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For the last few years, Windows 8 has been a part of my daily life. As a part of the Windows 8 engineering team, I spent many hours installing and running Windows 8 on a variety of hardware. I’ve learned a lot about Windows 8 during this time, and I’m looking forward to sharing some of this knowledge and excitement with you. In this post I’ll give an overview of eight of my favorite features and updates in Windows 8.
They are:
Performance Enhancements
Windows 8 was engineered to optimize performance and battery life. This enhanced performance is beneficial when using a wide variety of PCs ranging from Windows RT tablets to Windows workstations.
These are a few of the performance investments we made in Windows 8:
Shortly after it was released, I wrote a post on the Samsung Series 9 ultra-thin notebook PC. I really like this PC because it’s thin, it’s light, it has a great screen, and it’s fast! I recently put Windows 8 on this PC and found that it’s even faster compared to my experience with Windows 7. I found that it boots faster, launches Windows Explorer faster (when plugging in a USB drive or my Canon 5D Mark III camera), and also launches playback of video files faster. When it comes to performance, there’s no looking back, Windows 8 delivers!
You can read more about these enhancements on the B8 blog, including posts covering web browsing, power and battery, and memory footprint.
Navigation and Appearance
The first thing you’ll notice when you use Windows 8 is the new Start Screen (with live tiles). Behind the scenes, there are plenty of other less visible new capabilities in the Windows 8 experience that help you perform tasks quickly.
Some of these new power user capabilities include:
There’s plenty more, but this “starter list” gives you an idea of some of the great features and improvements that were added for Windows 8.
The Quick Link menu – lots of great one-click features!
If you run more than one display, you’ll want to check out desktop background spanning in Windows 8. The first thing you’ll need is an image of sufficient width. For a side by side dual monitor setup, just add up the horizontal resolution for each display, in my case this was 2560 + 2560 = ~5120 pixels wide. To demonstrate this feature I took a screen grab from some 5K video footage that I shot this fall with a RED Epic camera, and set it as my desktop wallpaper. By default, you’ll see the same image on each display. However, once you select the “span” setting in the Desktop Background Control Panel, you’ll see a panoramic image spanning across your displays. Here’s a screen capture comparison showing the resultant screen real estate with the “fit” option (mirrored) and the “span” option (continuous):
Wallpaper image fit to each display
Wallpaper image spanning both displays
And here’s what I see when sitting at the workstation, very cool! It’s as if your displays are windows and your image is behind them.
Now I’m going to have to go out and shoot some really nice panoramic landscape shots to use as wallpaper!
There are additional multi-monitor enhancements in Windows 8:
If you want to read more about multi-monitor enhancements in Windows 8, check out this blog post. I’ll also be blogging more about mouse navigation, keyboard navigation and other related stories in future posts.
Windows 8 Task Manager
Windows 8 has a better Task Manager and it’s my go-to place to check up on system resources, monitor apps, terminate processes, and countless other tasks. Here is what it looks like:
The startup tab in the new Task Manager for Windows 8
Did you know that you can easily control startup process options by right-clicking on items in the Startup tab in the new Task Manager? It’s that easy! If you’ve used msconfig to optimize startup behavior in the past, you’ll want to check out this new “Startup” tab in the Windows 8 Task Manager.
Have you ever spent too much time searching through the task manager to find the process or service that you’re looking for? The Windows 8 Task Manager makes this much easier because it groups processes into sections for apps, background processes, and Windows processes. For services, the task manager shows the “friendly name” for each service running so that you can easily examine what’s going on.
There a ton more information about the Windows 8 Task Manager here.
DirectX 11 Gaming
If you haven’t seen the latest wave of innovation in DirectX PC games, they are amazing! These games feature super-realistic immersive environments, interactive physics modeling, amazing human characters, and high resolution textures. These games are more exciting and more realistic than ever before, and just when you thought it couldn’t get any better the next amazing game is released. I can’t believe I get paid to do this.
Here are some of the many recent DirectX 11 game titles:
In order to bring to life these experiences to life, Windows 8 supports the latest GPU hardware including the AMD Radeon 7970, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 690, and many others.
Tessellation with DirectX 11 – Note the top of the ear and the collar area where enhanced edges and curves are observed – Image courtesy NVIDIA
For more information about DirectX 11 exclusive features and optimizations in games, check out this article from NVIDIA. We will be covering DirectX 11 and PC gaming in more detail in future posts.
Native USB 3.0 Support
Windows 8 natively supports USB 3.0. USB 3.0 is up to 10x faster than USB 2.0, so it’s great when transferring large quantities of data to and from an external device. Windows 8 native support for USB 3.0 ensures more consistent USB 3.0 feature support, better device compatibility, and improved power management that results in longer battery life. In addition, there are already hundreds of millions of USB 1.0 and 2.0 devices that also work great with Windows 8.
Blue means fast! - USB 3.0 (Superspeed) ports and device cable
I’ll be talking more about Windows 8 USB 3.0 support and devices in future posts, but in the mean time you can read more about USB in Windows 8 here.
UAS 3.0 and Storage Spaces
Large scale storage has become an ever increasing need for today’s power user. Fortunately Windows 8 has some great new storage features that help out here! To start, Windows 8 offers native support for UAS 3.0, which translates to increased drive performance, better drive interoperability, and power savings as well. Windows 8 also introduces a new feature called Storage Spaces.
