is now over, the Anniversary Update is, of course, a free release for Windows 10 users. Windows is now offered as a service. So long as the hardware requirements don't change, Windows users who are using Windows 10 will continue to receive both security fixes and feature improvements indefinitely. For upgraders and self-installers, the Anniversary Update doesn't make any changes to the required specification, so if your system is running Windows 10 now, it'll support the update just fine come the August 2 release. How Microsoft will handle making changes that do leave systems unsupported remains to be seen.

For OEMs, however, there are some small changes. Anyone wanting to ship a system with the Windows branding and logos needs to meet Microsoft's hardware specs, and these have gone up ever so slightly. New Windows systems will have to include at least 2GB RAM, and they'll have to include support for TPM 2.0 using either a discrete security chip or the integrated support found in some system chipsets.

The RAM change seems to be driven more by comfort than any strong need. In testing Windows 10, I've created virtual machines with specs below the required amount, and they appear to be perfectly functional. But more RAM is never a bad thing, especially for Web browsing.

The TPM requirement shows how features that were once considered scandalous have now become mundane. TPM-like hardware was once expected to usher in some kind of computing Armageddon, rendering our PCs no longer our own due to impenetrable protection of DRMed media and a total abolition of software piracy. This never came to pass. Instead, TPM and related technologies are used for protecting systems from certain kinds of malware, secure disk encryption, and other incremental improvements in system security.

Visual refinement

The Start menu is perhaps Windows' most distinctive piece of user interface. So it's not surprising that Windows 8 was so reviled given the way it all but discarded the Start menu. That release abandoned something a generation of PC users grew up with.

The new Start menu finally puts all your apps on the top level.

Windows 10 went a long way to restoring what Windows 8 took away. Version 1607, however, breaks a convention that the Start menu has maintained since its inception. Until now, the initial "menu" part of the Start menu has always been a mix of pinned icons and special items such as Run and Find. All the actual programs were tucked away in a Programs or All Apps submenu. Windows Vista changed this a little by making the menu no longer hierarchical—it expands "in place" and flattens any nested folder hierarchy—but still hid programs away behind an All Programs option.

In 1607, the top level of the Start menu is now... All Apps. A narrow icon bar running up the left provides access to Settings, Explorer, and the Power and Account menus, and the top few items of the program listing are dynamically generated by usage and recent installation. Overall, access to programs is now more direct than it has ever been.

I don't quite get what took so long to do this. It's much more sensible. There are three main reasons for opening the Start menu: clicking a pinned app from the live tile section, typing to search for something, or opening something from All Apps. Why hide it away?

This audio output picker is very useful indeed.

The user feedback is most visible, and valuable, in some of the smaller changes, however. The lock screen, for example, no longer slides up to show the password box. Instead, the password box uses the same background. The speaker icon in the notification area now shows a volume slider when you click it along with a primary output picker. Several times a day I switch between my (USB-connected) headphones and my (HDMI-connected) receiver, so making this quickly accessible is excellent.

The Taskbar also received some adjustments. On multi-monitor systems, the time and date now shows on every single screen instead of appearing only on the primary. This seems weird and superfluous until you play a full-screen game on your primary monitor, at which point you wonder why there was ever a time that the clock wasn't shown on every Taskbar.

By having the operating system "know" about your various calendars and accounts, it can show relevant information in useful places.

The right-hand side of the primary Taskbar is a little different as well. First of all, clicking the time and date now shows your imminent appointments in addition to the calendar. Second, the Action Center icon for notifications has been yanked out of the notification area and given its own special icon to the right of the clock. This icon shows how many unread notifications you have, and whenever you receive a new notification it changes from its default icon to that of the app sending the notification.

Fortunately, the numeric overlay can be disabled. While I find the notifications useful in the moment (especially the synced ones from my phone), I rarely find it interesting or useful to browse historic notifications in the Action Center. The number overlay is a constant taunt that I have things to attend to. The only notification-driven action I care about is "Clear All." Begone, foul number.

The number of notifications shown per app in the Action Center can now be customized, as can the quick access buttons at the bottom of the Action Center. There's also a prioritization system so that apps you really care about will always have their notifications shown at the top.

The notifications themselves are nice. I'm just not that excited about seeing all the old ones gathered together.

