Items tagged with BW8
On the Building Windows 8 blog today, Windows 8 team lead Steven Sinofsky told readers that Windows 8 has been Released to Manufacturing (RTM). What that means is that the OS has been frozen and passed all internal certifications. Bug fixes and feature update development will continue apace, but Build 9200 is complete and apparently has been for at least a week. Here's what happens next. Availability to those with MSDN and TechNet subscriptions will start on August 15 while those with Microsoft Software Assurance licenses will be able to download the enterprise version of the product starting August 16. On September 1, Volume License customers will be able to buy it. At some point, it'll leak...
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Earlier this week, Microsoft principal program manager Chaitanya Sareen dished out information on why Microsoft ultimately decided to kill the Start Menu and replace it with the polarizing Start Screen. According to her, killing the Start Menu wasn't seen as a big deal, given that consumers and businesses had largely stopped using it. We’d seen the trend in Windows 7. When we evolved the taskbar we saw awesome adoption of pinning [applications] on the taskbar. We are seeing people pin like crazy. And so we saw the Start menu usage dramatically dropping, and that gave us an option... So I’m a desktop user, I pin the browser, Explorer, whatever my apps are. I don’t go the Start...
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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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