The Windows 8 Thread

[MR.B]

I remember reading ages ago that Intel's first smartphone SoCs weren't capable of running Windows because they missed a feature that Windows required (possibly a PCI bus or something similar, can't remember exactly as it was a while ago lol).

So does this mean that the latest Intel SoCs won't be able to run the full version of Windows 8 i.e. including full explorer, backwards compatibility etc? Or have Intel added in all the necessary features?

It will definitely fully support Win 8 and run all x86 software, just like any other Intel chip. Intel keep talking down ARM because those devices wont be able to do the same, so Intel's SoC must be able to run all existing PC software or they wouldn't be saying this.

The SoC Intel have for Win 8 is called Clover Trail and it's designed specifically for Windows and not smartphones, but is quite similar to Intels new smartphone SoC called Medfield in terms of power consumption and performance.

It seems that the ARM SoC's for WOA also lack certain "PC" functionality such as a PCI bus. This is what a lot of work in WOA will address. I'm sure there will be another variant of this "embedded edition" of Windows that will be made available for Intel SoC's as well.

As far as i know the desktop Windows 8 version will be the the same version that runs on Intel and AMD SoC's, there wont be any other versions, just Windows 8 and WOA, being as Intel and AMD will both have SoC's specifically designed for Windows 8.

 

[MR.B]

Some new stuff on the Windows 8 blog, nothing big though so wont bother adding it to my original post, but it's interesting...

Enabling accessibility - This is about new features to help people with disabilities like visual, mobility and hearing impairments (vid here).

Reliably measuring browser performance - Shows the testing MS they do with IE, using the IE Performance Lab.

Stuff worth mentioning...
The lab contains 120 machines from desktops, laptops, netbooks to touch devices, both x86/64 and ARM.
The lab measures performance of Internet Explorer 200 times daily, collecting over 5.7 million measurements and 480GB of runtime data each day
The servers they use are each 16 core + 16GB RAM.
Activity is measured with 100 nanosecond resolution.

And...

Since the lab runs 24/7, hardware failures are inevitable. Replacing failed components with identical parts from a different manufacturing lot almost always results in the repaired computer running faster than the other machines in the pool. While this difference would be unnoticeable in the real world, when you’re measuring down to 100 nanoseconds, even a few cycles can impact the results! If after a repair a machine no longer runs identically to the rest of the pool, it is removed from the lab and the pool’s size permanently shrinks.

...Well it's paying off, i noticed with the Dev Preview that IE10 is faster/smoother than any other browser (i do web design so use loads of browsers, but it wont really show if you're running Win 8 virtualized), being as MS deal with real world performance, not benchmark scores!
Some of it seems to be down to GPU, as even text and static images are GPU accelerated. IE9 also had this (and is still the only browser with full GPU acceleration) but it's improved with IE10. An example of how much full GPU acceleration can impact overall experience is to go to Google Maps, make browser full screen, then drag the map around - it should be smoother on IE9. It's the same with any sites that use HTML5 / JavaScript animations, or even just scrolling up and down a complex page. I'm sure IE10 will be speedy and butter smooth on touch screens... Now if only it will have better add-on support...

 

[MR.B]

ok.

i guess but then with pinch to zoom you could have terrible vision and it not matter as you don't need to see the side bars. perhaps the reason is to encourage fingers at the side of the screen so that when you zoom you aren't blocking the view, or thinking about it this current method is a bit more structured so you know if you find it hard to ead a page, zoom in 4 times etc, where as pinch to zoom is harder to get just right every time so quickly

The magnifier has pinch and zoom on the scroll bars (pinch a scrollbar to zoom in/out or just tap the + and - icons). You cant zoom in on Metro on some areas, you can sometimes only zoom out, and i'm pretty sure you cant zoom in on the desktop at all, so this is why the magnifier is there because it will work for literally everything. The magnifier is also mostly designed for thumb use, not fingers because MS found this was more natural.

And i like the new Win 8 logo... but Windows Phone 7's is better.

 

[MR.B]

nor the new windows UI. I think it will be a great UI for home use, but Im not so sure on the productivity at work side of it. I fine Windows 8 is a fantastic evolution fo the start bar and cannot see Metro really helping my work!

Metro isn't for serious work anyway.

I do web design, 3D rendering/modelling, programming and graphic design, yet in a whole days work i use the Start menu about 0.01% of that time, if at all. Everything you need is already on the desktop, and MS have made many improvements to the desktop in Win 8 that will help work flow or give better performance (or both, like with Storage Spaces). The one thing i use the Start for is search, and Metro IS easier for searching, being as it displays results full screen with larger easy to recognise icons while also showing me a lot more results, as the higher the resolution your monitor is the more results it shows (150 on my monitor vs a handful on the cramped messy Start menu). Searching works exactly the same too - while on the desktop just hit the Win key and start typing.