I guess it's fair to say that I don't really care for Action Center. It's mainly a way of creating busywork, tidying up all those unwanted snippets of info that were only important to me in the moment. I feel the same about the notification centers on iOS and, especially, Android. They're just sources of clutter. The notifications themselves are getting smarter—you can reply to Skype messages, snooze Cortana alerts, embed pictures, etc—but I'm finding that these features are much more useful when the notifications first pop up. The ability to track them historically feels unimportant.

I am, however, glad to see Microsoft continuing to build up this functionality and make them more capable. I would love more options here; in particular, I wish the pop-up alerts could display somewhere other than the bottom right of my primary monitor. They get in the way of gaming there.

Oh Cortana

As well as making the notifications themselves better, there are now more of them thanks to one of the things Microsoft says has been a big focus for version 1607: Cortana.

My relationship with Cortana is still mixed. On the one hand, I do use certain Cortana features. I work from home in Brooklyn and semi-regularly have meetings in Manhattan, with all my appointments stored in Exchange and Outlook. Outlook will give you a warning of an impending meeting, but Outlook only notifies you at some fixed interval before the event occurs. You can be warned 15 minutes or an hour or a day before the event.

Cortana, by contrast, tells me about those meetings when I actually need to leave my apartment. Cortana can see the meetings, can understand the location specified for the meetings, and can figure out how long it'll take on the subway to get there. This is smart: the system aggregates my calendar data with map data, geolocation data, and public transit data. It produces something that's genuinely useful.

On the other hand, I still don't find myself actually talking to Cortana. It just feels awkward to talk to my computer to ask her things. Strangely, I don't have any qualms about talking to (or, as my wife will attest, shouting at) our Xbox to control it, but when it comes to my PC I'd rather use my mouse and keyboard.

You can now talk to Cortana on the lock screen.

If you are the kind of person who talks to their computer, 1607 offers more facilities to do so. Cortana can now be enabled above the lock screen, so if your PC is logged in but locked, you can still talk to her and ask her questions. How much she will answer will depend on how she's configured. By default she won't tell you about your calendar or e-mail when the machine is locked (restricting her only to, for example, weather queries or setting reminders), but if you trust your environment you can allow these responses, too.

Those reminders are also more capable. You can now tell Cortana to simply remember facts that aren't tied to any particular time or place. Cortana has evolved into a share target; you can share, for example, a set of directions from the Maps app with Cortana and then retrieve them later on.

This really comes into its own with phone syncing. Built in to Windows 10 Mobile and available on Android with the Cortana app (and to a lesser extent, the Cortana app on the iPhone), all these notifications are shared across devices. You can look up some directions on your PC and share them to Cortana, making them accessible instantly from the phone.

The phone can also now push notifications to the PC. My colleague Ron Amadeo wrote about his experiences with the Android version of Cortana, and the "translation" from Android notifications to Windows ones clearly has a lot of issues.

This is useful, but why not route the call to my PC so I can answer it on my headset?

My experience with Windows 10 Mobile was quite a bit smoother—not altogether surprising, given that both operating systems use the same notification scheme. Notifications from missed calls and SMSes come over quickly and consistently, and you can reply to the SMSes directly from the notification.

This is really handy, especially for things like SMS-based two factor authentication. I no longer need to pull my phone from my pocket just to get the code. Still, the current setup leaves me yearning for more. It makes me even more frustrated that the planned Messaging Everywhere feature, which would have let me use the SMS app on my PC to relay messages via my phone, got nixed. (Eventually the feature will supposedly come back using the Skype client).

More broadly, though, the capabilities continue to feel weak compared to what Apple is doing with Handoff and Continuity. iPhones can pass voice calls through to Macs on the same network. Cortana lets me share directions from PC to phone or vice versa, but in Handoff, the Maps app can simply share state between phone and computer without any intervening "share" step. Microsoft's approach has the advantage of working even with Android phones, but given the many issues we've found, that's small comfort.

Ink, resurrected

Before there were capacitive screens and finger-based touch, there was the stylus. In the 1990s, Microsoft dabbled with Windows for Pens. In the 2000s, Microsoft got more serious with Windows XP Tablet Edition. The purpose throughout was the same: the pen was to serve not only as a mouse replacement, capable of near-pixel perfect manipulation of the existing Windows interface, but it was also a device for more "human" interaction like handwriting, drawing, and sketching.

