Since Windows 95, Microsoft has been using the Start button, which eventually became a Start “orb” button in Windows 7. Leaked screenshots from the upcoming Windows 8 Customer Preview build shows that the familiar Orb button is missing this time round. Users will be expected to simply hover their mouse over any corner of the screen (almost like hot corners in Mac OS X), which will then bring up the new Metro-infused Start menu screen.

Touch screen users will also just hold their screen over a corner of the screen (or use a swipe action). Windows fans might be peeved at the lack of the Start Menu in Windows 8, but it should be pointed out that in future the Start Menu is now being replaced by the “Start Screen”, which uses Metro style apps that look very similiar to Windows Phone 7, and also share a lot of the code base. This will make future cross-platform development between Windows 8 and Windows Phone a lot easier.

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We have seen a few great enhancements arriving in Windows 8, including a brilliant new touch interface, and much more efficient use of system resources – but most of the marketing seems to be focussed on tablet form factors and touch screens. The other major development is that Windows 8 will have the ability to run on ARM processors (the same type of processor you might find in your phone or tablet), but it has been recently rumoured that this is only relevant to the Metro style apps, and the existing “desktop” will not be made available on the ARM devices.

So what happens to the existing bog-standard mouse and keyboard users? If you have spent some time with Windows 8 Developer Preview, you will know the interface is not particularly intuitive if you do not have a touch screen. Yes, it is by no means complete, but it makes one wonder how relevant the Windows 8 update will be to users who use standard desktop and notebook PCs.

“Windows 8 will be largely irrelevant to the users of traditional PCs, and we expect effectively no upgrade activity from Windows 7 to Windows 8 in that form factor.” – IDC

Now it looks like IDC has been asking this same question – stating that Windows 8 will be “largely irrelevant”, as one of their Top 10 predictions in 2012. Their reasons are simple –

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Microsoft today showed us a bit more of their new Windows 8 operating system – and while it really is a very ambitious project, the clear attention was given to the tablet interface. It seems Microsoft is not bargaining on tablet / phone class dumbed down operating systems for tablets – they are going to put the full Windows experience on these devices, but with some more touch friendly controls. Risky move?

Windows 8 takes a lot of the aspects which makes Windows 7 so good and simply takes it further. It is all about speed, in fact they showed off Windows 8 running on a rather old Lenovo S10 netbook with a lowly 1GB of RAM. On closer inspection it seems Windows 8 uses even less system resources to run than 7, but the difference is not major. But netbooks are old news – we now want ultrabooks and tablets right? So Microsoft has had to keep up.

So the rest of the presentation rather focussed on a new Samsung Tablet that was loaded with Windows 8 and its new Metro style touch layer. The interface is truly new – it does not follow the same UI principles as iOS or Android, and that familiar Metro / Windows Phone inteface looks remarkably good on a wide screen display. Animations and typography looks brilliant. After looking at some videos it is clear that speed was especially important – but you should keep in mind these tablets are running Core i5 processors (and they sport a fan vent to get rid of heat)…

Microsoft is going to make Windows 8 available for a range of hardware – not only standard laptops and desktops. Even though the developer preview was shown off on Intel hardware, Windows 8 will be made available on ARM processors (similiar to what your smartphone uses), so expect major increases in battery life. This is of course a major undertaking – Microsoft has to make one OS that runs on everything from tablets to desktops with massive high res screens. Compare this with Mac OS X Lion, which only needs to be made for key few machines in Apple’s stable, and you really understand why Windows 8 is actually quite incredible.

Microsoft is releasing this developer preview today, and users can go download it. But the product is still very unfinished, and requires very specific hardware to actually try out the new touch based features. But there are a few things that can be seen right now:

Boot time: Microsoft has massively cut down on boot times with Windows 8. Regardless whether you run a brand new monster of a PC or an old netbook, expect boot times to be cut in half.

New Touch Centric “Start Screen”: This keeps the familiar Metro interface that was launched with Windows Phone. The user is presented with customizable “tiles” that can hold any type of notification you want – unread mails, calendar info, RSS feeds for News, etc.

