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The Windows community is aflutter with anticipation of the operating system's next major update, rumored (though far from certain) to be called Spring Creators Update. We'll be there with coverage when it releases, whatever it's called. Meanwhile, Windows 10 just keeps getting better. Yes, the big semiannual releases are a major part of that, but between-release updates also play a big role. More than any other current desktop operating system, Windows continues to push the boundaries. Consider, for example, that the voice-activated digital assistant Cortana showed up a year before Apple added Siri to macOS, that only Windows Hello lets you log in to your desktop with your face, and that only Windows offers full touch-screen support.

Bottom Line: Windows 10 Fall Creators Update continues Microsoft's winning formula of improving its OS incrementally, adding new design, apps, and functions that benefit its users without disrupting their productivity.

Like last spring's Creators Update, Fall Creators Update isn't a drastic overhaul, but it does add some nifty new tools, mobile integrations with iOS and Android, major new app capabilities, security improvements, and helpful system tweaks. Even with all its forward-looking features, however, the OS remains familiar to longtime users. Windows 10 is an Editors' Choice desktop operating system.

What's New in Fall Creators Update?

Before digging into all the details of the OS, here's a cheat sheet of what arrived with Fall Creators Update:

Continue on PC: Integrating your mobile device-whether it runs Android or iOS-with Windows 10 is a major goal of the Fall Creators Update. More and more, you'll be able to continue activities while switching between devices.

Video Editing in the Photos App: Join and trim video clips into movie projects and add soundtracks, titles, and special effects. Photos now even auto-creates movies and lets you remix them.

OneDrive Files On-Demand: You no longer have to choose which folders to sync with Microsoft's online storage service: Everything appears in File Explorer and is just a download away.

My People: Keep your closest contacts right in the Taskbar for easy interactions through multiple channels.

Mixed Reality Viewer and Mixed Reality for Paint 3D: See your 3D creations and others' added to the real world.

Edge Web Browser Updates: Pin sites to the Taskbar and mark up e-books and PDFs.

Ransomware Protection: Windows Defender Security Center now protects against unauthorized changes to files and folders.

Those are just the highlights; there are many more immensely helpful small touches, too, like the ability to share from File Explorer to social networks, and even the way the Share panel itself now shows icons for your most frequent contacts at the top, making it easy to send stuff to them. One more cool thing: The on-screen keyboard now includes a mic icon, so you can use your voice anywhere you need to enter text. Many of the updates were prompted by vast amounts of user feedback.

Windows Is Back on Track

Even before the Fall Creators Update, Microsoft's flagship software has proven to be a much bigger success than its ill-fated predecessor, Windows 8: With nearly 700 million copies installed (as of early April): Windows 10 now claims 52 percent of the U.S. desktop operating system share, having passed Windows 7, with 35 percent as of March 2018. Commercial usage is growing 84% year over year. By comparison, all versions of Apple's desktop operating system account for less than 20 percent of U.S. computers, according to data from StatCounter.

The newest Windows still runs the vast majority of the millions of existing Windows programs. Yes, that means it still uses the much-derided Registry to maintain configuration settings, but on today's fast hardware, it's no longer much of an issue. And modern Windows Store apps don't come with any Registry baggage. That's partly why Microsoft delivered Windows 10 S (now considered a Mode rather than an separate OS version), which only runs Windows Store apps. In fact, Microsoft recommends against using any third-party registry-optimizing software for Windows 10.

How to Get Windows 10

If you're running Windows 10, getting Fall Creators Update is a simple matter of running Windows Update, accessible from the Settings app. If you don't see it, you can head to Microsoft's Windows Download page to force the issue, or even download a disc image ISO to create startup media for a clean installation. Microsoft has changed the update interface so that it's less likely to interrupt you while you need the PC. You can even get up and running using just your voice and Cortana!

If you didn't move up from Windows 7 or 8 during the year Windows 10 was a free upgrade, you can still get the new OS, but you'll have to pay. It's preinstalled on all new PCs, and you can get the software via download or on USB sticks for the same prices as previous Windows versions; that is, $119.99 list for Home and $199.99 for Pro. Your data and programs come along for the ride when you update from previous versions, though it's always a good idea to back up before an OS upgrade.

