2. Windows 8 Start screen

Microsoft the familiar Start menu is a Start screen which features the same kind of live tiles and data as Windows Phone's home screen,

When you open an app that needs the desktop you still get the familiar Recycle Bin and Taskbar, but the Start button - which now only appears when you hover in the bottom left corner with your mouse - takes you back to the Start screen.

The Start Screen can be used as an application launcher for desktop apps, or Windows 8 Modern UI apps (that's what Microsoft is currently calling the new interface).

3. Better multiple monitor support

Microsoft has decided that, with more of us using multiple monitors on our PCs, that it needed to overhaul its desktop management.

That means you can now have the Start Screen on one monitor and the desktop in another, or choose to have the Windows 8 Desktop and taskbar on both screens.

You can also put a different background on each screen if you have multiple monitors. Windows 8 also enables you to split screen between Modern UI Windows 8 apps, so you can have both your Windows Messenger on a third of the screen alongside your Desktop. This takes a bit of getting used to!

4. Windows 8 charms

A key arrival for Windows 8 is what Microsoft is calling Charms. These appear when you mouse to the right-hand side of the screen or swipe in from the right on a touchscreen.

They enable you to access the Start Screen on a touch device (although many touch devices will also have a physical Windows 8 button on the bezel of the screen or a Windows key on the keyboard).

The other buttons are Search, Share, Devices and Settings and provide quick access to these functions on touch and pointer-driven displays alike.

As well as searching your apps and folders, charms work across different apps, so for example a social app can tap into the Share charm so you can share files to that app quickly and easily - it's contextual to the app you are using.

The Settings charm gives you quick access to basics such as volume and brightness controls, as well as putting your PC to sleep or restarting it.

The search and devices charms are fairly self explanatory, but the share charm is interesting.

5. WIndows 8 Search and Social

With the Start menu gone, search is available not only through the Search charm but also through the Start Screen - just start typing and the results on screen are for programs and files.

As with Share, the Search charm is contextual, so you can search inside any app - for example you can do a web search from here, or look for a destination using the Travel app. Doing a web search is powerful and quick, it's a simple way to launch a browser and search speedily.

As for social, WIndows 8 supports Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter natively, so you can browse social updates within the People app and elsewhere.

6. Windows 8 ARM support

Until now, Windows has only supported x86-based Intel and AMD PCs but that is all changing with Windows 8, which will support devices running on ARM architecture.

British company ARM's chip designs are being used in a growing number of devices, and Microsoft is keen to make Windows as widely available as possible - especially on cheaper Windows 8 tablets to compete with the iPad and Android tablets.

• Windows 8 vs Windows RT: what's the difference?

While ARM produce the original so-called 'instruction set' for the processors used in these devices, other people manufacture the chips. So expect to see Windows 8 tablet devices based on Nvidia's Tegra 3 and Qualcomm's Snapdragon to start with.

The version of Windows 8 used on ARM-based devices is actually referred to as Windows RT - this stands for runtime. You can't buy this separately, only with a device.

7. Windows Store

Microsoft's Windows Store is a key part of Windows 8, offering both desktop and Modern UI apps, both free and paid. You can search the Store using the Search charm, as well as browse through the top free or top paid apps as well as look through apps by category.

When apps are updated, you can also download these updates very easily, just as you would on iOS or Android.

8. Windows 8 cloud integration

While Microsoft may not agree with Apple's Steve Jobs that we are in a post-PC era, it is clear that they are keen to make cloud integration central to Windows 8.

That means the potential to sync data to SkyDrive - there's a SkyDrive app as well as the ability to save data to and from your cloud storage. Office 2013 apps have SkyDrive capabilities included, too.

Microsoft also syncs settings your Windows 8 PCs - including your browsing history in IE, for instance. Photos can also be shared across multiple PCs.

Installing and upgrading

The RTM and RTM evaluation downloads are ISO files that you have to burn to an optical disk or build a bootable USB flash drive for, but that's not something consumers will have to deal with now.