As we all know, this use of the stylus never really took off. Driving Windows itself with a stylus was too awkward. Direct finger-based touch with capacitive screens succeeded in a way that stylus never did. Microsoft never dropped the pen idea, however, and Windows continues to support pen input both for controlling the interface and for handwriting and drawing within applications. The Surface line of hardware has all supported pens, arguably making the stylus more interesting and useful to more people. Through this all, Windows' native pen support hasn't really moved much beyond the days of Windows XP Tablet Edition: it's still an interface designed for mouse and keyboard (and, now, finger), not a stylus.

Ink Workplace puts ink-oriented apps at your fingertips. Er, pen tip.

For the first time, the Anniversary Update strives to make pen input more accessible and discoverable in a few new ways. In the notification area of pen-capable systems is a new pen icon. Tapping this opens up the Ink Workspace: instant access to sticky notes, sketching, and screenshot annotating. Below that are links to other pen apps such as OneNote. Styluses with a Bluetooth button, such as the current-generation Surface Pen, will open the Ink Workspace when the button is pressed, too.

The sticky notes have some neat recognition features; write $MSFT and the text turns blue, and you can tap it to see stock performance. Write a time and date and you can create a Cortana notification. Write a URL, even, and you can open that up. The sketching app seems perfunctory, and it sports an on-screen ruler for drawing straight lines. The screenshot tool is straightforward, and I can see it being ridiculously handy for a certain kind of user.

I'm not that kind of user, though, at least not yet. Since leaving school about 17 years ago (good god, has it really been that long?) my handwriting has deteriorated from an already poor state to something that's borderline illegible. It's not very fast, either. The Windows handwriting recognition does an astonishingly good job of picking out what I wrote, but it's not a comfortable input system for me. Similarly, I'm not a OneNoter. I know that there are those for whom the note-taking application is central to their workflow, but that's not me.

Instant access to scribbling over screenshots is something that's genuinely useful.

The pen capabilities of the Surface systems have always felt a little wasted on me in that regard. The Anniversary Update hasn't changed that. Pen still doesn't feel like the natural way to interact with the system, but it's starting to win me 'round. The quick and easy screenshot annotation is something that I'm sure designers the world over will be able to make use of when working with their clients. The instant access afforded by the new Workspace means that pen is always at one's fingertips. You can even use ink above the lock screen, letting you jot down notes even faster.

It all has me thinking that maybe it's time to take the dive into OneNote to combine its audio recording with pen-driven sketching during interviews and press conferences.

Edge: on the cusp of being usable

The Edge browser at Windows 10's launch was very much a work in progress. Its core engine was fast, attractive, and had decent support for Web standards. But the engine was wrapped in a browser that was very bare-bones. It takes a significant step forward in 1607.

The big improvement here is support for extensions. The extensions are written using a mix of HTML and JavaScript and installed and updated via the Windows Store. This is a very similar model to the one Chrome uses for its extensions, and indeed, Microsoft says that the extensions themselves are highly compatible, if not quite identical.

Early extensions include Reddit Enhancement Suite, AdBlock, AdBlock Plus, LastPass, and no doubt more in the coming days, weeks, and months. My experience is that they work about as well as they do in other browsers, which is rather the point: Edge is no longer behind in this regard.

The invaluable Reddit Enhancement Suite makes reading /r/dota2 even better.

Edge also now supports pinning tabs, so sites that you use consistently can have their tabs shrunk to the size of the icon and anchored to the left-hand side of the tab bar. Once pinned, a tab can no longer be closed by hitting its X button (as it no longer has one), protecting tabs from accidental closure. Microsoft has also been championing Edge's low battery consumption when compared to Chrome and Firefox.

There's also richer integration into operating system capabilities; Edge can send notifications that appear in Action Center, and websites using the FIDO specification can use Windows' biometric authentication.

Is Edge going to be my daily driver? I think it's close to winning me over from Chrome, but it's not there yet. There are extensions I need that haven't been ported (1Password, Global Twitch emotes, a handful of others). I also have stability concerns. Every browser I use crashes from time to time. Tabs die, and occasionally Chrome just up and falls over entirely, wiping out every window and every tab at once. For now, Edge seems to die just a little too often.

When away from a power outlet, Edge is easy to recommend. The battery difference feels real. But as a primary browser, particularly in desktop scenarios, it's still not quite there yet. As it gains more extensions and greater stability, it certainly can get to this point.