Windows 10's minimum system requirements are surprisingly low: a 1GHz processor, 1GB of RAM, and 16GB of hard drive space. The 64-bit version of Windows 10 increases the RAM requirement to 2GB and the disk space to 20GB. You'll also need a DirectX 9-capable graphics card and a display with at least 800-by-600 resolution. You can find out whether your system is up to snuff by reading Can My PC Run Windows 10?

Windows 10 is available to most users in just two editions: Home and Pro (with 32-bit and 64-bit options for each), but all of the major features appear in both versions. Pro adds business-y things like network domain joining, Hyper-V virtualization, group policy management, and BitLocker encryption. That last one may be of interest to security-conscious personal users, too. Unsurprisingly, if you upgrade from Home levels of Windows 7 or 8, you get Windows 10 Home, and if you update from the professional versions of 7 or 8, you get Pro.

There are, of course, other editions of Windows 10 for special use cases: Windows 10 S has morphed into a Mode that's available in any Windows version and only runs Windows Store apps, vastly improving security and performance. It's still the default on the new Surface Laptop, but according to the official Windows Blog, going forward, "customers can choose to buy a new Windows 10 Home or Windows 10 Pro PC with S mode enabled, and commercial customers will be able to deploy Windows 10 Enterprise with S mode enabled."

The Enterprise version of Windows 10 is still an option for large organizations that want bulk licensing deals. Two Education versions target K-12 institutions: Windows 10 Pro Education and Windows 10 Education. And let's not forget the lightweight edition that powers Internet of Things devices and the Raspberry Pi: Windows 10 IoT Core.

When setting up a Windows 10 account, you can set up a local account without the need for a Microsoft account, but you lose many of the OS's best features if you do so. Many critics have nevertheless called out Microsoft for harvesting usage data by default, so the company has clarified privacy choices at setup. The company also showcased a new Privacy Dashboard coming to a future update of the OS, which will let you see and manage any data saved in your Microsoft account. For details, read Windows 10: How to Protect Your Privacy.

Interface

Windows 10 presents almost no learning curve for longtime Windows users, while managing to incorporate many of the advances of Windows 8-faster startup, tablet capability, better notifications, and an app store. Its windowing prowess remains unmatched, letting you easily show the desktop and snap windows to the sides and corner quadrants of the screen.

Most of Windows 10's interface remains intact, aside from the Fluent Design of some included utilities, the My People icon in the Taskbar, and the Share options mentioned above. One fun effect in the new design language is called Acrylic Material, which gives elements like menu bars a semi-transparent look and the appearance of depth when the mouse is over them.

It's still worth calling out a feature that appeared in the original Creators Update: Night Light. This works similarly to Apple products' Night Shift, adjusting the colors displayed away from the blue part of the spectrum, which has been found to interfere with a good night's sleep. When you turn on Night Light in Settings, by default it's enabled from sunset to sunrise, but you can change it to hours you specify, or turn it on immediately. Apple Night Shift only offers the last two options. You can even adjust the warmth of the spectrum Night Light uses (see the nearby screenshot).

The Start menu still shows the All Apps list without a second button press, and it also shows most used and newly installed apps. I appreciate that you can also set basic folder icons to appear, or not, as you choose. So, for example, you can have icons for File Explorer, Downloads, Documents, and so on appear right above the start button.

Another interface feature I've come to cherish is File Explorer's Quick Access section. This lets you easily find whatever file you were last working on regardless of the application you were using. So, if you edit an image and want to add it to another app, it's right at the top of the Quick Access list. You never have to remember where you just saved a file to find it quickly.

Some overlap between the Settings App and Control Panel still remains, an interface legacy of Windows 8, but really, it's much less of an issue than in Windows 8. For simple system settings, you use the Settings app, for deep, technical system options, you go to the Control Panel. Though you can get to deeper settings like Device Manager by right-clicking the Start button, Control Panel's no longer an option there. Instead, you see it when you perform certain actions like trying to uninstall a legacy program. You can still open it by simply typing "Control" in the Start menu search bar.

The Mobile Connection

New in Windows 10's Settings app is a Phone section. Though Microsoft's own mobile operating system has gone by the wayside, the company still sees an opportunity to streamline using the duopoly mobile OSes with Windows. The Continue on PC app lets any browser on iOS or Android open a webpage immediately on a Windows 10 PC, or to create a notification in the Action Center with the link. For tips on how to get started with this new feature, read Sync Your Smartphone to Windows 10 With Continue on PC.

