While Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) already gave the world an official first look at its next operating system earlier this fall, the unveiling event in San Francisco was decidedly small and low key. According to a report, the operating system’s “real unveiling” — where consumer features will be revealed in full — will occur in late January.

A source within Microsoft that spoke with The Verge said that the company is planning a press event in January where executives will demonstrate a consumer preview of the new operating system.  Reportedly, Microsoft will also demonstrate the operating system on other platforms such as phones, tablets and the Xbox One. Microsoft will also demonstrate the operating system’s new touch platform called Continuum too.

The choice to put Windows 10 on stage at a press event in late January, and not at the Consumer Electronics Show, is an interesting yet understandable one. A trend over the past few years is for vendors to show off their big announcements for the year — and Windows 10 is certainly Microsoft’s — at press events outside of the big tent of CES. It’s far too noisy and chaotic for vendors to get adequate attention, which means that important launches are scheduled for press events outside of the time CES occupies.

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Microsoft recently announced the Windows 10 Preview, this preview is considered more of an Alpha build of the operating system as we very likely won’t see the finished version for another year or so. As a result, one wouldn’t expect many people to start testing an operating system out this far out, but Microsoft wants to get a lot of user feedback about Windows 10, so they made a preview available for download the day after they announced Windows 10. This new version of Windows is designed to compromise between Windows 8.1 and Windows 7 and essentially tries to make up for all of the mistakes they made with Windows 8.

In a recent blog post, Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore said, “Over the weekend, we hit 1 million registrants for the Windows Insider Program. That equates to a lot of people using the Windows 10 Technical Preview and sending us feedback. How much feedback? Over 200,000 pieces of user-initiated feedback have been submitted to us via the Windows Feedback app from Windows Insiders like you.” What is also interesting is that even though this is supposed to be an enterprise version of Windows 10, there are still a surprisingly large amount of users actually installing Windows 10 Preview on their machines rather than just testing inside of a virtual machine. Joe said that, “…Well, only 36% of installations of the Windows 10 Technical Preview are in VMs. The remaining 64% are all on actual PCs. This makes us confident that a lot of the feedback is based on “medium-term” use and not just a few minutes of experimentation. Another indicator that we have solid usage is the number of app-launches that happen on a device. 68% of you are launching more than 7 apps/day, and some people are using it even more heavily. We have seen about 25% of devices running the Windows 10 Technical Preview launching more than 26 apps per day, and 5% launching a whopping 68 apps per day!”

What this means to Microsoft is that people are genuinely trying to use Windows 10 Preview and see whether or not they really like it, well in advance of its release. Plus, it also shows us what kinds of statistics Microsoft is collecting during this Windows 10 Preview phase. Personally, I enjoyed using previous Windows previews when they were made available, and I don’t expect Windows 10 to be any different. Microsoft clearly wants to get as much feedback and data as they can about Windows 10 before they actually launch the OS later next year and they don’t want to have a repeat of Windows 8 where people are cursing the company up and down and saying that the old version was much better (see Windows Vista vs Windows XP).

Additionally, one must remember that Microsoft is already getting this many people interested in Windows 10 Preview after only two weeks of being available. Clearly there is a lot of desire for a new and fresh operating system from Microsoft and that they’ve made a lot of their users unhappy with Windows 8. And frankly, they’re not wrong. Because the reality of the situation is that a lot of desktop users still prefer to run Windows 7 on their desktops over Windows 8 if they have the choice. Windows 7 is simply more desktop friendly than Windows 8, even if it lacks a lot of the performance improvements that Windows 8 brings.

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Want to see what all the buzz was about yesterday? Well, Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) is giving you a chance to test out the Windows 10 Preview for free as long as you agree to become an ‘insider’ and help them improve it before it launches next year. All you need to do is head over to the Windows 10 Preview site and log in with your Microsoft account and then make sure your system meets the minimum specifications. If you’re already running Windows 8.1 you’re pretty much read to go and the OS will handle everything for you.

System requirements

Processor: 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster

RAM: 1 gigabyte (GB) (32-bit) or 2 GB (64-bit)

Free hard disk space: 16 GB

Graphics card: Microsoft DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM driver

A Microsoft account and Internet access

Precautions

Also, keep in mind that some processors and hardware configurations still are not supported by the Technical Preview, so if you have driver problems there’s a chance your hardware isn’t supported. You will also need to have a monitor capable of running a minimum of 1024 x 768 resolution in order to access the Windows Store to download apps. Also, after you install the preview you will no longer able able to play DVDs using Windows Media Player, which means that they are moving people over to the new Windows 8.1 video player which was problematic in Windows 8.1 because you had two video players for all video files. This is a clear indication that Windows 10 Preview gets rid of that and very likely that Windows 10 as a whole will do away with Windows Media Player. Windows 10 Preview will also remove Windows Media Center if you have Windows 8 Pro and install the preview.
If you have Windows RT 8.1 (ARM-based tablets) the Windows 10 Preview will not work for you either. Microsoft had already said that they will address the Windows 10 ARM situation at a later date (very likely in 2015) but that Windows RT will be folded into Windows as a whole and no longer operate as a separate OS. The same goes for Windows Phone, which will also carry the Windows 10 name scheme, but since it too is based on ARM we probably won’t see anything until 2015.

If you’re running Windows 7, 8 or 8.1 and your default installed language isn’t English, Chinese or Portugese you will only be able to keep your personal files when you upgrade, you will lose all of your apps and Windows settings. Additionally, if you have a language pack or language interface pack, those will also be removed when you install the Windows 10 Preview

Also, some older 64-bit CPUs may be blocked from installing the preview (AMD 64-bit Athlons, perhaps?) but Microsoft gives no explanation why.

Last but not least, if you are running Windows 7 without Sp1 you can only upgrade to the preview by downloading an ISO file and not using Microsoft’s automated system or Windows Update.

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