In-Depth with the Windows 8 Consumer Preview
by Andrew Cunningham, Ryan Smith, Kristian Vättö & Jarred Walton on March 9, 2012 10:30 AM EST- Posted in
- Microsoft
- Operating Systems
- Windows
- Windows 8
Windows has changed a lot since Windows 95 ushered in the modern era of the desktop operating system almost two decades ago—the underlying technology that makes Windows what it is has completely changed since those early days to keep pace with new technologies and usage models. Despite all of those changes, though, the fundamental look and feel of Windows 7 remains remarkably similar to its hoary old predecessor.
Windows 95 and Windows 7: We're not so different, you and I
All of that's changing—the Windows 8 Consumer Preview is here, and it brings with it the biggest fundamental change to the default Windows UI since 1995. Metro is an interface designed for the modern, touch-enabled era, and when Windows 8 (and its cousin, Windows on ARM) is released, it will signify Microsoft's long-awaited entry into the tablet market that the iPad created and subsequently dominated.
The difference between Microsoft's strategy and Apple's strategy is that Microsoft is not keeping its operating systems separate—iOS and OS X are slowly blending together, but they remain discrete OSes designed for different input devices. Windows 8 and Metro, on the other hand, are one and the same: the operating system running on your desktop and the one running on your tablet are going to be the same code.
Metro tends to overshadow Windows 8 by the sheer force of its newness. Although it's one of the biggest changes to the new OS, it's certainly not the only one. Windows 8 includes a slew of other new and updated programs, utilities, services, and architectural improvements to make the operating system more useful and efficient than its predecessor—we'll be looking at the most important of those changes as well.
Will all of these new features come together to make Windows 8 a worthy upgrade to the successful Windows 7? Will the Metro interface work as well with a keyboard and mouse as it does on a tablet? For answers to those questions and more, just keep reading.
Hardware Used for this Review
For the purposes of this review, I’ve installed and run Windows 8 on a wide variety of hardware. I’ve done most of the review on a pair of machines, which I’ll spec out here:
|
Dell Latitude E6410 |
Dell Latitude D620 |
|
| CPU | 2.53 GHz Intel Core i5 M540 | 2.00 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo |
| GPU | 512MB NVIDIA Quadro NVS 3100M | Intel GMA 950 |
| RAM | 8GB DDR3 | 2GB DDR2 |
| Hard drive | 128GB Kingston V100 SSD | 7200RPM laptop HDD |
| OS | Windows 8 x64 | Windows 8 x86 |
I also installed and used Windows 8 on the following computers for at least a few hours each:
|
Netbook |
Late 2006 20" iMac |
Mid-2007 20" iMac | HP Compaq C770US | Late 2010 11" MacBook Air | Custom-built Mini ITX desktop | |
| CPU | 1.6 GHz Intel Atom N270 | 2.16 GHz Core 2 Duo | 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo | 1.86GHz Intel Pentium Dual-Core | 1.6 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo | 3.10 GHz Intel Core i3-2105 |
| GPU | Intel GMA 950 | 128MB ATI Radeon X1600 | 256MB ATI Radeon 2600 Pro | Intel GMA X3100 | NVIDIA GeForce 320M | Intel HD Graphics 3000 |
| RAM | 1GB DDR2 | 2GB DDR2 | 4GB DDR2 | 2GB DDR2 | 4GB DDR3 | 8GB DDR3 |
| Hard drive | 5400RPM laptop HDD | 7200RPM desktop HDD | 7200RPM desktop HDD | 16GB Samsung SSD | 128GB Samsung SSD | 64GB Crucial M4 SSD |
| OS | Windows 8 x86 | Windows 8 x86 | Windows 8 x86 | Windows 8 x64 | Windows 8 x64 | Windows 8 x64 |
This broad list of hardware, most of it at least a couple of years old, should be representative of most machines that people will actually be thinking about upgrading to Windows 8—there will be people out there installing this on old Pentium IIs, I'm sure, but those who are already know that they're edge cases, and are outside the scope of this review.