And that's just the start. Microsoft wants to make your mobile devices smarter by tapping into its cloud services, using what the company calls the Microsoft Graph. This includes data from Office 365, LinkedIn, and that gathered by its Bing search service, which crawls the entire web. Cloud Clipboard is an upcoming feature that didn't make it into the Fall Creators Update. As its name suggests, that will let you copy and paste between your mobile and your PC.

More for Photos

The included Photos app gets a ton of improvements with Fall Creators Update, not the least of which is the ability to edit videos. It's dressed in the slick new Fluent Design System look, with a translucent window. It also gets an AI-powered search function, which means you can type things like "dog" or "mountain" and see results containing those items in your photo collection.

Photos now lets you import media from any device or folder. You can organize your photos into albums, apply automatic fixes like red-eye correction, lighting, and color, as well as add Instagram-like filters. The app's interface uses slider bars for easy touch input, and lets you draw on photos and videos.

Photos creates automatic galleries for you based on photos taken at a similar time and place, picking the best of similar photos to include. Though it has face-recognition like its macOS counterpart, and can group all the shots of one person, it doesn't associate names with the faces.

Video Creation in the Photos App

The Photos app now sports a Create button, with options for Video remix -automatic movies from your content; Video project, and Album. The first two are what's new and interesting. Video remix simply has you select two or more photos or clips and automatically joins them, applies titles, crops, filter effects and adds fitting background music and titles. A big Remix button swaps out different styles automatically. When I created a movie based on a recent weekend trip, the video's recipients were duly impressed.

The video editing interface is storyboard based, meaning it doesn't use timeline tracks. You can drag the thumbnails back and forward in the sequence to reorder them, and you can trim individual video clips. A very cool extra is that you can apply 3D effects, and even anchor them to an object in your video with motion tracking. You can use the included mood music or your own tracks. If you choose the former, transitions are timed to the beats.

Just added in January 2018 is the ability to designate someone in your automatically generated video as the Star. The program identifies faces in the video clips and photos, and it lets you choose one to highlight. It then creates a video in which that person is the most important element.

My People

Fall Creators Update finally brings with it the My People feature that was touted for its predecessor, Creators Update. This lets you pin contacts to the Taskbar for easy communication via email, Skype, or whatever communication apps later support it. You can drag files to the friend's icon to share files with them, read or send email or Skype messages without opening separate apps. But the most fun part of it happens when you send an emoticon in a Skype chat: The smiley pops up from the user icon and animates with a large winking character, for example, or whatever emotion is being shared.

Cortana Tricks

Cortana, Windows' voice-responsive AI digital assistant, may be Windows 10's highest-profile feature. The intelligent voice assistant predates Apple's Siri on the Mac by over a year. New for the Fall Creators Update came the ability to turn off, restart, lock, or log out of your PC using your voice. There's a confirmation step, so don't worry about shutting down unexpectedly.

I should note that you can't completely disable Cortana, but you can prevent her from accessing your location, email, contacts, and browsing history, and communications. You can also turn off her listening for "Hey Cortana." Cortana is, however, the search function in the OS. You can hide the search bar if you never want to use it.

You can use Cortana from the lock screen-useful for things like playing a music playlist, asking about the weather, or asking for points of information. Speaking of music, the Cortana panel has a musical note button that serves a Shazam-like function to identify songs in range of your PC's mic. Intel also has new wake-on-voice technology that means you could say "Hey Cortana!" and have the PC respond even if it's in sleep mode.

It's sort of like an Amazon Echo, without the need for a separate device and without the push to purchase stuff. Dedicated Cortana speakers like the Harman Kardon Invoke let you use Microsoft's assistant without a PC. A new icon in the Cortana sidebar, that looks like the Invoke speaker itself, makes setting up such devices a snap. Cortana has skills that let you control smart home devices like Philips Hue lightbulbs and Honeywell Lyric thermostats. Microsoft recently added support for IFTTT, which lets it tie into even more smart home devices and web services using what it calls recipes.

Cortana Notebook, which is where you specify your interests so that you'll be notified about what matters to you, has added a few more categories, including On the Go, which pops up suggestions for when you arrive at work or home. Unlike Siri or Google Now, Cortana lets you specify exactly what the assistant knows about you-interests, important people, locations-and you choose whether to have her respond to your spoken "Hey Cortana," or whether you want to use the feature at all.

Cortana Reminders can be based on Place, Person, or Time, but they don't have to be. Sometimes you just want to be reminded of something without having to specify any of those. That kind of reminder shows up in Cortana's Whenever group.