As with the Windows 8 Consumer and Release Previews, how much of a previous Windows system you can keep when you install RTM depends on which version you're upgrading from.

 

 

Upgrade from Windows 7 and you can keep programs, Windows settings and files; upgrade from Vista and keep settings and files. Upgrading from Windows XP only gives you your personal files.

Unlike Windows 7, you can't do a full upgrade from any of the preview versions of Windows 8; you'll need to either restore your previous version of Windows from a backup, do an upgrade that only keeps your files or do a clean installation.

This option only appears with Windows 8 and Windows 8 Pro; if you have the Enterprise version, you have to upgrade from another Enterprise edition of Windows, and the previews of Windows 8 were all Windows 8 Pro, so the only option is a clean install. 

A button asking if you want to upgrade and keep apps, settings and files does show up when you run the installer from Release Preview, with the warning that this only works on 'supported versions of Windows' but the installer then told us that indeed, it couldn't upgrade this version of Windows and we had to close it and start over.

Again, you won't see this if you buy Windows 8 normally, only if you're looking at the evaluation or MSDN version now.

If you're installing Windows 8 Enterprise, you activate it once it's installed (the system for that was still being set up when we started testing, so it wasn't seamless, but this is what you'll see as a normal user).

With Windows 8 Pro the installation is the same experience as you'll get if you buy a Windows 8 upgrade - it checks your system, tells you what you can keep and which programs won't be compatible (and helpfully removes them and then restarts the installation) and asks you to enter your product key as a normal part of the installation.

Scanning a fully loaded Windows 7 system with a lot of apps installed and many gigabytes of files takes around 10 minutes, then another hour (or on a really loaded system, two) to set up Windows 8 with all your compatible programs intact.

If you're doing a clean installation without keeping any applications, or an upgrade where you just keep files and settings, it's far faster.

On a variety of PCs it took 10-15 minutes from starting the installation and entering the licence key to get to picking the colour scheme and choosing whether to accept Express Settings or customise the setup.

One of the items under Express Settings is the controversial default of turning on the Do Not Track setting in Internet Explorer 10. Choose Customize and you can change that, but there's an ongoing argument about what Do Not Track means and how websites will treat the IE10 setting, because it is the default.

It's clearly marked and you can easily change it, but advertisers and some ad-funded organisations remain unhappy.

After this you can set up a local account or log in with a Microsoft account such as a Hotmail address, which synchronises settings with any other Windows 8 PCs you use and gives you access to the Windows Store.

While Windows 8 finishes the set up, which takes a couple more minutes, you get a brief on-screen tutorial showing you how to move your mouse into the corners of the screen to open the charm bar.

If you have a touchscreen, it also shows you how to swipe for the charm bar, but only if you have the right screen - so an older tablet PC with only an active digitiser just shows the mouse tutorial.

If you've picked a colour scheme, the tutorial uses that for the image of the screen - a little thing, but it's a subtle way of making it feel more like your PC.

Once the mini tutorial has played a few times, the set up screen starts switching between various different colours - presumably to show you the other colour choices as well as reassuring you that it's still working.

Everyone who has an account gets to see the tutorial when they first log in, making good use of the short time it takes to create the desktop the first time (they don't all get the colour show, though).

If you do an upgrade install starting with Windows running, you'll never see the option to set the language for your keyboard or settings for date and time formats. If you boot from USB to do a clean install, you're asked to choose these settings but that's it, apart from Express Settings.

In neither case do you get to choose the time zone; Windows 8 either keeps the current time zone if you do an upgrade or sets it up automatically based on the language of the installer for a clean installation.

A UK Windows 8 image kept the UK time even on a clean installation; a US image set the timezone to Pacific when we did a clean installation (you can change that quickly enough inside Windows without needing an admin account).

On a Sandy Bridge Core i5 PC with an SSD, 15 minutes after putting in the USB stick, we were running Windows 8 RTM, ready to activate and trust the PC to get settings synced from the Release Preview install setting showing up - such as SkyDrive photos and our Hotmail calendars. 

references by techradar