Update: Hey AMD fans! A lot of you noticed that there weren't any AMD CPUs included in my test suite. This was not intentional on my part, but rather a byproduct of the fact that I have no AMD test systems on hand at present. For the purposes of this review, these specifications are provided to you only to give you an idea of how Windows 8 performs on hardware of different vintages and speeds, not to make a statement about the relative superiority of one or another CPU manufacturer. For the final, RTM version of Windows 8, we'll make an effort to include some AMD-based systems in our lineup, with especial attention paid to whether Windows 8 improves performance numbers for Bulldozer chips.
With Windows 8, Microsoft has two claims about hardware: first, that Windows 8 would run on any hardware that runs Windows 7, and second, that programs and drivers that worked under Windows 7 would largely continue to work in Windows 8. Overall, my experience on both counts was positive (excepting near-constant Flash crashes), but you can read more about my Windows 8 hardware recommendations later on in the review.
The last thing I want to do before starting this review is give credit where credit is due—many readers have said in the comments that they would like multi-author reviews to include some information about what author wrote what opinions, and I agree. For your reference:
- Brian Klug provided editing services.
- Ryan Smith wrote about DirectX 11 and WDDM 1.2
- Kristian Vatto wrote about the Mail, Calendar, and Photos apps.
- Jarred Walton provided battery life statistics and analysis.
- Andrew Cunningham wrote about everything else. You can contact him with questions or comments at andrewc@anandtech.com or using his Twitter handle, @Thomsirveaux
Now, let's begin at the very beginning: Windows Setup.
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Braden99 - Friday, March 9, 2012 - link
I work with applications like Maya, Photoshop etc. and find my productivity has not been effected at all in Windows 8. Most of the complaints about Windows 8 are grossly exaggerated, by users who cannot easily adapt to change. MS needed to do something big to insure relevance into the future, prepare for new hybrid devices, and entice a new generation of users, and for the most part every feature of the old start screen is still present. The desktop still exists, and explorer has more features than ever. Those "power" users would have probably been using the keyboard to activate and search through start menu, and now they still can, with same number of key presses (yes a context switch, but only for a second, or as quick as you can type and press enter).That said I'm hoping for a lot of tweaks that improve the features and direction MS are already going in - That's what I'm focusing on my attention on.
ananduser - Friday, March 9, 2012 - link
Fair review, impressed by Win8, don't care about GUI sensibilities, I never criticized any OS for subjective GUI peculiarities.Battery issues might also stem from lack of custom drivers that are the norm in laptop land. Anyway I might be wrong seeing as they should work in W8. Maybe they do but don't use W8's touted power saving features.
Why always bring the subject of OSX price vs Win's price ? OSX is an upgrade, it has a requirement that you detain the previous version. Win is sold as a stand alone product(upgrade options exist as well). Now, ever thought about "you get what you pay for"(mac fans always love this phrase) ? W8 will bring out of the box built in hypervisor, storage spaces and incredibly huge hardware support(among many others). Also you can virtualize W8 in any VM. OSX lacks all that and has less hardware support, in fact has hardware restrictions. Bottom line Windows costs more because IT IS WORTH MORE.
PS: Did you really need 2 imacs and a mba to test W8; one Apple PC wasn't enough ?