Cortana Reminders is also a share target, accessible from the share button in a Universal Windows app. For example, if you're in the Edge web browser, you can hit the Share button, choose Cortana Reminders, and attach the site URL to the reminder. If you do this from the Photos app, the picture is included in the reminder. The share panel no longer hangs on the side of the screen, but appears in the center of the screen like a regular dialog.

Cortana can scan your Outlook.com or Office 365 email for phrases like "I'll get you the report by the end of the day," and suggest a reminder. It's a completely opt-in feature, and you have to add Outlook.com or Office 365 as a connected service in Cortana's Notebook. Another capability is Pick Up Where I Left Off, in which Cortana offers to resume all the activities from your last session, such as websites open and documents you're working on.

Cortana in Windows 10 interacts tightly with Cortana apps on other devices, such as Android phones and iPhones. You can enable notifications from the phone, including things like low-battery warnings, to show up on Cortana on Windows. You also see messages from WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and SMS from the phone. With all of these improvements, Windows 10 is edging towards the tight integration between mobile and desktop that you find in macOS, though it still doesn't let you reply, except to Skype messages.

The integration works more fully with Android devices than with iOS devices, since the latter restrict access to some system capabilities. For example, you can use your Android phone's SMS text messaging on a PC if you have Cortana installed on the phone.

Windows Ink

Touch and pen input support is a major differentiator between Windows 10 and Apple's macOS. Apple sticks with Steve Job's edict that touch screens don't make sense on laptops and desktops, but a touch screen is the most intuitive interface type possible. You see something you want to interact with, such as a button, and you can press it with your finger. In using a Surface Pro 4 and an Asus Zen AiO Pro Z240IC all-in-one PC (both of which have touch screens) for the past year or so, I've gotten to the point of trying to tap buttons on computers with non-touch screens out of habit.

Windows' digital ink capabilities allow stylus input to work just like a pen or pencil, converting it to text. This is a technologically cool feature, but it will only be of interest to owners of tablets and convertibles like the Surface Pro or the Surface Book. The new Windows Ink Workspace offers sticky notes (with extra smarts), as well as Sketchpad and Screen Sketch options. It also shows recent apps you've penned in and suggests pen-friendly apps in the Store. You can turn off the feature's icon if you don't expect to use it.

This new Ink Workspace can be summoned by clicking a stylus button. You can also take advantage of some Cortana smarts in the new sticky notes. For example, if you write "Wednesday," the text is turned to a blue link, and clicking this gives you the option to set a Cortana reminder. I actually had better luck getting Cortana to notice flight information when I typed it in the note, rather than penning it, however. Info on flight status for such notes appears at the bottom of the sticky.

Sketchpad offers ballpoint pen, pencil, highlighter, eraser, ruler, and touch writing tools. Sketchpad resembles the whiteboard app on the Surface Hub. It also lets you crop the image, copy it, and share it to any Universal Windows app in the share sidebar. A ruler tool lets you draw perfectly straight lines, and even includes a compass. Double-clicking the pen button or choosing Screen Sketch from the Ink Workspace snaps a screenshot of your desktop and opens it in Sketchpad so you can annotate and draw on top of it with any of the aforementioned tools.

One of the coolest inking capabilities is the pen keyboard. You switch to this mode from the standard on-screen keyboard. Start writing on the line there, and text predictions show up. Hit Enter, and your writing turns into text in whatever text area you're writing in. It does surprisingly well with even poor penmanship, and striking through your writing deletes it easily. Not pen-related but new for the on-screen keyboard is a microphone, meaning you can use voice dictation in anything on your PC that accepts text input.

Edge Web Browser Gets Sharper

The Edge web browser that comes with Windows 10 is fast and standards-compatible, and it offers unique tools like Web Notes that let you mark up and share webpages, a clean (ad-free) Reading view, and built-in Cortana search via right-click. Extension support came with the Anniversary Update, but now they're more capable and somewhat more abundant. Ebook support came in Creators Update, as did new tab organization and preview tools, payment options, and 4K support for Netflix.

Edge's Extensions menu option links to the Windows app store, from which you can get Edge extensions. I tested by installing one I consider essential-LastPass. There are also extensions for Amazon, Evernote, Microsoft Translator, OneNote, Pinterest, Pocket, and more. Though it's not a long list yet, those are some heavy hitters that will make the browser appealing to more demanding users. Of course, it's just a start, and there are only 98 extensions as I write this, compared with thousands for Firefox and Chrome.