A better store for gaming

The Windows Store and the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) have come under fire from gamers. Much of the criticism is off base, but certain criticisms were sound. Control over features such as v-sync and SLI is important to many gamers, and Windows 10 at its release did not offer that ability.

Download sizes were also a problem; the Store would install any programs to the primary disk, potentially causing space issues for anyone with a fast SSD for the operating system and a larger, slower spinning disk for big programs.

The Anniversary Update Store and the underlying platform address many of these concerns. Games can now disable v-sync if they want; they can also take advantage of Nvidia's G-Sync and AMD's FreeSync variable refresh rate technology. You can finally choose which disk software installs onto at install time. The store even has explicit information about minimum specs and recommended specs, making it easier to check whether a game will be suitable for your system. All around, the experience is better.

The Store packs in a ton of new information about apps and games.

The preferred route for developers on Windows is still UWP. UWP software written using the WinRT framework is substantially compatible with Windows on PCs, tablets, phones, Xboxes, and HoloLens. For game developers, DirectX 11 and 12 are the recommended APIs of choice, providing some degree of compatibility between PC and Xbox. Until now if you wanted to sell your apps through the store to take advantage of the Store's automatic updating, you had to use one of these technologies.

Windows 1607 introduces a new option: Project Centennial, officially known now as the Desktop App Converter. The Desktop App Converter, as the name suggests, converts conventional desktop apps built using Win32 and turns them into packages that can be both installed and updated using the Store infrastructure.

The App Converter tracks every change made to the filesystem and registry made during an application install and then captures them to a file. Converted applications run in a semi-virtualized environment with a virtual registry and view of the file system, so they "see" those changes that were made at install-time. These virtualized changes are never made to the real file system or the real registry, ensuring that the application remains isolated and can be cleanly uninstalled without leaving clutter everywhere. Special provisions are made for registering file extensions and a few other "system-wide" changes so that these can be cleanly installed and uninstalled.

Microsoft had this technology around for many years; App-V, a feature offered to enterprises to help them manage software deployments and delivery, uses a similar scheme of partial virtualization to ensure application isolation. Centennial just takes things a little further by adding the Store-based selling, installing, and updating.

For the most part, apps run using the App Converter aren't sandboxed or otherwise restricted; they can use any API of their choosing including old legacy APIs such as DirectX 9. Apart from the virtualized view of the registry and file system, there are a couple of other constraints. For instance, the apps can't use Administrator privileges and can't install any device drivers.

This lack of sandboxing means that Centennial applications aren't quite as safe as proper UWPs would be—and of course, apps packaged this way won't run on any version of Windows other than the desktop version. It also means that almost any app will work when bundled and distributed this way. Now, developers with existing software can easily repackage their Win32 programs and sell and maintain them through the Windows Store.

Microsoft's hope is that, over time, developers will add UWP features like the power managed background tasks and support for the share contract to their Centennial applications. Longterm, the idea is that developers will fully convert to UWP in order to gain access to things like the XAML user interface technology. To support that migration, developers can create mixed applications that have a Centennial portion and a UWP portion.

Centennial could be regarded as being something of an admission of failure. Interest in UWP applications does seem to be growing in Windows 10, but it's far from being the default development choice. If it were truly booming, then Microsoft might never have bothered with Centennial. On the flip side, there's a ridiculous number of Win32 applications out there in the world, and it's unrealistic to expect those to ever be ported to UWP. Allowing Centennial as a halfway house still offers some advantages—in particular the clean installation, uninstallation, and updating—without requiring those applications to be rewritten from scratch.

The big question for Centennial will be if third parties bother. An abundance of well-known and well-liked Win32 games and applications hitting the Store will make things a lot more appealing to software customers. With enough footfall in the Store, the incentive to develope proper, safer UWPs becomes much more compelling. But if third parties ignore Centennial, the impetus to use the Store and develop apps for it will never materialize.

This is tantalizing. The settings interface is here, but no apps appear to use it.

Another feature that could be good depending on adoption is the ability to create applications that register to handle certain domains. iOS and Android already support this. Twitter's official app, for example, can take ownership of the twitter.com domain, meaning that any twitter.com link will open directly into the app rather than in the browser. Windows 10 Anniversary Update offers a comparable facility.

