Hands-on with Windows 9 Technical Preview Build 9834

Build 9834 of the still-unnamed Windows Technical Preview slipped out through unofficial channels in late September 2014, just days after Microsoft confirms Windows plans for the next generation of its flagship operating system. The build carries the "Windows Technical Preview" branding but internally still references Windows 9 across its registry hives and metadata, which made it irresistible to anyone eager to see what the company had been cooking since Windows 8.1.

I spent the better part of a week poking at this build on a spare laptop, mostly between school runs and a quick dash out to pick up a new SSD from my local JB Hi-Fi. The machine is a mid-range Ultrabook I bought on special eighteen months ago, the kind of kit that flies off the shelves in Australian retail, and it runs the preview without too much fuss once you clear a bit of disk space.

Australian testers have a slightly different lens than our American counterparts. We deal with intermittent NBN dropouts, a Telstra-supplied router that sometimes prefers to disconnect itself, and the eternal question of whether 4G failover is worth the data. Build 9834 coped with all of that, which is encouraging given how often previews punish modest hardware.

This hands-on walks through what I found after a week of putting build 9834 through its paces.

First boot and the sign-in screen

The boot sequence is noticeably faster than the shipping Windows 8.1 release on the same hardware. From cold power-button to lock screen, the system clocked in at roughly fourteen seconds on the Ultrabook, with Secure Boot enabled. That is a meaningful improvement for an interim build, and it suggests Microsoft has been tuning its storage stack under the hood.

The lock screen itself carries the new flat aesthetic, with a softer palette than the high-contrast blues of Windows 8.1. Time and date typography has been refined, and the shortcuts along the bottom edge of the screen have been simplified. Once you sign in with a Microsoft account, the transition to the desktop is seamless, with no jarring animation.

Australian English is now a first-class citizen in the regional settings. Selecting English (Australia) applies local date formats, AEST as the default time zone, and the metric system throughout the OS. Anyone who has wrestled with US-defaulted builds in the past will appreciate it.

The start menu makes a welcome comeback

The headline change in build 9834 is the return of the Start Menu, but in a hybrid form that takes cues from both the Windows 7 menu and the Windows 8 live tiles. Clicking the Start button brings up a familiar list of programs on the left, with a column of live tiles on the right. Resizing the menu works as expected, and the all-apps view is a single click away.

Right-clicking on the desktop now brings back a proper context menu with Display Settings, Personalise, and the like. Long-time Windows users will recognise the layout immediately. The Charms bar is gone, replaced by a small settings cog that lives in the upper-right corner of the Start Menu.

Pinning modern apps works well. Bundled apps like News, Finance, and Sports show up as live tiles that pull down fresh data. The build ships with a noticeably trimmed-down collection of pre-installed apps compared to Windows 8.1.

Virtual desktops and window management

Task View has gained a dedicated button on the taskbar, sitting just to the right of the search box. Clicking it brings up a thumbnail strip of all open windows, with the option to add a new virtual desktop at the bottom. Each desktop can be named, which is useful if you separate work, personal, and side-project windows the way many of us do at home.

Snap behaviour has been refined. Dragging a window to the left or right edge of the screen snaps it to occupy half the display, and dragging to a corner will quarter it. Windows automatically suggests filling any empty snap slot with another running application, similar to the assistive snap in third-party tools like AquaSnap.

Refinements worth noting in this build

The persistence change is the standout. Earlier builds forgot your extra desktops whenever you logged off, which made the feature feel like a toy. Build 9834 fixes that, and the result is something genuinely useful for juggling multiple projects.

Cortana touches and a new search bar

Cortana is not enabled in this particular build, but there are clear hints she is on the way. A search bar now sits prominently on the taskbar, replacing the older charm-based search, accepting both text and voice input once the microphone permission is granted. Typing into it brings up a richer results pane than the one in Windows 8.1.

Search integrates with local files, OneDrive, and the Windows Store, with results categorised into Apps, Files, Web, and Settings. The new Settings pane is a major improvement over the scattered options in 8.1.

For Australian users, web results respect the local market, surfacing Australian publishers and local currency conversions when relevant. It is the kind of detail that makes the difference between a build that feels like a foreign port and one that feels like it was made for you.

Performance on modest Australian hardware

Tested over a Telstra-supplied NBN FTTB service in Melbourne's inner suburbs, the build performed respectably on a mid-range Core i5 with 8GB of RAM and a mechanical hard drive. App launch times were a touch slower than a clean install of Windows 8.1, but file copy operations and search indexing felt snappier once the initial out-of-box experience completed.

The Settings app and the Store app both crashed once each during the testing week, consistent with what most preview users were reporting at the time. Memory usage at idle hovered around 2.4GB, slightly higher than the 1.8GB I typically see on the same machine running 8.1. Anyone running older hardware with only 4GB of RAM should expect some sluggishness.

Battery life on the Ultrabook took a small hit, dropping from roughly seven hours to about six under similar workloads. Worth keeping in mind if you regularly work on the train between Sydney and Brisbane, or out at a café in Adelaide's CBD.

Known quirks and how to report them

Bugs to flag if you install build 9834

Microsoft's feedback mechanism is built directly into the build, accessed through the Settings pane under the Feedback heading. Submissions are tagged with your hardware configuration automatically, which makes it easier for the engineering team to spot patterns across specific machine types or regional issues.

For Australian readers keen to install this build, my strong advice is to do it on a spare machine rather than your daily driver. Preview builds are unpredictable, and data loss is always a possibility. If you do hit something genuinely interesting, drop a comment on the original confirmation news story on this site and let the community know what you have found.