Microsoft representatives told me that the reason for the smaller selection is that the Edge team is being very careful in vetting extensions, not wanting another ActiveX-type security nightmare. Coding for IE's extensions uses the same web technologies as Chrome does (HTML and JavaScript), however, and Microsoft says converting existing Chrome extensions is trivial for developers. What's more, the W3C is coming out with a Browser Extension standard, which Microsoft plans to support.

Unlike most browsers' extensions, Edge's appear by default in the overflow menu rather than next to the address bar, but you can add their icons to the toolbar with a Settings option. The LastPass extension worked just as in other browsers. LastPass's on-page features, such as automatic password fill-in, also worked well via the extension.

Edge now gets 478 out of a possible 555 points in my testing on the HTML5Test.com site, making it highly compatible with modern web standards compared with IE, which scores 312. Firefox equals it with a 478, Chrome scores 518, Opera duplicates that as does Vivaldi, both of which use Chrome's rendering engine.

Tablet and touch-screen users will appreciate Edge's swipe gestures, which let you go back and forth in history, and desktop users will appreciate that right-clicking the back button drops down tab history, as most browsers do. I also appreciate that Edge, like other browsers, now offers a Paste-and-go option and the ability to pin tabs. And finally, with Fall Creators Update, there's now a full-screen browser view. Also new with this update is the ability to pin webpages to the Taskbar or Start menu. But you still can't set a web image as your desktop background from the browser, as you can in Firefox.

Microsoft has done quite a bit with tabs in Edge, particularly helpful to those who keep lots of tabs open. The browser already showed thumbnail previews of your site tabs when you hover over them with the mouse, but now a down-caret button lets you show all the preview thumbs at once for easy skimmability. I do wish that you could turn off the hover-over thumbnails, though, since they sometimes get in the way of browser control buttons.

The Set Aside icon at top left lets you send the currently open group of tabs to the background. Just tap the window icon to its left to reopen the set, favorite them, or share them. The tab groups you've set aside remain available even after you shut down and restart Edge. The browser does mark noisy tabs with a speaker icon, but unlike Firefox, it doesn't let you silence them with a click on the speaker.

Ebooks in Edge

Edge serves as the reader for Microsoft's new ebook initiative. The browser already can display PDFs, but now you can buy (or get for free) ebooks in the Windows Store. There's already a decent selection, with a good library of free classics. I downloaded Dickens' Great Expectations, and it looked great on the high-res Surface Book display. You access your bookshelf via the same icon that drops down Favorite, Reading List, History, and Downloads. Just like any other ebook reader, it lets you choose fonts (including publisher defaults), set bookmarks, view the table of contents, and search. You can also look up words with Cortana via right-click or tap-and-hold options.

One very cool option is to have the book read to you by a selection of voice types, with adjustable speed. For standard reading, just as with any dedicated ereader, you can swipe back and forth through pages or tap the left or right side of the screen. But in a way, I still prefer a separate app for book-reading. For example, the Nook app that I use shows the exact page numbers, while in Edge (and Kindle) you only see a percent read. It's also preferable to have the bookstore in the same app as the reader. You can finally set Edge to full screen view, which makes for a better reading experience.

For an in-depth look at Window's 10 browser, read my full review of Microsoft Edge.

Dynamic Lock, Hello, and Security

IT staff can benefit from the Fall Creators Update's enhanced Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection (Windows Defender ATP), which gets new preventive capabilities and monitors new indicators of attacks. For consumers, the Defender Settings panel offers a new option for protection against ransomware, with the Controlled folder access option. Windows Defender can schedule regular system scans and shows notifications about threats.

The corporate-targeted Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection detects and resolves advanced network threats, and Windows Information Protection isolates corporate data from personal data on work PCs.

The Dynamic Lock feature lets you log off based on the proximity of your Bluetooth-paired smartphone, using Dynamic Lock. I tried this with a Surface Book my iPhone 6s (yes-you don't need a Windows Phone!). After I walked about 25 paces away, sure enough, the Surface switched to lock-screen mode. This is a security feature, since it only logs you off when you're away, not on when you come near.

Windows Hello biometric authentication is supported on Surface Pros and Surface Books, but you can also use third-party biometric login devices, such as the Eidon Mini fingerprint reader, Intel's RealSense cameras, and a wristband from Nymi that identifies you by your unique heartbeat signature.