So far I haven't found any apps that actually use it, however. There's a settings page for configuring it, but nothing takes advantage as of this writing. I can't even find developer documentation any longer; there were pre-release documents that described how apps would be able to register for this support, but that appears to be missing right now. It's possible the feature was cut at the last minute, but its continued presence in Settings suggests otherwise.

GNU/NTOSKRNL

The single most fascinating new feature of the Anniversary Update is, without a doubt, the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). This isn't installed or enabled by default, and for the time being it's aimed squarely at developers; it won't even run unless you set the system to Developer Mode in the Settings app. Nonetheless, it is remarkable.

When enabled, Windows runs a couple of kernel-mode components that offer the same API as the Linux kernel offers to Linux programs. Windows has supported Unix-like APIs in the past, but historically programs had to be recompiled, at the very least, to support this. The WSL is different. The drivers don't just expose the right APIs, they include all the infrastructure needed to execute binaries that are compiled for Linux systems.

Microsoft has teamed up with Canonical to help develop this, so the userland belongs to that of Ubuntu. Not "like" Ubuntu; it installs and runs the same .deb packages that a real Ubuntu system uses, just running on top of the Windows NT kernel.

Linux processes themselves are still NT kernel processes. They're visible to the kernel and get run on processors just the same as Windows processes, but they're very special processes. Microsoft calls them "pico processes" and says that they were first implemented in Windows in Windows 8.1. Every normal Windows process contains certain standard information: there is a special library loaded into the process (ntdll.dll) that handles calling kernel functions, along with some pieces of data describing the process itself and any of its threads. Pico processes don't have any of that data. They're an empty address space.

Pico processes are associated with a driver (the implication being you could have several different drivers each with their own family of pico processes, but for now, it's just a Linux Subsystem driver and Linux-like processes), and this driver, the pico provider, is responsible for keeping track of its own pico processes. The pico provider also handles calls from the pico process into the kernel. The Linux pico provider sets up the Linux pico processes so that they can use the Linux approach to calling kernel functions.

Command-line apps just aren't very photogenic.

As far as the Linux programs are concerned, they're running on Linux. They call regular Linux kernel functions in the regular Linux way without any indication that it's not actually a Linux kernel that's providing those functions.

Microsoft has provided various additional components to create a virtualized Linux-like file system that still has access to the full Windows file system as necessary.

The Linux subsystem is not complete. There are many Linux APIs that are not yet implemented or that are implemented only partially. There's no X server, either, though third-party Win32 ones will work fine. Nonetheless, it's sufficient to run a wide range of common Linux programs, including bash, the gcc compiler, vim, emacs, and more. This is consistent with Microsoft's initial goal: courting developers who are familiar with the software stacks on Linux or OS X and making them feel at home on Windows systems.

But even as complete as it is (and unfortunately buggy, it is beta) the Linux subsystem does actually work. It needs more development so that more APIs are supported. Some parts of Linux will be quite hairy on Windows and might even need the NT kernel itself to be changed so that they can be fully supported. And it's still not clear if Microsoft will stick rigidly to its "for developers" rationale. I'd love to see this opened up to become a supported part of the server system so that we could, for example, run redis natively on Windows—though developers certainly seem keen on making it as fully featured as possible.

An even more cut-down version of the pico process shows up elsewhere, too. In addition to pico process, which is paired to a pico provider, Windows supports minimal processes: totally empty processes that don't do anything. No pico provider, no nothing. They're simply an address space into which memory can be allocated or deallocated.

Microsoft is using this for Windows' memory compression feature. Memory compression was added (without Microsoft telling anyone, oddly) in the initial Windows 10 release. Prior to Windows 10, used blocks of memory (allocated in pages of 4 kilobytes) could be written out to the pagefile if the operating system needed to make more physical memory available. This is slow, especially if the page of memory needs to be used again, as it must be read back from the pagefile.

Memory compression adds an intermediate step; before being written out to the pagefile, memory pages are compressed. This frees up some physical RAM (since the compressed pages take up less space than their uncompressed data) while avoiding the need to hit the hard disk. If the system still needs physical memory, then the pagefile can of course be used, but the memory compression provides a kind of trade-off.

