Windows 8

Description

Windows 7 sold more than 630 million licenses during its first year of availability. The challenge that Microsoft faced with Windows 8 was not fixing something that was broken — Windows 7 was popular and well-regarded — but rather preparing the Windows platform for a change that had already occurred in the consumer market: touchscreens had become the primary interface for a new generation of computing devices, and Windows had no answer for tablets beyond a mouse-and-keyboard operating system that happened to be available on touch hardware.

Microsoft released Windows 8 on October 26, 2012 with an interface re-design more fundamental than any Windows release since Windows 95 ushered in the era of graphical desktops. The Start button was gone. The Start menu was replaced by a full screen tile-based launcher – called Start Screen. A new application environment was called Windows Store Apps — initially called Metro Apps — it filled the screen edge to edge and operated entirely via touch gestures. Traditional desktop applications still ran, but they were one tile in the Start Screen with apps designed for touch, rather than the default environment.

DEVELOPMENT AND RECEPTION

Microsoft developed Windows 8 under two sets of pressure at the same time. Apple’s iPad had sold 25 million units in its first year and created a mass market tablet category that Microsoft had no product to tackle. Android tablets were growing. Intel and Microsoft’s partners had been pressing for a Windows tablet for years, but no previous version of Windows adapted well to touchscreen interaction — the interface required precision that fingers couldn’t reliably give.

Windows 8 solved the touch issue but introduced another problem. The Start Screen and touch-first apps worked on tablets, but desktop PC users – the overwhelming majority of Windows customers – found the changes disorienting. The lack of the Start button eliminated a navigation landmark that Windows had used since 1995. Switching between the touch-oriented Start Screen and the traditional desktop was a jarring context switch. Apps created for the Windows Store operated in full screen, lacking the windowed mode desktop workflows needed in their first release.

Windows 8’s reception among critics and users was mixed at its launch and became worse commercially. Sales were weaker than Microsoft had hoped they would be, and corporate customers — who were still hadn’t fully migrated from Windows XP to Windows 7 — showed little interest in rolling Windows 8 out across enterprise environments.

Microsoft released windows 8.1 as a free update in October 2013, restoring a Start button (although it opened the Start Screen instead of a traditional menu), adding an option to boot directly to the desktop, and allowing Windows Store Apps to run in windows on the desktop. Windows 8.1 had fixed the most-criticized specific issues without changing the fundamental interface redesign.

Microsoft ended mainstream support for Windows 8 on January 12, 2016, and simultaneously ended extended support — a rather short support lifecycle, reflecting Microsoft’s desire to get users to Windows 10, which was launched in July 2015, with the traditional Start menu restored. Windows 8.1 followed the same pattern of having a separate support timeline, with end of life occurring on January 10, 2023.

FEATURES

Start Screen and Live Tiles

The Start Screen replaced the Start menu as a primary application launcher. Applications took the form of tiles in a grid. Live Tiles that are updated dynamically based on content from the application — a weather tile that updates with the current weather, an email tile that updates with the number of unread messages, a news tile that cycles through recent news headlines, etc. — without requiring the user to open the application.

Charms Bar

A hidden toolbar known as the Charms Bar was revealed when a user moved the mouse to the right edge of the screen or swiped from the right on a touchscreen. The Charms Bar included the options of Search, Share, Start, Devices and Settings which applied contextually to whatever application was open. This system was designed to offer consistent access to common tasks in all applications but required users to discover and remember the gesture.

Windows Store

Windows 8 introduced the Windows Store as a centralized distribution point for Windows Store Apps, bringing the app store model from iOS and Android to desktop Windows. Apps purchased via the Store installed themselves, and did so in the background. The Store made a limited start with a few products and grew throughout the life cycle.

Improved Performance

Windows 8 was faster at booting than Windows 7 on equivalent hardware using a hybrid shutdown mode which hibernated the kernel instead of shutting down the kernel completely, causing the next boot to skip the kernel initialization sequence. Task Manager got a full makeover with per-process CPU, memory, disk and network usage columns and a startup manager for controlling which applications ran when the computer booted.

SkyDrive Integration

Microsoft’s cloud storage service, then known as SkyDrive (later known as OneDrive) integrated into Windows 8 for file syncing and cloud-stored file access via File Explorer.

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

• Processor: 1 GHz or faster
• Memory: 1 GB RAM (32-bit); 2 GB RAM (64-bit)
• Storage: 16 GB (32-bit); 20 GB (64-bit)
• Graphics: DirectX 9 Graphics using WDDM driver
• Display: 1024×768 at minimum resolution
• Note: Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 have reached end of life and do not get security updates from Microsoft anymore