On the software side, Windows Universal Apps and websites you browse in Edge can also use Hello for authentication, similar to identifying yourself on an iPhone or Apple Watch with Apple's TouchID. Apps that support Hello include Dropbox and iHeartRadio.

Like Firefox, Edge now also blocks Flash from running unless you green-light it by tapping a puzzle-piece icon. You can choose to always allow Flash, too, but why not take advantage of that extra measure of protection?

Action Center

A Windows 10 feature with roots in mobile operating systems is the Action Center. While previous versions of Windows included something also called Action Center, the new feature is more like a smartphone's notifications plus quick action features. In fact, that's exactly what it is.

The Windows 10 Action Center, similar to Apple macOS High Sierra's Notification Center, keeps those messages available in a right-side panel. You open Windows 10's Action Center panel from a taskbar button, or on touch screens with a swipe in from the right edge of the screen. The panel also offers frequently needed functions like power, settings, networking, and screen brightness and rotation. One of these actions, Connect, is pretty neat, in that it lets you project your screen onto another one on your Wi-Fi network. I was able to display my Surface Pro's screen on a big Samsung TV with no setup aside from choosing OK on the TV-pretty nifty.

Store and Universal Windows Apps

Why do you need an app store on your PC? Mac users have had one for several years, and it offers the advantages of automatic updating and a single source for finding programs you need. It gives you access on all your PCs to apps you've bought. Acceptance to the Windows Store also means an app has been vetted by Microsoft for security. You can also install apps to external memory-something tablet users will appreciate.

For Windows 10, there are even more advantages for these modern apps: They can tie in with the notifications and share panels. For example, if you use the Facebook app rather than going to the Facebook website, you can see notifications for new messages and you can send shareable content via the app.

Windows 10 Store apps are called Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps, meaning they can run on desktops, tablets, phones, the Surface Hub, and eventually on the Xbox and Microsoft HoloLens 3D augmented-reality headset. Underneath these apps is Windows 10's OneCore platform, a common base that underlies all these device types and allows not only apps, but also device drivers to work with them. UWP apps have one final benefit: They run within containers so that they don't mess with the rest of your system.

Tablet Mode

Tablet mode is a trimmed down, more touch-friendly version of the OS, with a full-screen tile-based Start screen. After you pull off the keyboard from a tablet, such as the Surface Pro, or convert a convertible laptop to tablet mode (often by bending the screen backwards), Windows pops up a message asking if you want to switch to Tablet mode, in which the Start menu and modern apps become full-screen. Touch gestures like closing an app by swiping down from the top of the screen work in this mode, and the All Apps view stretches across the screen with large tiles so it's easier to get to any app.

Included Apps-Office Mobile, Mail, Calendar

You get a surprisingly full kit of apps with Windows 10. Not only do you get utilities and information apps like Calculator, Camera, Maps, and News, but you also can get Microsoft Office from the Windows app store. You heard that right, but there's a catch: Unless you have an Office 365 subscription, you can only read, not edit, documents with these lightweight productivity apps.

The version of Office you get with Windows 10 is equivalent to the iPad version of Office, called Office Mobile. It's capable of most word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation needs, but pros who need to dig into Excel pivot tables and Word advanced formatting will want the Office 365 version.

The included Mail app is getting smarter, with things like Focused Inbox. This is a great feature that's already implemented in the Outlook for iPhone and Android apps. It filters out all the newsletters and promotions, and only shows you mail from those with whom you regularly correspond, or that is in some other way deemed important by the service. You can of course still see everything else at the tap of a tab, and turn off this focusing for mail you don't want it. You can now also use @ signs in an email body to add them to the conversation. Still, the app isn't as powerful as the Office 365 desktop version, though I must admit that it's now good enough to be my everyday work email client.

The Mail app is integrated with Calendar and Contact apps, available from buttons along the bottom of Mail. Calendar does a presentable job of handling multiple calendars, appointments, and views. The Calendar includes color-coding for event categories, public calendar subscriptions for shows and sports, and cards for deliveries and travel reservations. The cards for travel reservations even have links to online check-in services.

The Groove Music app can play music sitting on your hard drive or in your OneDrive cloud storage. And at year's end, that's all it will do, since Microsoft is discontinuing the excellent Groove Music Pass streaming subscription.