Storage Spaces offers:
Storage Spaces in Windows 8 is also very easy to setup. There’s two easy ways to get to Storage Spaces management:
In Storage Spaces management, you can create a Storage Space with only a few clicks.
Storage Spaces landing page in the Control Panel
Creating a new Storage Space – Options
Storage Spaces show up like any other drive in Windows Explorer
Enhanced Sensor Capabilities
For Windows 8, sensors play an important role in delivering interactive experiences. In order to create an optimal tablet experience, light sensors and accelerometer sensors are used to automatically control screen brightness and auto-rotate the display. Furthermore, all tablet PCs have a full 9-axis sensor fusion sensor hardware capability (3D accelerometer, 3D gyro, 3D magnetometer). These sensors together implement support for “Sensor Fusion” – an exciting new capability for Windows 8 that enables smooth and accurate compass readings, as well as powerful 3D motion detection that’s perfect for interactive gaming experiences and other kinds of interactive applications. Windows 8 includes class driver support for sensors (via new standards additions to HID), and an extensive set of APIs for developers that are writing Windows Store apps. For more information about Sensor support in Windows 8, check out my blog post here.
Star Chart, an app that uses sensor fusion – available on the Windows Store
Enhanced Boot Security and Performance
In order to ensure that Windows 8 security is optimized, countless aspects of PC hardware and software security were considered during the development of Windows 8. One of these considerations was to incorporate UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) secure boot into the Windows boot architecture. With UEFI secure boot, the risk of loading a compromised Windows image is greatly reduced which translates to less susceptibility to certain types of security attacks. It’s just one of the many ways that Windows 8 integrates with UEFI system firmware.
In addition, boot performance has also been significantly boosted in Windows 8. We developed Windows 8 fast start up which intelligently shuts down and boots your PC. With Windows 8, you’ll be surprised how quickly your PC hibernates, resumes, and boots. If you want to know more, there is a blog post with detail on Windows 8 fast start up here.
These are a few of my favorite Windows 8 features and I’ve really only scratched the surface here! In future posts, I’ll cover more on these topics and take a close look at new Windows 8 PCs, peripherals/components/accessories for Windows 8, and of course apps running on Windows 8. I look forward to sharing this with all of you. If you want to stay up to date, Follow me on Twitter!
Good writeup, nice counter to all the "windows 8 is crap for a desktop user" articles that people seem to write as link bait all over the web. Especially the storage spaces and multi monitor stuff looks good to me.
These "enhancements" all come at the cost of some features that were pulled from each component. That is not what enthusiast users want. They want everything that came previously intact/unbroken. There are just as many newly introduced regressions which remain unfixed in Windows 8 due to MS's new policy of delivering a "beta" to customers which is already finalized. (social.technet.microsoft.com/.../18b53644-6c6b-4d32-820a-53134a0913f3)
On an unrelated note, it might be a good idea to mention that UAS stands for USB Attached SCSI since it is a fairly new protocol. :P
Please fix the link to Star Chat app apps.microsoft.com/.../6df7e745-782f-44e7-b408-6259a8da6a7f and
"Star Chart, and app that uses sensor fusion"
to
"Star Chart, an app that uses sensor fusion"
abm- thanks for catching that! I fixed the Star Chart link and text.
Will Microsoft provide an update for Windows 8, which consists of three things: the option logon directly to Desktop (without Metro UI Start Menu), Windows 7-style Start Menu, and Aero Theme?
I know these three things could have been done using third party software, but it will be much more reliable and secure if given directly by Microsoft.
Say, this update will keep Windows 8 from failure, at least it will attract Windows 7 users to upgrade. Will you? Do what you want, but let us do what we want.
Brightsmith, 25000+ Windows 8 apps are made available in Windows Store and 40 million Windows 8 licenses are sold in last 40 days!! Its far from failure.
I wonder if experimenting with the W8 Built In Administrator account poses a significant risk for new users, especially on stand alone machines or small home networks. Reading questions on the internet and countless Microsoft resources, including the MS Communities sites, seems to indicate that the BI Administrator Account is a mystery to many and therefore a basic and potential security risk. Even MS help resources do not seem to provide any adequate information about what the BI Administrator account (1) is, or (2) how to use it.
I hope I'm in the right place to add my two-cents! I am a windows user through and through! I am using an HP Compaq 8510p, which by the way was purchased used. I installed Windows 8 late last year (after upgrading to an Intel 320 series SSD)- and I couldn't be happier. The Start screen that gets all the bad press, to me, is easier than ever to navigate Microsoft Windows. I am an IT manager for a small business in So. California, the computer discussed above is a laptop, which is now a stay at home desktop replacement. I have a Windows Tablet RT since January of 2013- Thank You MS for Remote Desktop! Change is inevitable in all aspects of life, so Windows OS going to what they call Metro Start screen or whatever... is awesome, I just type and find what I need, or scroll for the square holding the connection to my world. It is the best so far, at least for me- my laptop NEVER shuts down unless I tell it too, and everything- "just works." Windows 7 was awesome too, but I've moved on, and Windows 8 only made things easier for me, and works better for this aging laptop, which HP should look back at build specs'- I dropped this a month ago, actually it got thrown into a wall and fell to the earth- only to be found intact and sill on and nothing lost, except a corner of the base, slightly uncovering a metal frame work that save its life! I also use other OS's- OS X, Ubuntu, Linux- but Windows is how business works, and I haven't had ANY issues with Win 8- It Just Works- finally Microsoft.