Betta fish swims into Windows 8 Consumer Preview waters

News

  • February 4, 2012 at 2:29 pm

0

Bing page for Windows 8 Consumer Preview - betta fish

We’ve been covering the next version of Microsoft’s Windows operating system for quite a while now. Windows 8 will be big, with a truckload of improvements over Windows 7. Installing or upgrading to Windows 8 will be easier and faster, it will offer a touch-friendly boot experience with 30-70% faster boot times. The new operating system will have a smaller memory footprint, able to run on just 1GB of RAM, and of course is built for a mobile future, to run on both desktops, laptops and tablets.
continue reading

Connecting the Galaxy Nexus to your computer via MTP and the lack of USB Mass Storage

Guides

  • December 10, 2011 at 5:41 am

12

For better or worse, Google has been pushing to abolish microSD card slots from Android devices. Some of the reasoning behind this move revolves around making making the experience easier for beginners, i.e. not having to worry where apps will be installed, applications breaking when you remove the SD card or having to download and use a file manager. Of course this goes against rightly disgruntled advanced users who’ve been used to the convenience of expandable external storage.

The Galaxy Nexus (read our full review here) is Google’s brainchild, proudly becoming the first Android device to run version 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, and as such, it does not have a microSD card slot. Moving the external storage discussion aside, there is one specific functionality that’s become collateral damage. That is USB mass storage. To clarify here, Ice Cream Sandwich has support for USB mass storage but the Galaxy Nexus doesn’t.

USB mass storage is the protocol that allows your computer to view any USB device as a normal storage drive, i.e. gives it a drive letter and you can open it with Windows Explorer or Finder on Mac OS and transfer files and folders as you would with any other drive. If you’ve ever connected a USD thumb drive to a computer and browsed its contents, then it was using USB mass storage. USB mass storage allows block level access, i.e. ‘complete access’ to a storage device. As the Galaxy Nexus has one, unified, built-in storage which hosts both the Android operating system and your personal files it was impractical (if not impossible) to permit block level access on that storage.
continue reading

Windows 8 setup to be easier and faster, designed for online delivery

News

  • November 21, 2011 at 4:29 pm

0

Windows 7 vs. Windows 8 time to upgrade

I still wake up at nights running cold sweat from nightmares of past Windows setup experiences. Installing Windows was an extremely time-consuming and painful experience, especially if you wanted to keep your files or settings instead of doing a fresh install. Although the process has been improving with each new version of Windows, with Windows 7 making the experience much easier, it’s still very time-consuming and you need to keep a tech-minded person handy for help.

Microsoft has been keeping us deeply involved in the Windows 8 development process through an official blog, and their latest post deals with improvements made in the setup and upgrade process. Microsoft promises that the new install process will be easier, faster and extremely stable.

Microsoft faces a huge challenge when it comes to managing the install and upgrade process for a new version of Windows. Windows is designed to run on personal computers with millions of different configurations. Users’ demands may also vary widely, someone might want to do a clean and customized install whereas another would just want to upgrade a previous Windows installation with the least user interaction.
continue reading

Windows 8 to have a smaller memory footprint be able to run on just 1GB of RAM

News

  • October 7, 2011 at 12:46 pm

0

Windows 8 (right) vs. Windows 7 SP1 (left) memory footprint

Windows 8 will do things better, faster and look nicer than Windows 7. The good news is that if you’ve bought a PC in the last couple of years you will probably be able install and take advantage of Windows 8 — note you can download your preview copy to give Windows 8 a try now. Microsoft has already said that Windows 8 will be able to run on previous generation machines, even an ATOM-powered netbook with just 1GB of RAM.

Well today Microsoft is showing us how it was able to reduce the system footprint, in order to be able to get Windows 8 to run smoothly on such a low-end netbook, while leaving memory available for other applications to run. In the image above you can see task manager memory usage on the same system, in Windows 7 SP1 on the left and Windows 8 on the right. To achieve this reduction, Microsoft has made hundreds of specific changes to minimize OS memory use in Windows 8. Hit up the link after the break for the full lowdown by Microsoft’s Bill Karagounis on the Building Windows 8 blog.
continue reading

Windows 8 to offer much faster boot-up speeds

News

  • September 9, 2011 at 2:46 am

0

System boot times, Windows 8 compared to Windows 7

Information on Windows 8 has been trickling from the official development blog, “Building Windows 8”, over the past few weeks, giving us an insight of what we should expect from Microsoft’s next operating system. The engineering team tackles one topic at a time, discussing the underlying issues and motivations, the challenges and what has been done in Windows 8 to address this. We can only say that this is a very engaging way of learning about Windows 8.

Today, Gabe Aul, takes us through what has been done to improve Windows cold boot-up times; that is, the time until you have a workable desktop from the completely off state — not from hibernate and not from sleep. Microsoft has been able to deliver significantly faster boot-up times in Windows 8 compared to Windows 7.

A quick search on YouTube will land you with tons of videos comparing Windows to MacOS boot speeds, an obviously important issue for the overall user experience and a benchmark of how “well” an operating system performs.

Although hibernating your Windows PC already leads to faster boot up times, a lot of users like to completely shut down their computers in order to start fresh.
continue reading