Windows 8 - The Top 9 Features

Good news is – Windows 8 comes with more than 300 new features. Well, it is not feasible for me to write about all those features here, but here is my take on what are some of the key new features that you would love to use –

(1)   Support for ARM tablets (ARM Processors) 

This would be the first Windows release which would run on both ‘ARM based tablets’ and also x86 PCs based on ARM processor from Intel and AMD.

(2)   Touch Centric, Tile-Based metro style UI

The Windows 8 Start Menu is customizable through a mosaic of tiles, which differ from traditional desktop icons by letting you view live information from Windows 8 Metro style apps without actually accessing the apps.

Metro interface is subdivided into blocks or ‘Live Tiles’. The touch interactive tiles display immediate data from email services, social networking sites, IMs etc.  It also provides multi-monitor support.

(3)   Charm

This is nothing but the new widows Start bar. On normal PC, they are accessed by dragging the mouse to the bottom-left corner of the screen where old Windows start button is. For tablets – you swipe from right side of the screen.

Charm sidebar offers 5 sets of options – Start, Search, Share, Device and Settings. Star option returns the user to home screen. Devices option shows the list of connected devices. And Share option shows the social network sharing apps.

(4)   New Task Manager and Control Panel

The new task manager will list the applications independently from background processes. This will allow users to view CPU usage, memory usage, performance etc easily.

Control Panel is now modified to include categories down the left side and options for those categories on the right.  New options include Personalize, Users, Wireless, Notification, General, Privacy, Search and Share.

(5)   Snap Multi-tasking

This is designed to make it easy to run 2 apps side-by-side, to resize them and also switch between them.  But it does not allow you to view all your running apps on a single screen.

(6)   New Improved ‘Copy’  feature

Windows provides this new copy experience where in all current copy operations can be performed in a single dialog box instead of requiring separating dialog box for each app. The new dialog box also allows you to pause, resume and stop each copy operation which are running. This will also warn in case there is a version conflict while copying. Besides, it also shows a graph where each job shows speed of data transfer, the transfer rate trend and how much data left to transfer.

(7)   USB 3.0 Support

Windows 8 will have drivers for USB 3.0, which is 10 times than USB 2.0

(8)   New and improved security features

Windows 8 comes with a new and improved security feature that includes an improved Windows Defender built into the OS.

(9)   IE 10

IE10 will allow the end users to search either their desktop or the web through Microsoft’s Bing search engine. It will also play a major role in Metro UI. 

Users will be able to surf the Internet with a skinned version of Internet Explorer 10. The Metro IE 10 browser brings a start screen for quick access to the Web sites frequently used by the user, as well as the pinned Web sites. It also has the address bar and a set of common commands at the bottom and Tabs at the top. It also supports private Tabs when users opt to leverage the browser's InPrivate feature. The new "draw mode" will help users to draw on a Windows 8 touch screen using anywhere between two and five fingers. In addition, an "enhanced magnifier" will allow users to magnify only a selected portion of the screen.