In the initial Windows 10 release, compressed memory was handled in the kernel's memory space. However, nothing in the user interface ever actually acknowledged or referenced that. There was no way of seeing how much memory was compressed and how much was really in use. If you looked in Task Manager, the System process would simply appear to be using enormous amounts of memory—potentially many gigabytes, rather than the few hundred megabytes it should be using. Windows 10 looked as if it were leaking memory, badly.

The 1511 update made this a little bit clearer; Task Manager's System process was renamed "System and Compressed Memory" to indicate that it represented more than just the kernel.

This bubble explaining the impact compressed memory is having is all well and good, but it's very strange to hide the Memory Compression process from the details tab.

1607 changes things up again. The System process is now just the System process and Compressed Memory has disappeared entirely. Windows now uses a minimal process to hold the compressed memory. While earlier builds of the Anniversary Update listed that minimal process (as "Compressed Memory") in Task Manager, it's now hidden from view entirely. Third-party programs will still list the process (it shows up in Process Hacker, for example) as does the command-line tasklist program, but Task Manager's detailed process listing denies all knowledge.

Its memory graph on the Performance tab, however, does acknowledge compressed memory. There's a counter to say how much memory is being used to store compressed pages, and hovering the mouse over the "in use" portion of the memory composition bar will tell you how much memory is compressed and how much memory would be occupied if there were no compression.

Windows 10 one year on: Is this it?

The Windows 10 Anniversary Update is certainly a bigger update than the November Update, and its visible feature work is definitely welcome. However, the gap between the initial Windows 10 release and this one doesn't feel that big. Apple's OS X (or as it's soon to be known, macOS) is on an annual release cycle, and each release feels a bit more substantial than this release does.

Microsoft is still adjusting its processes to handle this more frequent release cycle and new approach to beta development, and this likely had some impact on the company's ability to deliver new features. But even in that light, this still feels a little on the slight side.

I suspect that many of the 5,000 improvements are made up of very small changes—moving more configuration options into the Settings app, for example, or adding an inverted white-on-black option for certain apps—which is worthwhile and helps make Windows feel more like one operating system rather than many. This work isn't high impact, but it should, over time, make Windows' historic legacy much less visible, modernizing older parts of the interface and adding consistency that's still lacking.

There has been a greater amount of Windows development over the last year than is immediately apparent in this release. Features for Windows Server, such as supporting nested Hyper-V (so that you can run virtual machines inside virtual machines) and containers (for streamlined software deployments), have been developed over the past year. They're even present in Windows 10, though their relevance to desktop usage is presently marginal.

I expect that, as with Apple, it will take Microsoft a bit of time to get its development process fully nailed down and truly hit its stride with its annual releases. The past year has included not just the core Windows 10 and Windows 10 Mobile work; it has also included the final development and integration of the Xbox operating system (which is now, too, a UWP-capable Windows 10 system) and the HoloLens platform. The Xbox update is already out, and the HoloLens and Mobile updates should be out soon.

With this significant integration work now done, I'd hope that the next releases are a little more substantial.

For now, the Anniversary Update is an incremental update that makes Windows 10 incrementally better. For Windows 10, the decision to upgrade is obvious, and in many cases, there's no decision to be made. In fact, home users will be getting it whether they like it or not. They shouldn't fear this; if nothing else the revised Start menu layout makes the upgrade worthwhile.

But the decision for Windows 7 and 8.1 users is rather different now than it was a year ago. A year ago, upgrading to Windows 10 was an easy decision to make, because the upgrade was zero cost. Unless upgrading was absolutely impossible (due to an incompatibility or being particularly wedded to Media Center), then upgrading was the obvious thing to do. Windows 10 is a better operating system than those two, especially for $0.

But that option is now officially gone. There are ways to cheat the system and continue to receive the free upgrade, but I don't know how long they'll last. If you don't use loopholes, upgrading now costs $119 for regular Windows 10, $199 for the Pro version. That feels like a lot of money for something that was, until a few days ago, free. If you were eligible to upgrade when it was free, but neglected to do so, well... money aside, it's worth upgrading even more now. Windows 10 was better than Windows 7 and 8.1. Windows 10 Anniversary Update is better than Windows 10.

But Windows 10 Anniversary Update doesn't reinstate Media Center, doesn't restore Windows 8's stronger tablet interface, and doesn't disable the telemetry that has some people up in arms. If you didn't want Windows 10 then, you're still not going to want it now.

Ars Staff

350

View Comments