Items tagged with Building Windows 8
For most of the 27 years since the first portable computer was announced, computer power use has been treated as a function of the underlying hardware. Even today, OS-level power optimizations are discussed in terms of whether or not the operating system properly supports the low-power operating modes of the CPU. The idea of optimizing the operating system to ensure minimum power consumption isn't something that Microsoft devoted much attention to, at least not until now. Over at the Building Windows 8 blog, team members Sharif Farag and Ben Srour have posted a discussion on how Windows 8 differs from previous versions in terms of minimizing power consumption. The new data builds on previously...
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One of the aspects of the current Windows Task Manager UI that doesn't scale particularly well, even on existing systems, is the CPU Usage monitor. Trying to track more than four cores quickly devolves into a game of "find the thread." The more cores you have, the less useful information the panel conveys. The 60s moving average CPU utilization line goes from a useful point of reference to a massive tangle of updating graphs, only a handful of which contain information that's actually germane to the task at hand. Windows 8 replaces the old view with a new, color-coded 'heat map' grid of data that scales much more effectively to handle large data sets. The image above shows Windows running on...
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The Windows 8 Start Menu Screen is shaping up to be a bone of contention between Microsoft's engineers and those following the company's Building Windows 8 blog. In a series of recent articles, Microsoft's Steven Sinofsky delved into the history of the Start Menu (the basic concept is 16 years old) and discusses its various shortcomings. Part of the impetus for a re-think comes from Microsoft's own research, which shows that Start Menu usage declined dramatically from Windows Vista to windows 7, thanks in considerable part to the debut of taskbar pinning. Windows 8's Start Screen does away with classic Start Menu functionality and replaces it with an entirely different model. Microsoft believes...
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Microsoft's Steven Sinofsky has published an update to the Building Windows 8 blog in which he sheds light on how Windows 8 treats the GUI differently than any previous version of the operating system. One of the concerns surrounding Windows 8 has been whether or not the operating system's new 'Metro' UI would supplant the more conventional GUI and whether or not users would be able to switch between the two. Microsoft has already demonstrated an updated version of Explorer's UI structure, as partial proof that the company is devoted to preserving both the old and new presentation methods. According to Sinofsky, Windows 8 will treat the desktop as an optional environment. He notes that the company's...
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