Windows 8 has been said to boot fast, but until now it’s been a Microsoft story. Now, Tom Warren from WinRumors has proven it to be very true. I am very impressed. Remember, this is a developer preview and not a beta or final product. It should become even faster by the time Windows 8 is released, not only because of more efficient programming, but because of new hardware between now and then.
Steven Sinofsky has announced that tonight at 8PM PDT Microsoft will release a developers preview of Windows 8. I can imagine that the response will be great, so download speeds may not be the best. But, I can assure you I will be downloading it starting at 8:00:01 PDT, along with many others. I can’t wait to give it a whirl!
EDIT: Download Link Here – It is now available for download.
Upgrade from Windows 7 installation is not supported for pre-release code; only clean installs are supported. Reminder: this is a developer preview release and is not meant for production. It is not a beta release. We will be updating the release with various quality updates and drivers over the coming weeks/months just to exercise our overall update and telemetry mechanisms.
Windows 8 is set to be shown to the world today at BUILD, Microsoft’s new event. You can watch the keynote live at BuildWindows.com. Apparently, there has already been a few breaking of the NDA’s there, so some news may already be out there.
BUILD is a new event that shows modern hardware and software developers how to take advantage of the future of Windows. Learn how to work with the all new touch-centric user experience to create fast, fluid, and dynamic applications that leverage the power and flexibility of the core of Windows, used by more than a billion people around the world.
Fox News, with help from research firm Gartner, has it’s doubts that Windows 8 will make much of a splash in the enterprise market when it is released. Claiming that Windows 7 was such a success and many still on Windows XP that they will just skip Windows 8 as they did with Windows Vista. Of course, the “saving grace” of the next edition of Windows is going to be the tablet market. For an operating system that hasn’t even been released, or shown to the public in any beta form, people are making some harsh judgments on the software.
Michael Silver, a vice president at research firm Gartner who studies personal computers, exclusively told FoxNews.com that many companies have what he calls “migration fatigue” and will skip Windows 8 entirely.
UPDATE: Ed Bott does an excellent job rebutting the article from Fox News with some excellent responses.
Yes, this is an affiliated ad and I get some revenue from any sales with this link, but I wanted to pass on the deal. I am sure other companies will be offering competing deals, but be sure to compare what you get before making your purchase. Regardless of where you buy the game, retailers will be fighting for your dollars and will be throwing some swag your way when you make your purchase. Don’t buy the game by itself when you can get some goodies with it.
The Windows 8 team has posted a bit on the new Windows 8 boot time optimization. One of the major factors in judging a PC’s speed is it’s boot time, and Windows 8 looks to make some huge increases in speed. I have upgraded to an SSD on my main Windows 7 machine and am very happy with my boot speeds, I would love to test out Windows 8 (hopefully a public beta soon) booting from the same SSD.
Now here’s the key difference for Windows 8: as in Windows 7, we close the user sessions, but instead of closing the kernel session, we hibernate it. Compared to a full hibernate, which includes a lot of memory pages in use by apps, session 0 hibernation data is much smaller, which takes substantially less time to write to disk. If you’re not familiar with hibernation, we’re effectively saving the system state and memory contents to a file on disk (hiberfil.sys) and then reading that back in on resume and restoring contents back to memory. Using this technique with boot gives us a significant advantage for boot times, since reading the hiberfile in and reinitializing drivers is much faster on most systems (30-70% faster on most systems we’ve tested).
I know I’ve made fun of Apple in the past, and I’ve claimed that Apple users aren’t as smart as Windows and Linux users. But, running across an old knowledge base entry over at Apple’s site has changed my mind. They are extremely smart and know more than the average user.
Microsoft has announced a new edition of the Xbox 360 console. Decked out in Call of Duty, Modern Warfare 3 graphics and new power on and disk tray sounds, it looks and sounds pretty badass. The new machine comes with two themes controllers as well as the MW3 game, and a 320GB hard drive. Also available are a MW3 themed bluetooth headset and individual wireless controllers.
This limited edition console includes a customized console with graphics from the game, along with two custom wireless controllers, a 320GB hard drive, a copy of “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3,” as well as custom sounds when the console is turned on. Here are the .WAV files of they what they sound like: power on/off and disk tray eject.
As the PC turns 30 years old, PC World asked industry leaders, including Bill Gates, their thoughts on the PC – past, present and future. One thing I disagree with, and I have for the past 20 years every time it is brought up, is that the end of the desktop PC is here. The desktop PC is always going to be relevant as long as we have desks. It is where we work, where we get things done. Tablets, laptops, netbooks don’t have the horsepower or the screen size or the ergonomics of a desktop PC to be a replacement. Nor does it have the enthusiast crowd following (yet).
"The PC has improved the world in just about every area you can think of," Gates said. "Amazing developments in communications, collaboration and efficiencies. New kinds of entertainment and social media. Access to information and the ability to give a voice people who would never have been heard. All of these have their roots in what the PC made possible, amplified and extended by other devices.
"But we’re still falling short in some areas," Gates added. "Education is one example, where the impact of technology lags behind almost every other part of society. There’s so much more that can be done to utilize technology in engage students, help teachers, and customize learning for each child."
Happy Birthday to the old IBM PC. I remember using a couple of these in the mid/late 80’s when others were using 286’s. Yea, I was jealous! I moved on, though, and went to a 386 then 486, then went the AMD route and a short stint with a Cyrix “Pentium Killer”, then back to an Intel/AMD cycle. The IBM PC brings back some great memories. I wouldn’t mind having another one of those things as part of my collection. 