Another included app is Movies & TV, which also offers a content store as well as the ability to play your own videos. The Compact Overlay option lets you have a small, always-on-top window showing video while you do other things on your PC.

You still get lots of utility-type apps, too, including a scanner app, alarms, and a voice recorder.

The impressive Maps app recently has been updated with support for Windows Ink, meaning you can mark up a map using a stylus or your finger on a touch-screen PC. But that's not all: You can calculate the distance of a line you draw on a map and get directions for two points you tap. If you don't have a touch screen, the same functionality is possible with a mouse. You can also use a virtual on-screen ruler to make your lines straight.

For basic image editing, that old standby, Paint, moves to the Windows Store. Its replacement, the new Paint 3D, is now the default. Not only does it let you create, customize, and decorate 3D objects, but you can also share them with the Remix3D.com online community. New with Fall Creators is the ability to show your 3D creations mixed with real-world backgrounds using the PC's camera.

The Mixed Reality Viewer is an included app that will play a central role in Microsoft's VR strategy along with HoloLens and lower-cost headsets. Along with that, the new Mixed Reality viewer app can show your 3D creations as part of the real world, using your webcam. You can even anchor an object to a surface, such as your shoulder!

OneDrive and Skype

Two of Microsoft's cloud services-OneDrive for online storage and syncing and Skype for communication-play an increasingly prominent role in Windows 10. There's an important distinction between these and Apple's analogous iCloud for macOS: They can be used on any platform. There are Skype and OneDrive apps for Macs, Androids, and iOS devices, as well as for Windows devices.

New for OneDrive in Fall Creators Update is OneDrive Files On-Demand. As its name suggests, you don't need to download everything to all PCs in your account; instead, the OneDrive folder shows everything, but files that are only in the cloud show a cloud icon in the status column in File Explorer. While OneDrive does a great job syncing Office documents and personalization settings, and Skype is a very rich communication tool, there's still some work for Microsoft to do in integrating them with Windows 10. You can finally share from Photos to OneDrive, but only if you install the OneDrive UWP app. OneDrive still boasts the very useful Fetch capability: If you enable this, you can browse any folders remotely form OneDrive's web interface.

You can directly reply to Skype messages inside Action Center, which happily saves you from opening yet another app. Windows has the potential for parity with macOS's Messaging and Facetime apps, but it's not there yet. The Mac solution is still more seamless, but Windows 10 is getting closer, with an SMS relay option for Android via the Cortana app. Also keep in mind that Skype is a full, standalone VoIP solution that can call standard phones, while the Mac is just hooking into the iPhone's mobile connection and requires proximity of the phone. Like OneDrive, Skype works on all major platforms, not just one.

Gaming in Windows 10

Microsoft continues to make the Window 10 proposition sweeter for gamers. The Xbox app for Windows 10 not only lets them see an activity feed, but it also includes game DVR and can even stream games from an Xbox One to the PC. Now you can stream games publicly on the new Twitch competitor, mixer.com, as well. PCMag's game maven Jeff Wilson has taken a good look at Windows 10's Xbox gaming app. While he found that game streaming and the DVR feature worked well, he was less impressed with the game selection-it can't compete with Steam's. He was also disappointed that you can't buy games right from the app, but instead have to switch to the Windows Store app.

The Xbox and Windows 10 Stores have been unified, and the Play Anywhere initiative means you can buy games for one platform and play them either on the console or the PC. Game progress stays in sync between platforms. Play Anywhere games have begun to appear, and the list has grown since I last checked, now at 43 titles with 5 more "coming soon." Notable entries are Gears of War 4, Forza Horizon 3, Killer Instinct, ReCore, and Resident Evil. You can keep up with the list on the Xbox Play Anywhere page.

Beyond the Xbox app, Windows 10's 3D video engine is now DirectX 12, which, according to some game developers, could open up a whole new level of realism to games. And Windows 10 was recently enhanced with the ability to turn off VSync and instead enable AMD's Freesync and Nvidia's G-Sync in Universal Windows Platform (UWP) games and apps. The same update also unlocked frame rates for UWP games. You can read more about what Freesync, G-Sync and unlocked frame rates mean for Windows 10 on our sister site, Extreme Tech.

