Apps can now be installed to any external storage device

Self explanatory--and quite deserving of being plaqued and framed and given a trophy and a feature of the year award.

http://www.windowscentral.com/how-install-windows-10-apps-external-drive

I was one of the tens of thousands who specifically requested this through the feedback system, only to see no acknowledgment from Microsoft as to nay or yay. Many of us thought since it had been left unaddressed since last winter we might as well chalk it up as a lost cause. Fear not--your 16 GB HP Stream 7 has now grown wings since you can now have as many apps as you wish provided that you have the SD cards to accommodate them. You can even swap out and mix and match as many external devices as you well please with apps scattered across all of them. (For those with traditional desktops and laptops with more than one internal storage device and are already wondering, yes, this feature also allows you to choose any secondary internal drive as well!) No app exploding if you forget to insert the external storage device with the right app--it just won't load and everything will still be hunky dory in the registry and system settings.

Now, to carefully formulate my plans for total world conquest, err, Farmville, once I obtain a greased lightning Lexar Professional 1000X 128GB MicroSDXC card when it releases in August.

 

Huzzah! When I get my Asus Vivotab Note 8 back, I'll be installing Win10 on July 29th!

 

This is truly phenomenal! Any guesses as to how slow programs will appear to launch from 128GB SXCD cards?

 

Ugh. Am I being a Debbie downer, seeing the glass as half empty, because I'm bummed that this makes the decision of whether or not to upgrade to Windows 10 that much harder? I SO want to be able to put my Modern apps on my micro-sd card, but so far I don't like what I've seen of Win 10's tablet UI. Maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised by the time the final build rolls out, and maybe I'll find that the tablet mode is just as good as Windows 8.1. I'm not holding my breath, though.

 

I keep wanting to try this - just to see what 10 is like - but I use my tablet a bit much if it crashes alot. But what do we truly "lose" in 10? Charms? There are 3 functions I personally use often, share, adjust volume, and start - but 2 of those are redundant (volume rocker, start button, etc). Print is in fact inconvenient through charms, and for myself, the other functions are either replicated in action center (like WiFi control) or not often useful (like app settings, something that rarely should be used). The problem is that while we are trained, hidden commands are a problem for UI quality, especially with 0 visual cue... Taskbar on is certainly a WP factor, which seems annoying, until I consider how darn useful it is on the phone to have. If they can swipe-up it like on the HTC one m8, and hide with arrow or auto or whatnot (an easy change to add if it isn't there), it'd be golden... Start, for some unholy reason, has ungainly and enormous gaps between the edges and icons (despite the trend of all other OS and even WP itself, which keeps filling more) - but again, this is stupid easy to change, no matter how frustrating the current direction is. App slide switching seems like a thing to miss - except it is utterly annoying when it doesn't work, or your switching falls out of order and you slide through every open app (all the time). Nobody should call the app switcher tray a good thing, because that jerky thumb motion is the most unintuitive thing I've ever encountered or had to teach to a family member - the task switcher in 10 seems more like WP, which is accessible. Universal back button will be nice too. The app advances mostly seem for the better in UI and usability, like Cortana and Xbox and Music. OneDrive, which Mr. thurrot laments, is annoying - I liked placeholders too - but I just put all my OneDrive on an SD card already (and music, photos, and videos, the more significantly affected files, are already cloud accessible through their respective apps, so don't need placeholders or explorer presence). Inking improvements seem like a no brainer to want... Reverting to a not-full-screen immersive browser is definitely a nod to the other tablet OS and WP, but again, hidden URL bar is bad UI and tough to teach. I turn that feature off for family training, just leave it always on already... Gestures are very useful but not easy to teach. I'd like if more of our favorite functions were retained, not removed though...

Idk, I just feel like I'm not following the problems and complaints yet. Granted I haven't installed it out of stability fears - so you fellas are better able to dispute my observations...

