Microsoft Windows has been around for more than three decades. During that time, it has
grown to become a mainstay of business and personal computing, running on some 1.5 billion
devices worldwide.
The authors of this book began working together in 2001 with the very first title in the Inside
Out series, covering Windows XP. Like many of you, we took a break a few years ago, watching
from the sidelines as Microsoft released Windows 8 and Windows 8.1. We returned for
Windows 10 because, quite frankly, we were excited by the possibilities of “Windows as a
service.” As we predicted in the first edition of this book, published shortly after the initial
release of Windows 10 in 2015, Windows 10 is evolving rapidly.
That evolution has been a key part of our experience over the past three years, as we researched
and wrote what turned out to be a very significant revision to the original edition and then did a
series of ebook-only updates. This third edition incorporates all that learning and covers the two
editions of Windows 10 released in 2018.
One bedrock fact we’ve discovered over the past three years is that the core features of Windows
10 are familiar and change very slowly. The fundamentals of NTFS security and the registry, for
example, have remained reassuringly consistent throughout many generations of Windows. But
there’s also plenty that’s new in Windows 10, some of it obvious (the new Start experience) and
some not so obvious (Windows Hello).
The challenge of writing a book like this one is that Microsoft keeps updating Windows 10,
releasing new features twice each year instead of every few years, as in the past. To our great
relief, we’ve found that most of the changes in these semi-annual Windows 10 feature updates
are evolutionary, not revolutionary. You might notice small changes in a dialog box or in the
appearance of a feature, but its fundamental workings remain the same as before. Our goal in
this edition is to help you accomplish those familiar tasks
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