Windows 8 - the Features, Applications and News Thread

After the news release that Windows 8 will be coming out in October, I've decided to give it another whirl on my main computer.

Getting 1MB/sec download speeds - can't complain, I only got 50-60kb/s when the dev preview was released early on in the year.
 
|Thomas| said:
How will this translate into real life improvements? I assume this will only really make a difference on low performance devices (like say... tablets! :p)
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Those big collections tof photos, that take an age in w7 to see the previews, will drastically drop. Thy take an age even on a beast of a machine.
As well as PDF, text documents and a hundred and one other things.

So no it's not tablet specific. And it's not specifically a tablet Os. It's the first in a homogenization process.
 
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Glaucus said:
Those big collections tof photos, that take an age in w7 to see the previews, will drastically drop. Thy take an age even on a beast of a machine.
As well as PDF, text documents and a hundred and one other things.

So no it's not tablet specific. And it's not specifically a tablet Os. It's the first in a homogenization process.
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Personally I don't have any folders with enough photos to significantly slow down the icon rendering process. If that is true for some people though, and a significant annoyance, then fair enough :).

I don't know what you mean by "pdf and text documents", as in rendering the documents themselves, or the icons? Again, I don't have folders full of pdfs and text documents to notice this really...

I'm all for optimising code, that's fantastic, but it's a strange thing to make a video of.

Also, I didn't say it was a tablet os. The ":p" emoticon was more at the debate surrounding the tablet issue for you lately.

SoundsGood said:
It'll make scrolling through your porn collection far more enjoyable ;)
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Well that's me sold :p
 
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The actual documents when you load it.

Whys it strange making a video? You do realize they've made hundreds of videos on all aspects of win8, you do realise its a windows8 building blog.
 
Glaucus said:
The actual documents when you load it.

Whys it strange making a video? You do realize they've made hundreds of videos on all aspects of win8, you do realise its a windows8 building blog.
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A lot of the other ones show how they designed different features and thought about usability. This just essentially boiled down to "we made the code run better" and perform rather artificial tests to demonstrate this.

Maybe I only get shown the interesting ones.
 
there's loads of performance design blogs in there. its hardly artfical rendering a folder of photos.
and if you read the blog, it talks about what they've designed and why.
 
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Hi guys,

What flavours is win 8 coming, ie home, pro, ultimate etc?

And what is the max system ram will it use, as I'm looking to win 7 Ultimate atm as I want 16GB (IIRC its 16GB total on home so 2GB video card + 16 GB ram is shown as 14GB ram?)

Thanks :)
 
Glaucus said:
Hardware accelerating everything: Windows 8 graphics

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I noticed months ago that Win 8 was rendering thumbnails of my porn, err i mean images, much faster. Now i know why.

Seriously though, this is very useful. I do photography and have folders with thousands of 21MP images and Win 7 can take FOREVER to render all the thumbnails... and this is on a 6 core i7 @ 4.9GHz. It still takes a while on Win 8 but its cut the time in half or more.

This is also new for an OS i think, normally a GPU will just accelerate UI graphics/text. Having GPU compute/decoding capabilities built in is new. I'm sure we'll see a lot more of this stuff in the future.
 
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Given that this is going to need Direct X 11.1 for all the improvements are we all going to have to upgrade the graphics cards to run this stuff?
 
prescott28 said:
Given that this is going to need Direct X 11.1 for all the improvements are we all going to have to upgrade the graphics cards to run this stuff?
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You dont need DX11.1. And some features of DX11.1 can be supported on DX11 cards with driver updates. I've noticed the faster image thumbnail rendering works fine on my Crossfire 6970's which are DX11.

You only need 11.1 for Target Independent Rasterization which is shown at the end of the vid. Theres other benefits to 11.1 as well that are mentioned in the blog post. But all the other stuff in the video will work on DX10 cards. Even DX9c supports some of it.
 
I guess my GTX 470 is going to manage Direct X 11 but, as you say, there are some benefits. I'm currently back on Windows 7 as I came across a few programmes I needed that wouldn't run on 8 but I will be upgrading when 8 comes out.
 
What's the latest with regards the xrazy of circa £35 that was offered for people going from Windows 7 to Windows 8?

Are they still doing that?

I see they are doing it for £15 for people who buy a new PC between 2 June 2012 to January 2013, but I bought my laptop before this.
 
anticonscience said:
What's the latest with regards the xrazy of circa £35 that was offered for people going from Windows 7 to Windows 8?

Are they still doing that?

I see they are doing it for £15 for people who buy a new PC between 2 June 2012 to January 2013, but I bought my laptop before this.
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Well it was announced by Microsoft that upgrades would be $40 at least for a while after launch so I presume it is the case. However this will be a download and no physical object and, presumably, the old OS will have to be installed first. I imagine this will mean the website installing directly as the betas have been. That will entail installing the OS effectively twice if a disk decides to die.

Though more expensive, it may work out better to buy a full version.
 
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