WINDOWS 10 AT 5 YEARS HOW IT TRANSFORMED THE PC

MICROSOFT AND WINDOWS 10 CHANGED THE WORLD OF PCS—AND SOMETIMES, THE WORLD CHANGED WINDOWS 10.

- MARK HACHMAN

As Windows 10 turns five years old this week, it’s a good time to look at how much Windows 10 has changed the PC—with everything from Windows Hello to free updates, seemingly in perpetuity.

Microsoft began shipping Windows 10 to PCs on July 29, 2015—“ordering pizza for 1.5 billion people (go.pcworld.com/pzza),” as one Microsoft executive put it. Few remember now that PC makers barely made the launch (go.pcworld.com/brln), with even Microsoft admitting most PCs would ship with Windows 8 pre-installed instead (go.pcworld.com/8pre)—even as PC makers hoped and prayed (go.pcworld.com/ hope) that Windows 10 would outsell the debacle that was Windows 8 (go.pcworld. com/dbw8).

Well, it did. Improvements like Windows Hello might be taken for granted now, but they were groundbreaking for their time. (Apple Macs still haven’t quite figured out what these “touchscreen” things are!) As Windows 10 celebrates its fifth birthday, let’s look back at 10 ways the operating system has transformed our computing lives...mostly for the better.

1. THE POWER OF FREE

Wow, a free upgrade? Chrome OS does it, as do Android, iOS, and now Macs. But at the time, a free transition from Windows 8 to Windows 10 (