With Fall Creators Update, the Game Bar (invoked with Windows key-G) lets you enter Game Mode on demand, as well as start streaming to Mixer.com, and DVR recording. Game Mode moves system resources away from background tasks towards the game you're playing. You can also control this and other gaming features in the dedicated Gaming section of Settings. The game-broadcasting capability of Mixer.com (formerly known as Beam), boasts sub-1-second latency, for much tighter communication with your audience. It also lets users create their own Arena gamer tournaments on Xbox Live, in support of the burgeoning esports craze.

Not sure which game to play? Choose some from the group of first-rate titles in our Best PC Games feature.

What's Next for Windows 10?

The Windows Insider Program lets us see features that are even further on the Windows horizon. The company has announced a project called Sets, which lets you run multiple applications in a single tabbed window. This makes sense for a project you might be working on that requires a web browser, word processor, and PowerPoint. Another cool feature coming to a future Windows version is Near Share. Similar to Apple's AirDrop, this lets you quickly send a file to a nearby PC via Bluetooth. Also using Bluetooth is a new Quick Pairing feature, which saves you from opening settings just to get a mouse working.

The Timeline feature, coming in the next big update, will let users jump back to whatever they were doing on a chosen date in the past. Also imminent is support for LTE-capable Windows PCs running Qualcomm Snapdragon ARM CPUs, as units from Acer, HP, and Lenovo have already been unveiled.

Some smaller updates coming include tab muting in Edge. We can also look forward to Fluent Design on the Start Menu, Taskbar, Settings, and in the on-screen touch keyboard. Mobile-style shape writing comes to the keyboard, too. Cortana will get more powerful through the Collections feature that will save easy-access lists of your favorite books, TV shows, recipes, restaurants, and merch. She'll also be able to provide Windows support when you say something like "Cortana, show me how to change my display settings."

Because of Windows 10's software-as-a-service approach, new features occasionally show up in between the major updates, so features can show up when they're ready, even if it's between major releases. A good example is Fluent Design's appearance in several stock apps and the new Photos app features mentioned above.

Windows of Opportunity

Whether you're using your voice with Cortana, gesturing on a touch screen, writing with a digital pen, building a 3D model, or playing a PC game, Windows 10 offers a wealth of choices. The platform offers the most choice in form factors, too, from the smallest tablets to massive gaming PCs to the large Surface Studio to the giant Surface Hub. Add to those completely new Windows devices like Mixed Reality headsets and the Harman/Kardon Invoke smart speaker. Windows 10's only device weakness is the nearly defunct Windows Mobile ecosystem, though there are more and more integrations available for iOS and Android devices, such as Cortana, Edge, OneDrive, and Skype mobile apps.

Windows 10 is familiar, innovative, and adaptable to the size and capabilities of the hardware on which it's running. Because it manages to include so much exciting new technology while remaining familiar and intuitive, Windows 10 earns PCMag's Editors' Choice endorsement, an honor it shares with the polished and impressive macOS.

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The Windows community is aflutter with anticipation of the operating system's next major update, rumored (though far from certain) to be called Spring Creators Update. We'll be there with coverage when it releases, whatever it's called. Meanwhile, Windows 10 just keeps getting better.

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boats and cars and planes for transportation.

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The best invention ever is cooked food, because you can get sick from raw food

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The best invention ever is cooked food, because you can get sick from raw food

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Marines and other branches of the military

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The best invention of all time is the light balb

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The best invention of all time is the light balb

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The best invention of all time is youtube

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The best invention of all time is youtube

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Money is the best invention because you can get any other best invention with money.

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Money is the best invention because you can get any other best invention with money.

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and WiFi and cellular data.

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tv, xbox, anything by ubisoft, wifi, and money. That is, because they are used for maps, sharing info, trading (with money), and entertainment.

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the best invention of all time is the apple watch and the reason for this because you can have your fitness or the time

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the best invention of all time is the apple watch and the reason for this because you can have your fitness or the time

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at all times unless its not charged

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Wifi

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BOOKS!!

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so you stay alive

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internet devices sports bacon chocolate books $$$$$$$$ data

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Phones because you can go on social media and text friends.

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The Computer + Wi-Fi

Reason is because they make it easier to find things or for school purposes such as homework, studying, a calculator, or if your bored, there could play games.

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shelter and fire

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The best invention of all time is electricity

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The best invention of all time is electricity

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The iPhone 7 plus

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Apple iPhone 7 Plus pictures, official photos

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Apple iPhone 7 Plus smartphone gallery - high-resolution pictures, official photos

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the  best invetion is more jobs because then people have money to pay for things.