The Microsoft Windows 8

Hello Windows.

I am writing a new post after a long time. Windows 8 launched on 26^th October and since then more than 50% of Windows 7 users have upgraded to the controversial OS. Yes, I said controversial because the first thing you notice when you upgrade to Windows 8 is a missing start menu.

The “start” is now a totally different part of Windows 8 which is competing with Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android family. This User-Interface is called Modern (Not Metro for reasons nobody knows).

So now, a Window 8 has 2 UIs, “The Legacy UI” and “The Modern UI”. Pretty cool and simple names there.

Many blogs have given the Windows 8 a “mediocre” rating. I would say otherwise. Windows 8 is a tablet/laptop/desktop hybrid. It has a clean UI cloaking a highly potential Operating System (unlike Mac where OSX gives you what you see, no room for exploration).

So the first time when I used Windows 8, one day after its release, I loved it! The upgrade was a clean install and so it did take a little while (yes, I didn’t keep anything as I wanted to start fresh). The OS is comparable to OSX, iOS and Android.

So here’s a hands-on review:

The first time Windows 8 boots, the start screen is a modern city with a tower (apologies if this is a landmark) which looks a bit too flashy. After that I would have been clueless what to do but the mouse click saved me. (After this was a short tutorial to get you familiar to Windows 8 but I ignored it because I was familiar with the RP)

Account set-up was easy, 1^st thing I liked. In iOS it’s crazy, there is no denying it. Here all I had to do was sign into Outlook.com using my Gmail account and done! No credit card, no new sign ups. (You can also create a local account)

Next I went into settings and changed the logon picture to a high contrast piano picture. Microsoft had just released updates to all its apps improving the performance and adding features.

After updating the apps I explored the Windows 8 App Store. It was not bad at all considering that The AppStore started 2 years after the iPhone launched and has 650,000 apps while in 3 months the Windows Store has 13,000 apps.

Another good feature is the split screen in a 1:2 ratio. Multitasking is way easier and it does its job as promised.

The desktop had one thing missing, Aero, which was okay considering that it still looks different. Everything is different; maybe that is why some people couldn’t adapt to the change.

Other noticeable changes are:

· Explorer has a ribbon UI
· Boot time is VERY low
Live Tiles
· The shortcuts hold key to Windows 8
· App store is growing fast
· Everything compatible with Windows XP SP3 also works
· The personalization pane has many extra features like PIN, Picture Unlock etc.