 

A bit of slightly modified copy and paste from a post I made elsewhere, but a lot of the problems, in my opinion:

Charms weren't perfect, but having these specific commands in the same place all the time made sense. Now some of that is going to be thrown into apps but not always the same place (and that’s even disregarding legacy Windows 8 apps), some of it will be in the taskbar, some of it will be in the Action Center, and some of it will be in the system tray.

It’s indicative of the Windows 10 design in general – it feels put together by a million different committees. There isn’t any consistency anywhere. The Quick Action buttons all do different things. Some are toggles, others cycle through options, some send you to the Settings page, and others open up a new flyout. And what the Action Center Wifi button does is entirely different than what the Action Center system tray icon does.

Meanwhile, we’ve got a global back button in the taskbar, when the majority of apps don’t support a back button. We’ve got broken interaction with any Windows 8 apps because they had to shoehorn in a menu button in the titlebar.

The start screen is worse compared to Windows 8. Instead of a swipe from the side and a large start button, there’s a very small taskbar icon for start. Instead of a swipe to see all apps (and have that menu fill up the screen) you have to press a menu button, and then press a tiny all apps button, and then you only see those apps fill up a tiny section of your display.

The current implementation of Task View puts all of your windows in the center of the screen… great for a keyboard and mouse, but not so great for a tablet where you’re holding the device by the sides. Your fingers are at the edge of the screen, so switching through apps just makes sense to be there too.

Metro IE wasn’t perfect, but it was designed for touch. Spartan on the other hand, is not a tablet browser. Again, there’s inconsistency all over it. You have to move your hand back and forth between different parts of the screen constantly to use it. The address bar / Cortana search window is at the top of the screen, but Cortana results are on the right. Your tabs and new tab button are at the top, but favorites are on the right. One thing that Metro IE did amazingly is to put all of the controls in the same spot. Speaking of controls, in Edge, you’re stuck with an always visible menu / address bar. Other touch browsers handle this better, whether you’re talking about Metro IE, with its app bar menus, or others, which slide the address bar off screen as you scroll down, letting you see more of the page you’re trying to browse.

Plus, the tab metaphor was done better in Metro IE. I’m on a tablet. Give me large thumbnails of my page rather than tiny little tabs and favicons any day of the week. Other things that Edge is missing – swipe gestures for forward/back, a good hover solution (Metro IE put the buttons at the bottom, so when you press and held on a hover menu, the menu popped open and was unobscured by buttons. Edge puts the right click context menu on top of the site’s menu that you’re trying to use), any sort of link disambiguation features (I’ve seen other touch browsers pop up a magnifier when I tap on two links that are really close together, etc.), and a bunch of other basic touch functions.

Nobody would argue that Windows 8 is perfect. However much of a failure it was, every part of touch interaction was fully thought through from the beginning. What we’re seeing with Windows 10 is Microsoft trying to tack on some stuff at the last minute, and it’s not working.
What Microsoft should have done is taken what worked in Windows 8 and built on it (for example, the way Windows 10 handles desktop apps in tablet mode is superior to how Windows 8 does it). Instead, they threw out everything.

 

Thanks for laying out some of the holes in the design that I can't experience until I try it. I still feel hopeful - half of those glaring holes are app oriented and super flexible for what they will look like someday. I agree they seem to have thrown out most of what made Windows 8 stand out as touch oriented, in favor of a more "common" style (other OS, WP, and desktop)...

 

I just got the Lexar High-Performance MicroSDXC 633x 128GB card which has a real-world read speed of about 75 to 85 MB/sec and a write speed of 20 to 25 MB/sec. I saw about the same speeds I get from my local eMMC on my WinBook TW 802. Naturally, it does not compare with the SSD on my Surface Pro 2, but the built-in eMMC storage is a order of magnitude slower than an SDD, anyway. Load times seem to be 1 to 2 seconds for normal apps, 3 to 5 seconds for demanding games. However, when you are dealing with load times usually a second or so, a half of second difference I get with an SSD isn't really noticeable since apps are typically lightweight on resources anyway.