johnridley | Oct. 28th, 2014

I'm putting Windows 10 technical preview on my primary machine. It's a personal machine and I am pretty careful to never keep anything critical ONLY on the PC so I'm OK with running a possibly flaky OS. Besides, I've been running this on the lab PC for a couple of weeks and it's been behaving quite well and I like it.

It went about as well as normal Windows installs. That is, put in the CD, tell it to blow away the whole boot drive and replace it, click "next" a few times, wait about 15 minutes for install, and start installing. Once I had the video driver and Chrome installed, I could start browsing and working and watching video while doing the rest of the installs on a 2nd monitor. So the PC was really only out of commission for about 30 minutes. I always keep all my data on a 2nd hard drive which I disconnect during installs so there's no chance for the install to decide to do something regrettable. I generally throw my dozen or so most important things on right away then install other software as I need it.
( setup notes )

We picked up a kind of neat pumpkin with a color changing LED in it. However it was just a standard Fast Fade LED of the kind that you buy on eBay (in fact I have some in the lab that are exactly the same shift pattern) and the pattern was disliked by all as it does a lot of flashing, not so much with the fading.

I grabbed an ATTiny85 off the shelf, wired an RGB LED directly to the PWM outputs (no resistors needed because of the internal resistance of the batteries), whipped up some quick code for it, got the color shifts about where we wanted them, and threw it all on a small board that replaced the single self-flashing LED on top of the existing battery holder/switch and hot-glued it in the pumpkin again.

Here's the board pre-install and the completed thing: