For most people, this restriction may not be an issue, but certain vertical applications specialized programs, such as those for point-of-sale PCs need to boot directly into a desktop environment. Until Windows 8 versions of such programs become available, users requiring vertical applications should stick with earlier versions of Windows.
If all you need to do is launch an application, you can simply click its tile in the Start screen. If you need robust file management and navigation features, you have to access the desktop. After you boot the machine, pressing the Windows key sends you to the desktop. Instead, to move to the desktop consistently, you need to be in the habit of pressing Windows-D.
Another option is to move the pointer to the lower left of the screen and click there though this method works only if you have used no other app recently. Except for the omission of a Start menu, the desktop mostly behaves the same in Windows 8 as it did in Windows 7. Move your pointer to the lower-left corner and right-click, ignoring the Start-screen peek that pops up. This is the simplified Start menu; you can also bring it up by pressing Windows-X. Microsoft has chosen to leave the Windows 8 desktop bare, as it did with Windows 7.
Given the absence of the old-style Start menu, you may wish to add the system and user-file icons by right-clicking the desktop and selecting the Personalize menu.
After you have added those two icons, you can pin them to the Windows 8 Start screen. Connecting to networks is easier than ever, once you have installed the right drivers.
The appearance of individual windows has changed. Gone are the faux transparency and the fake beveled edges, replaced by a completely flat appearance. The Ribbon contains, in one location, all the information that previous versions displayed in a series of menus and submenus.
Ultimately, navigating the new desktop is similar to getting around the old version, but the absence of a full Start menu may throw you off at first. Using hotkeys, and customizing the desktop and Start screen, might help you become more comfortable in the short run. The PC you own today almost certainly lacks a touchscreen. Manufacturers are starting to ship desktop displays with touch capability; the first touch-enabled displays have built-in capacitive touch sensors, which work via a USB connection to the PC.
Future touch displays might communicate through some flavor of wireless, including Bluetooth. More likely candidates for built-in touch are mobile PCs, including traditional clamshell laptops and convertible units that you can transform into tablets, either by concealing the keyboard or by detaching the display, which can act independently as a tablet. But then your kids come up and start touching the screen—after all, these days young users are growing up expecting displays to be touch-enabled.
The Tap 20 is unusual in that it has a built-in battery, which allows you to move it around the home easily and use it as an oversize tablet. Touch support makes the Start screen more usable, though the user interface still has some rough spots. For example, if you swipe your finger in from the left just a little, you get thumbnails of currently running or suspended applications. But slide it a bit too far, and one of those apps takes over the screen. You need to develop a delicate touch no pun intended to take full advantage of the interface.
And despite some imperfections, the touch interface works smoothly. After you use it for a few days, the old way of using Windows will start to seem slightly cumbersome. Microsoft has tried and failed on several occasions to create a market for tablet PCs, but the models released during those attempts have always been clunky and difficult to use.
Even so, Microsoft is planning to support two types of tablets. The second type will carry a slightly different flavor of Windows 8, dubbed Windows RT. These companies design system-on-chip SoC products, which typically consume very little power relative to their performance. Windows RT tablets will have a restricted version of Windows 8.
Although such tablets will include the traditional desktop, you will have access to the desktop only on a limited basis, to run preinstalled applications such as Office. In contrast, tablets with Intel-compatible processors can run the full PC version of Windows 8, and offer complete access to the desktop.
The existence of two types of tablets on the market may end up confusing consumers, though the differences in price will likely drive shoppers in one direction or the other. Windows 8 is here! InfoWorld can help you get ready with the Windows 8 Deep Dive PDF special report , which explains Microsoft's bold new direction for Windows, the new Metro interface for tablet and desktop apps, the transition from Windows 7, and more. Stay abreast of key Microsoft technologies in our Technology: Microsoft newsletter.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde operating system " -- may be applied conclusively. While Windows 8 inherits many of the advantages of Windows 7 -- the manageability, the security plus integrated antivirus , and the broad compatibility with existing hardware and software -- it takes an axe to usability. The lagging, limited, often hamstrung Metro apps don't help. In this review of the final, RTM version of Windows 8, I'm not going to reexamine what's come before; almost everything discussed in my Release Preview review and in my Consumer Preview review still stands.
There's no Start button on the desktop, and the utilities that managed to graft Start onto older beta versions don't work with the final RTM Win8. Moving from Metro to desktop and back again, especially on a large and touch-deprived monitor, will have you reaching for the Dramamine. I can confirm after months in the trenches and talking with many hundreds of testers that anyone who defines "real work" as typing and mousing won't like Windows 8 one little bit.
Windows 8's universal search function might be its best feature. By either clicking the search icon in the charms menu or simply typing when you're on the Start screen, you can query nearly anything on your device or on the web.
The search application, which runs full screen in the Modern UI, consists of two panes. The larger left pane shows results while the right pane contains the free text search box and a long list of icons, representing different things you can search. Click to Enlarge By default, Search queries your list of installed applications, but you can select icons that allow you to search Microsoft's app store, the Web via Bing, your email, your contacts or any of a dozen other Windows 8 applications.
New applications can even add themselves to the search list. Since the Start screen doesn't list any of the preloaded desktop applications by default, we found ourselves using search to get to Windows Paint or the command prompt. Strangely, applications within the Control Panel are invisible to search.
When we searched for "Computer Management" or "Mouse," both sub apps under the Control Panel, we got zero results. Overall, we found search fast and helpful, but we wish there were some advanced settings that let it dig deeper. It failed to detect a JPG we put in the root of the C drive or thousands of pictures we had on another partition.
We also found it annoying that the search app always defaulted to searching our apps, even if we had searched something else the previous time we used it. We also would have appreciated the ability to search more than one thing at a time for example, files and the Web. Click to Enlarge The Share charm in Windows 8 provides a compelling, cross-application service.
If you're in a Windows 8 application that enables sharing and click the Share charm, you're presented with a list of options for sending the document, URL, story, photo or some other data to your friends. The list of sharing options that appears depends on what services you have installed that have Windows 8's sharing contract enabled. When we found a news story we liked in the USA Today app, we clicked the Share charm and were presented with the option to share it either via the Mail or the People app.
The blank message featured the headline, thumbnail, link and blurb of the article and allowed us to edit the subject line, to field and body before sending. When we tried to share the same article via the People app, we were presented with the option of sharing via either Facebook or Twitter; an editor appeared to let us compose a message. Click to Enlarge The Devices charm allows you to output what you're working on to any attached printers, projectors or home theater devices such as a TV.
The Home charm simply returns you to the Start screen, something you could do a number of other ways, including hitting the Windows key on your keyboard or hitting the Windows button on your tablet. Click to Enlarge The Settings charm provides both settings for the current app and a list of global options for your system. For example, when we clicked the Settings charm from within the Photo app, we saw a set of options, including the ability to set what services and locations it pulls the pictures from.
At the bottom of the Settings panel are buttons for controlling the sound and Wi-Fi connection, along with the Power button you need to shut down or restart the system. The link to the Modern UI's settings menu also appears here. Though Windows 8 feels somewhat clunky when used with a mouse, the Modern UI really shines on a tablet.
When we installed Windows 8 on a Samsung Series 7 slate, we were able to navigate around the interface with a number of sleek and intuitive gestures that aren't available with mouse or keyboard. Better laptop touchpads should mirror the touch-screen experience. We enjoyed flipping through open apps by swiping inward from the left edge, bringing up the app bar by swiping up from the bottom or down from the top and launching the Charms menu by swiping in from the right.
We found the gesture for launching the Switcher was a bit more difficult to execute, as it involves two motions: swiping in from the left a little bit and then back to the right. Swiping down to close apps was sometimes frustrating, too, requiring multiple swipes.
Hopefully, final hardware built to run Microsoft's OS will perform more smoothly. Like other tablet operating systems, Windows 8 works in both portrait and landscape modes. However, it's clear that the apps and UI are designed for landscape viewing because most scroll horizontally. News apps like Bing Sports looked particularly attractive on our tablet, because they format their articles into scrollable columns.
We enjoyed reading articles about baseball and then swiping down to choose from other sports. The virtual keyboard has large, well-spaced dark gray keys that were very easy to target with our fingers. It doesn't support tracing between keys like Swype does on the Android platform, but the keys do make a pleasant typing sound when you hit them.
We do wish that Microsoft included a number row above the letters instead of forcing you into a secondary menu. When we tried to use the desktop on the tablet, we ran into many of the same problems we've experienced on Windows 7 slates.
Icons were much smaller and harder to target than tiles on the Start screen, and tapping widgets like the close button or menu items in applications was a bit of a challenge because our fingers were often thicker than the object we wanted to touch. When we wanted to copy photos to our tablet from a USB key, we had to use file explorer and drag the tiny file icon from the window pane over to the tiny Pictures library folder.
This action proved difficult and resulted in several unwanted taps. Any time tablet users need to browse the file system with Explorer, change a setting in the control panel or run a desktop app, they'll be back on the desktop, dealing with these challenges.
However, we were able to effectively drag windows around with some practice, and we found the desktop virtual keyboard as accurate as its Modern UI counterpart. Though Microsoft appears to have focused more effort on the new Modern UI, it has added a handful of new features that only work in desktop mode. The most useful of these is File History, which creates a version of history of any files stored in your libraries or on your desktop, along with contacts and favorites and stores all those files on external drive.
To test File History, we went into Control Panel and configured a USB flash drive to hold our file history and set Windows to scan our files for changes every 10 minutes 1 hour is default.
We then took a photo of a baby from our Pictures library and drew a goatee on it. After 15 minutes, we went back into the File History application in Control Panel and selected restore, where we were able to find and replace the original, unaltered version of the photo. A more detailed task manager, which shows a more colorful list of apps, combines all CPU usage into one chart rather than one for each core.
We particularly appreciated the tab that lists startup apps and how much impact each has on boot time.. We particularly like the App history tab, which shows how much CPU time and bandwidth each of your apps has used during that session. The file explorer has also been revamped a bit so that it now uses ribbon-style menus like those we've seen in Microsoft Office, Windows Paint and many other Microsoft programs.
If you have a second screen attached to your computer, you'll appreciate Windows 8's improved multimonitor support, which now places the taskbar on all of your screens. Strangely, the Modern UI only appears on one of your two screens, the primary one by default. The other screen always shows the desktop, even at startup.
If you're using a keyboard and mouse rather than a touch screen, Microsoft provides other ways to change apps and pull up menus. With a mouse, you must hover the pointer briefly over different corners of the screen, a process we learned to live with, but found less-than-optimal because of the slight delay involved.
To pull up the switcher menu, you must hover in the upper left corner, wait for an icon to appear in the corner and then pull the pointer down. To pull up the Charms menu, you hover in the upper right corner. You can also get the Start screen by hovering in the lower left corner, though hitting the Windows key works better. Right clicking brings up the app bar. If you're using a touchpad and if that touchpad has appropriate Windows 8 drivers, you can use multitouch gestures to bring out these menus.
With gesture support, you can get to the Switcher by swiping in from the left. Pull up the app bar by swiping down from the top or open the Charms menu by swiping in from the right. Unfortunately, the testbeds we used did not have special Windows 8 touchpad drivers that would enable this functionality. With the introduction of its new operating system, Microsoft is launching its own Windows Store to help users find both new modern-style Windows 8 apps, along with a few select desktop apps. The Windows Store appears as its own Windows 8 app with a tile on the Start screen.
The store divides apps into several categories, including games, social, entertainment, photo, music, news, travel and productivity. As you scroll horizontally through the categories, each one has attractive tiles representing highlighted apps and most have tiles for top free apps and new releases.
Click to Enlarge Unfortunately, the selection of apps is pretty small at this stage. During our testing, we found that there were only apps in the store. A dozen of these were desktop apps that cannot be downloaded or purchased directly through the store; these included Microsoft Office, Adobe Lightroom, Visual studio, Adobe Reader and WinZip.
Some of the Windows 8 apps were written in non-English languages such as Chinese, Spanish or Russian. We didn't find any of the types of core applications we typically download on Android or iOS tablets. We didn't see any alternative browsers, Google apps, official apps from the major social networks, word processors, spreadsheets or file managers.
The games we saw were all casual games.
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