While the technical previews of Windows 10 have been with us for several months, not everyone installed them on day one. Those who preferred to wait should know that Microsoft released a “March update” for Windows 10 Technical Preview, under build 10041. This marks the end of a delay that stretched over two months and the start of a marked acceleration in the development of the operating system.
All signs point to the “back to school” season in the northern hemisphere as the debut threshold for Windows 10. It’s a period when many students will look to upgrade their platforms, and with a new operating system on the horizon, very interesting offers are likely to appear. Windows 10 has already been in its Technical Preview phase for five months. A good number of users decided to evaluate its conditions through a virtual machine to avoid risking their computers (after all, it’s not ready for general use), but there is always the possibility of a secondary hard drive and a bit of “dual boot”.
What brings us here today is the new build 10041, officially released last Wednesday the 18th. Initial access to this build was through Windows Update, but the Redmond giant needed only a week to prepare the ISO images and publish them on the official site. The serial number remains exactly the same as the previous edition, and the available languages remain at 18 (including Spanish). To tell the truth, the improvements in build 10041 are minimal. Transparencies in the Start menu, optimized dragging of applications (for example, moving windows between virtual desktops), changes in icon artwork (increasingly flat), and better support for Cortana make up the main package of modifications. For a moment it was thought this build would offer an early version of the Spartan browser, but we’ll have to wait a bit longer.
Microsoft was forced to adjust its evaluation processes because user feedback indicated a concrete fact: updates were very slow. In fact, Microsoft took nearly two months to put this build online, due to a conservative process of three internal tests before releasing a new version to the public. That said, it’s an excellent time to recall the minimum requirements for Windows 10: a 1 GHz processor with support for PAE, NX, and SSE2 extensions, 1 GB of RAM (the x64 version needs 2 GB), video compatible with DirectX 9 at a resolution of 800 by 600 pixels, and 16 GB of internal storage. Downloads range between 2.5 and 3.5 gigabytes, so be patient.