 

[MR.B]

Wait for the Beta though (29th feb) Lots of stuff is missing in the current Dev Preview.

 

[MR.B]

MS say that touch is coming to desktops but nobody is going to sit there with their arms in the air for a long time?

Not this again! MS have said they dont expect people to sit at a desktop and hold there arm out for ages. You'll get arm ache within 5 minutes. This is obvious though, you dont need to do testing to know that. MS always intend to support mouse + keyboard, they know it's better for certain things. MS's own developers have also mentioned that using touch for their work, for things like Visual Studio and programming, it would be much worse.

But... touch will be there if you ever need it, because there are quite a few specific areas where a touch based desktop or all-in-one monitor can work. For instance in public, wall mounted, for very young children as a learning device, for presentations, or say in the kitchen on the wall and you could use it to look at recipes while cooking.

Although i'm sure some manufacturers will try selling all-in-one touch based monitors to people who dont even need it, because people will still buy this stuff until the novelty wears off (like 3D TV's) just like the bottom left device in this leaked Fujitsu roadmap...

... liking to look of that detachable slate on the right

 

[MR.B]

It's just a different style. I know plenty of people who prefer OS X and iOS to Metro, and plenty of people who prefer Metro to OS X and iOS. Just because you don't like it doesn't make it flashy and out of date.

Hmm well i've been designing graphics for about 10+ years, including website, software and app UI's. When i started all the things that Apple still currently use (which Photek mentioned and made me LOL because it's very accurate!) were the "in thing" back then, so i used to do it myself. If you look at OSX it's hardly changed since release in 2001. If some people still like it, thats fine, but it's a dated style and things have improved since then.

 

[MR.B]

Is that VMware player? And where will I be able to download windows 8 when its available?

Dont use any kind of virtualization software if you actually want a good experience with Win 8. It wont take advantage of all the performance enhancements. And if you cant actually see how much better Win 8 runs, then whats the point of trying the BETA in the first place?

Virtualized, Win 8 feels considerably slower than Win 7 and the UI is a little laggy, as any virtualized OS is always slower than running on real hardware. But if you just install Win 8 to hard drive or another petition then it's snappier at pretty much everything, and boots, shuts down, sleeps and hibernates faster. Theres also features that wont work in virtualization.

I'm planning to install Win 8 on a USB stick, using the new 'Windows To Go' feature (see original post for explanation). Assuming it's in the BETA. You can get USB 3.0 sticks that are almost as fast as SSD's.

 

[MR.B]

Any news on the protogon file system thingy.

It's in my original post near the bottom. It's called ReFS (Resilient File System).

I've had Win8 installed on VMWare Player for a few months now and have noticed no sluggishness in the UI and the experience has been excellent. Hardware accelerated video works as does FlashHD without issue.

I tried the Dev Preview with VirtualBox and VMware, but even in VMware it looked like the UI was running at around 30 FPS, not 60 (my monitors refresh rate). Either way they'll always be a performance hit with virtualization, and sometimes it's only milliseconds that can make an OS feel faster. And things like the faster boot times dont work in virtualization.

 

[MR.B]

Have we heard or seen what they are replacing Zune with?

Zune might be within the new Windows Store when the Consumer Preview is out, for the music & videos section. Atleast that part was called Zune in this image (which is from MS). But apparently MS will be using a new name by the time Win 8 ships.

 

[MR.B]

Kinda Win 8 related... Anandtech has benches of Qualcomm Krait SoC for phones / tablets

It's a custom design of ARM's upcoming A15, many ARM SoC's will be based on A15 later this year. So performance should be very similar, and Qualcomm will be making SoC's for Windows on ARM likely based on the CPU inside Krait (but being as this SoC will mostly be inside Android phones / tablets many other components will change for WOA, including the GPU, but the CPU side should remain pretty much the same). So a possible rough idea of WOA tablet performance... it's definitely much faster than Intels upcoming smartphone SoC or any other smartphone / tablet SoC currently out.

Occasionally we'll see performance numbers that just make us laugh at their absurdity. Krait's Linpack performance is no exception. The performance advantage here is insane.

 

[MR.B]

New post about language support in Win 8

And guess what? We finally get to use real English! Not the bastardised "American English". I look forward to words being spelt correctly in Win 8.

We are proud to announce the addition of English for the United Kingdom to the list of Windows display languages. We admit that this is something we should have done a long time ago. Windows users in the UK have gotten by with the US English version of Windows, and while we Americans knew this was not their favourite, that is clearly no defence. We believe that this version of Windows will also be widely used in India, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, the Republic of Ireland and many other places.