Full Screen Apps: Yeah, this was taken from the iPad. But that is a good thing. Clicking on the tiles takes over the entire screen for the app being run, but the operating system buttons can still be brought up. And the current tablet hardware will sport a button to take you back to the start screen.

Internet Explorer 10: This can be viewed in the new tablet style interface, or in the old “desktop” centric interface we all use. The tablet “tailored” interface makes the website take over the screen, and additional swipes make buttons appear.

What is interesting is how different Microsoft has to approach the previews of Windows 8 compared to how Apple did it with Mac OSX Lion. Microsoft is handing out the developer preview more than a year before the release of Windows 8, where Apple only gave select developers beta access a few months before release.

The thing is that Microsoft is more reliant on developers to now get ready for the new touch tailored view of Windows 8, so it gives them really early access it. Microsoft’s strategy to use a full Windows operating system for tablets is risky, but brave nonetheless. What we should keep in mind is that iPad 3 will be out already by the time Windows 8 ships, with iPad 4 not too far away.

Do people still need full operating systems on their portable devices? Only time will tell…

For some reason we all love a machine that can boot quickly – even though it is slowly becoming more and more irrelevant because machines can actually sleep and hibernate quite reliably (and quickly) these days. But still – it is great to fire up a machine and see how quickly it can get us to the desktop. Right?

Problem is that boot time are reliant on quite a few factors, hard drive speed and number of drivers loading being the most important. Sure, things like SSD can really have amazing effects on boot time, but Microsoft wants to cut down on this boot time in Windows 8 even more. Microsoft is proposing a “fast startup mode” which takes elements from a standard boot combined with the hibernate function.

Windows 8 boot times compared to Windows 7 over 30 different PCs

Most impressive is the machines which actually have very long boot times will benefit the most – 70 seconds being cut down to 20 seconds is pretty amazing. So how is Microsoft going about this?

Without getting too technical – the biggest change is that the kernel session will be stored in hibernation file. The kernel is rather small compared to a standard hibernate restore, so it is a lot faster than restoring from hibernate which requires the entire memory contents to be read from the hard drive back to the RAM. The speed improvement comes from the fact that drivers do not have to be reinitialized from scratch, as the kernel is read in an active state already. This excludes device drivers however – so plug and play devices will continue to be recognized. The other big speed improvement comes from the fact that the boot process will now use multicore processors much more effectively. While the kernel hibernation file is read, a second thread kicks off to decompress the bit that has been read already. This will improve standard hibernation processes as well.

The results are very impressive. Check out this video – which is done on a bog standard HP Elitebook 2560p notebook with an SSD. Looks like the slowest part is the POST part which is not really in Microsoft’s control…

It is clear that Microsoft is taking some cues from the public’s shift towards devices like smartphones and tablets which have instant on capabilities. Many have been dismissing Windows in recent times comapred  to instant on devices like the Macbook Air which lasts up to 30 days in sleep mode. The problem is that people still use standard shut downs / reboots because they believe it is safer and more reliable. Microsoft currently points out that about half of all machines are shut down instead of being put into sleep mode. This is down to people not trusting sleep mode, because it keeps on draining the battery – Microsoft has to push hardware providers to improve on this, then the speed of reboot will become irrelevant.

If you want more technical detail on how Microsoft does this, check out the Windows 8 Build blog.

If you think about it, Windows’s file explorer view has not changed much in the last decade – sure, the File, Edit, View menu has been done away with in Windows 7, but the user is still overly reliant on the right click mouse command. But with all the focus on touch based interfaces, the right click command needs to start taking a backseat in future Windows releases. Microsoft is focussing a lot on making Windows 8 a lot more touch friendly, and it is not all about their Metro based interface.

Going forward, all Windows Explorer windows will carry a Ribbon bar with the most popular file handling commands placed in the tabs we have gotten used to in Microsoft Office. Microsoft quite obviously states that drop down menus do not work well in touch environments, yet there is still quite a few commands in the Ribbon bar that relies on drop-downs. What gives Microsoft? But if you are not going to use Windows 8 on a touch device (we first have to wait to see a Beta which shows off the touch aspects more), you can hide the Ribbon bar.

Microsoft also shows off a few new ways in which traditionally difficult tasks are made a lot easier on Windows 8. (more…)