At someone's request for an installation of Windows, I decided, out of some interest in the latest developments of Windows OS, accompanied by my thought "Since he insists, let him suffer," to install Windows 10 Technical Preview.
The first thing to do was to download the ISO and find a way to make a bootable device out of it. USB stick did not work (failed to boot). The first attempt to put it onto DVD with Xfburn ruined the DVD disc. A second attempt with K3b and another DVD disc finally booted.
Once the installer booted in the DVD drive, it became clear that there's no live boot. No way to check out what the opsys can offer other than to make a complete install.
Then it became clear that there's no easy way to begin installing because, as the Windows installer complained, the harddrive of the machine was "partitioned GPT style". (The machine in question had had Ubuntu at first.) For a change I booted to Linux on the machine and tried things with GParted, but the Windows installer remained complaining all the same. It was time to look up on the net what GPT means and how to get past it.
The answers on YT said that immediately as the Windows installer boots,
- Press Shift+F10 to open up command prompt
- In the command prompt, type diskpart
- Then list disks, whose answer in my case was just one - 0
- Then select disk 0
- Then clear
The last command will totally obliterate the structure of partitions, not to mention the data, on the disk. The upside is that you can proceed with the installation of your Windows. (A corollary seems to be: The only way to dual-boot is to install Linux
after Windows.)
One of the interests in getting to see Windows 10 was the famous Project Spartan that was supposed to have superceded IE.
A website instructs, "You can try Project Spartan using the "globe" icon on the taskbar." This is false. The globe icon was nowhere to be found, while the blue "e" icon was rather prominent.
A totally different website instructs, "Launch Internet Explorer 11 and type about:flags... Find the option labeled Enable Experimental Web Platform Features and select Enabled. Click the Apply Changes button at the bottom of the page and then completely close and restart Internet Explorer."
These instructions were possible to follow through in practice, but they led to no visible changes in the look and behaviour of the browser. In other words, a total letdown.
An incidental detail: The size of the Windows 10 Technical Preview installer is 4 GB. In a Linux distro with this size you get everything - a bunch of browsers, office suits, multimedia players and codecs, all Linux games historically produced, etc. In Windows you will still have to install that stuff separately. But this was already beyond what I was asked to do. Let him suffer.