We are releasing English for the United Kingdom as a standalone language. Standalone languages contain all the user interface components needed to be independent versions of Windows. Standalone languages can be used by OEMs to image a PC, or can be purchased as boxed software.

Took 'em long enough. EDIT: just noticed NathanE beat me to this lol.

Win 8 also supports 114 languages (up from 95 with Win 7). Theres now a new Language feature located in Control Panel where you can easily download and switch to any language you like. No need to buy a different language version of Windows anymore.

 

[MR.B]

So Windows 7 doesn't support UK English? Got to say I've never noticed lol.

All previous Windows version just supported the UK keyboard layout, not the UK English spelling. How can you not have noticed! with things like "color" all over the place...

 

[MR.B]

Can't you trace the roots of ZFS back decades? From one needlessly bloated, slow and fragmented filesystem to another old one...

How does it compare to Btrfs?

ReFS features (this is all in my original post):

• Metadata integrity with checksums - Verify and auto-correct data. Data can get corrupted due to a number of reasons and therefore must be verified and, when possible, corrected automatically.
• Integrity streams providing optional user data integrity
• Allocate on write transactional model for robust disk updates (also known as copy on write)
• Large volume, file and directory sizes - Optimize for extreme scale. Use scalable structures for everything. Don’t assume that disk-checking algorithms, in particular, can scale to the size of the entire file system.
• Storage pooling and virtualization makes file system creation and management easy
• Data striping for performance (bandwidth can be managed) and redundancy for fault tolerance
• Disk scrubbing for protection against latent disk errors
• Resiliency to corruptions with "salvage" for maximum volume availability in all cases
• Shared storage pools across machines for additional failure tolerance and load balancing
• Never take the file system offline. Assume that in the event of corruptions, it is advantageous to isolate the fault while allowing access to the rest of the volume. This is done while salvaging the maximum amount of data possible, all done live.

More details and a FAQ on ReFS can be found here. Keep in mind that ReFS will work in conjunction with Storage Spaces, also on my original post. But Storage Spaces should be in all versions of Win 8.

ReFS is only in Windows Server 8, not Windows 8. MS always release a new file system on the server version first, then bring it to home users, so it should be in Windows 9.

 

[MR.B]

Aah poop, in a moment of stupidity I've installed Windows 8 Dev. on my Windows 7 partition.

Any chance I can go back or am I stuck moving over my stuff.

1: Should have waited for the BETA! Only 7 days to go! Dev is missing many things.

2: You're stuck with the Dev Preview, if it's on the same petition it's overwritten your 7 install.

So basically, it irradicates the need for defragmenting?

I'm not sure. But if you use Storage Spaces, then MS have said fragmentation will not occur so you dont even need ReFS to avoid that. I think Storage Spaces is one of the best features in Win 8.

 

[MR.B]

Do you need to setup storage spaces from within windows. Or can you do it from windows setup before installing windows?

You set it up within Windows, i've not seen any mention of a setup process during Windows install. Unlike RAID you can easily add or remove drives without it screwing things up, so you dont need to set it up before you install the OS. You can also unplug all the drives that you use for Storage Spaces, then plug them in to another Win 8 PC in any order and it will automatically recognise the Storage Pool (no setup needed).

Screenshots of the process:

Create the Storage Pool
Choose name, size and data mirroring (if any)
Add more drives whenever you want
Manage drives

Simple. Notice they're also using some USB connected drives in the last pic, because you can add almost any type of drive, dont matter if it uses USB, SATA or SAS.

 

[MR.B]

New screenshots of Office 15... I think they're a good example of how you can have complex full blown software with the simple and clean Metro style without losing functionality. The ribbon is also now collapsed by default. But it's strange how Office now goes perfectly with Metro even though it's desktop software, while the desktop graphics and UI in Win 8 still look closer to Win 7 The desktop doesn't go with anything now! MS normally leave Explorers graphics until last though, so hopefully the desktop will be updated...

 

[MR.B]

It's not really Metro though is it?

When i say Metro, i mean thats the word used for this type of design style. As with Windows Phone 7 which first started using the name for it's look.

 

[MR.B]

 

[MR.B]

HP accidentally uploaded a Win 8 driver document on there site, it mentions these SKU's...

Microsoft Windows 8 32 Edition
Microsoft Windows 8 64 Edition
Microsoft Windows 8 Enterprise 32 Edition
Microsoft Windows 8 Enterprise 64 Edition
Microsoft Windows 8 Professional 32 Edition
Microsoft Windows 8 Professional 64 Edition

Hope this happens, because no more uttery pointless and consumer confusing "Home Starter" and "Ultimate" versions. Everything from Ultimate would just be in Professional.