Microsoft Releases Windows 10 S ISO to Developers, Education Customers

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(BTW, upgrade or rather feature unlocking price in UK, S to full PRO, is £59.)

MS pricing policy. I understand if there only comes the added VAT, but that EU price is ridiculous. HAHAH!

Kari said:

Do you subscribe to Visual Studio Enterprise or Professional (both paid for subscriptions)? If yes, it should be available to you using the link from first post.

slicendice said:

Well, it clearly states that you need a Visual Studio/MSDN subscription. The Cloud subscription that allows you access to Windows 10 S and many other OS releases costs $539/yr

You are in the same boat as me.

In that case I wont be able top test it :/

slicendice said:

MS pricing policy. I understand if there only comes the added VAT, but that EU price is ridiculous. HAHAH!

We have consistently been ripped of by MS in UK for ever even allowing for vat versus US sales tax difference - approx 14%. MS claim it is the additional cost of distance which is bs for digital media as we can just download from US. Basically, MS make a bigger profit out of rest of world than the luck US guys.

Same is true of hardware.

cereberus said:

... additional cost of distance.

In this case there's not even an electronic delivery, all features are there they just need to be unlocked.

Kari said:

Tried to download it since yesterday, been cancelling every try because of download speed; I'm getting all other downloads from MSDN / VS with max speed but this W10 S comes at max 300 Kbps, download manager telling me "2 days left".

It's fine here in Toronto Kari. Downloads in 6 mins. Probably just an issue with your geographical location?

badrobot said:

It's fine here in Toronto Kari. Downloads in 6 mins. Probably just an issue with your geographical location?

Yeah, staying in Europe I get between 50 and 200 KBps, which would mean about day and a half for a 4.5 gig file. Luckily I can teleport , go to US to pick what I need.

I just launch a VPN client, teleport my PC to West Coast USA and get decent speeds, the same file being downloaded in about 15 minutes.

Why Windows 10 S?

The alliterative quartet of Schools, Students, Security and Store are emphasized in the FAQ, with echoes of Windows 7 Starter, and the old Anytime Upgrade as was pushed on Netbooks when they burst on the scene.

This is fairly typical of Microsoft, by analogy, hanging around the school gates, like the pusher getting the next generation of users primed to come back to their neighbourhood supplier - and the price of upgrade to Pro(£59) is half the £120 for retail Windows 10 Home, or nearly a quarter if the £220 for Pro from the Microsoft Store.

It is streamlined and works well on an old Dell Latitude E6400 (Core 2 Duo E8400, 4GB RAM), which I installed in less than 40 minutes by applying the Install.wim of the x86 with Wimlib-imagex.exe to a formatted 20GB partition.

Activated by Digital license from previous Pro installations, it uses the Generic cloud Product key (Cloud=V3WVW-N2PV2-xxxxx-34QGF-VMJ2C)-discovered from a dual boot on the same machine using ShowKeyPlus.

It took quite a while to find the Intel Express 4 chipset integrated graphics driver.

Setting it to Insider Program Fast ring, it updated effortlessly to Insider preview 16241, and then to 16251 rs3.

Frustrating to geeks, this OS is nice to use, as long as you don't want "to fiddle under the hood", or customise to suit the way you want to work having prior experience with Windows.

How it may be serviced in case of problems is a mystery, I suppose like most modern things, it can't be fixed, just replaced.

Yet to investigate the "cloud" functionality, it's been installed less than 12 hours, during which I had some sleep.

Windows S is intended to be used in Schools or other institutions, mainly used for education. Everything can be serviced and managed in a central place.

As far as I know, you CAN run CMD and PowerShell, but not directly, it must be launched through an app that is Digitally Signed by Windows Store. All the tools are stored locally, but all security critical win32 applications are not available for the normal user. Which is the whole point of this OS.

Security and simplicity.

This OS is NOT intended for the average user. So you, me and other geeks out here, no point in complaining about an OS that is not really intended/targeted for us.

HERE is official MS instructions on Deployment and servicing for Windows 10 S. (The way Schools and institutions work with hundreds of computers the right/intended way)

Simply put, you don't FIX thousands of computers when they are broken, but rather redeploy the latest working and preconfigured image. Takes 10-60 minutes, depending on network and computers on the other end.

When you perform a windows update build upgrade (including with Windows 10 S), there is now, in the last few IP builds, a c:\windows.old\$Windows.~BT\sources\windowsold.wim image, which is presumably there for rollback. I intend to see if it is a full image that may be installed on the hardware (in effect, sysprepped for that machine and no user apart from the defaults). The .wim could be mounted and serviced offline, I guess.

Interesting times ahead.