Braden99 - Friday, March 9, 2012 - link
"but there’s still no way to use a different wallpaper for each desktop, something that OS X has supported forever"Actually you can in Windows 8. Go into Personalize>Click Desktop Background>Then you can right click pictures, and say set as monitor 1, or 2
Braden99 - Friday, March 9, 2012 - link
"but there’s still no way to use a different wallpaper for each desktop, something that OS X has supported forever"Actually you can in Windows 8. Go into Personalize>Click Desktop Background>Then you can right click pictures, and say set as monitor 1, or 2
superPC - Friday, March 9, 2012 - link
I see that most of you complains about the new start screen. well my father asked me to installed windows 8 on his laptop and he's much happier than he ever was with that laptop (it use to be a vista machine). it loads up in less than 40 seconds (not using SSD old core 2 duo machine with just 1 GB of RAM), shuts down in less than 30. it's super responsive and just plain fast (eventhough i've already installed all of his regular software suite). and he loves the new metro browser and apps. full screen apps looked lovely he said. he even likes metro because "it's more informative and searchable than the old start menus". honestly, windows is not aim at people like us the power user, it's aim at the rest of them: casual users. and if my dad, a 25 year veteran casual user of windows can live with metro than most of us obviously can too.p05esto - Friday, March 9, 2012 - link
That's great that it's dumbed down, but my question is WHY are you here on anaddtech? This is a site for real computer users who don't want it dumbed down.MS needs to allow advanced users to turn all the Metro crap off and use the OS just for launching their development apps. We don't want ANY of the crap found on the start screen or the hidden corners or whatever. I don't understand why MS is removing all customizability, it's been getting worse ever since Vista. Even in Office, why force the stupid ribbon, why not let power users use regular menus? I don't get why they force everybody to follow the same strict path. How hard can it be to allow people to bypass the metro start screen and put back the start menu with all their apps?
Oh, and bring back the option to organize apps in the start menu into folders so I don't have to look through 50 apps to see all my graphic editing programs or video programs (I liked putting them into broad folders of apps). Win7 eliminated that possibility. And bring back the SMALL and condensed task menu of apps. In Win7/8 they use these large icons with too much space on the sides...why? I found a registry hack to make them smaller and compact, but why make the large and cumbersome task bar area thre default? It befuddles me.
smilingcrow - Friday, March 9, 2012 - link
p05esto: “My question is WHY are you here on anaddtech? This is a site for real computer users who don't want it dumbed down.Oh, and bring back the option to organize apps in the start menu into folders so I don't have to look through 50 apps to see all my graphic editing programs or video programs (I liked putting them into broad folders of apps). Win7 eliminated that possibility.”
Win7 does allow you to organize your apps into folders on the start menu (after you click on All Programs) but it is not as simple as with previous versions. As you are a ‘real computer user’ I will allow you to find that info for yourself; which will be easy now that you know that it is possible which is the hardest info to get.
bigboxes - Friday, March 9, 2012 - link
Right-click task bar -> Properties -> Task bar tab -> check "Use small icons"freedom4556 - Friday, March 9, 2012 - link
Most of the improvements your dad talked about could be attributable to simply clean re-installing an old Vista install and then running updates. The switch to seven would likely have had a similar effect on performance.Sabresiberian - Friday, March 9, 2012 - link
An operating system, particularly one as ubiquitous as Windows, should appeal to ALL users, not just the lowest common denominator.There is a difference between making things easier to use for the non-technical person and dumbing down, and sometimes Microsoft loses sight of that.
Reading this article, I don't think Win 8 is necessarily "dumbed down" in it's interface, but I'm not entirely convinced. I do know, I'm not going to live with an OS that requires me to interface with it through big squares on a solid-color background.
I have a lot of trouble understanding why I would want to buy an "app" to begin with, since many of them seem to be nothing more than bookmarks. I seem to have been able to do without them for all the time I've used computers to now, I don't see why using a smart phone or tablet requires them, or even makes those devices better. I don't understand why we can't just have icons like the previous versions of Windows that we can touch to activate, if we want to activate them by touch and have the hardware capability.
This article has allayed some of my fears, and there is clearly enough reason to update from Vista to Win 8 on my next build, providing I can get rid of the yugly (yugly: you'-glee, as in "so ugly it's beyond ugly, it's yugly") interface. My second computer uses Win 7, and I'll have to be very impressed with Win 8 to switch from it when I rebuild a second computer.
Most people in the world that interface with computers are not technically inclined; many of them aren't all that capable in any case. It's good for these things to be easy enough to use that most everyone can use them, just please, please don't penalize ME in the process.
It will take a lot for me to give up DirectX, but I would do it, if it becomes necessary.
;)