Windows 8
Microsoft Windows 8 board.
4786 topics in this forum
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Collaborating to deliver Windows RT PCs
by Guest Steven Sinofsky- 0 replies
- 318 views
Since RTM on August 1, PC manufacturers have been using the released software to ready new PCs designed for Windows 8. Collectively, we are all very excited by the innovation and creativity that will arrive in market this October. Our engineering collaboration has been better than ever as we work to bring better performance, reliability, and battery life to new PCs designed for Windows 8. We also know many are interested in how we extended this process to a new generation of PCs built on the ARM platform. This post details how we have collaborated on the development of Windows RT and new PCs designed for the operating system. Mike Angiulo, the vice president of our Ecosys…
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Releasing Windows 8 - August 1, 2012
by Guest Steven Sinofsky- 0 replies
- 214 views
Today marks an important milestone in the Windows 8 project. The Windows 8 team is proud to share with you that a short while ago we started releasing Windows 8 to PC OEM and manufacturing partners. This means our next milestone will be the availability of exciting new models of PCs loaded with Windows 8 and online availability of Windows 8 on October 26, 2012. Back when we first demonstrated Windows 8 in May 2011, we described it as “reimagining Windows, from the chipset to the experience,” and that is what Windows 8 (and Windows RT) represents for both Microsoft and partners. The collective work: from the silicon, to the user experience, to new apps, has been an incr…
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Simplifying printing in Windows 8
by Guest Steven Sinofsky- 0 replies
- 409 views
Printing is one of the most common things we do with our PCs even as we read and work with more online resources. We set out to simplify and improve this common operation--working with partners across the ecosystem to deliver these improvements in Windows 8. This blog post was authored by Adrian Lannin, a lead program manager on the Printing team. --Steven Of all the peripheral devices that you can connect to your Windows PC, printers are one of the most popular, and have been supported for the longest time. In fact, Windows 1.0 (shipped in 1985) supported “a number of printers and plotters” and included a “Print Spooler [which] allows the user to work on one f…
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Hardware accelerating everything: Windows 8 graphics
by Guest Steven Sinofsky- 0 replies
- 353 views
With Windows 8 we set out to enable all applications to have the beautiful and high-performance graphics enabled by modern graphics hardware. This work builds on the well-established foundations of DirectX graphics, which have been providing an increasing breadth of APIs and capabilities. In Windows 7, we expanded the capabilities of DirectX to provide a common hardware-accelerated graphics platform for a broader range of applications. Whereas previously, DirectX mainly provided 3-D graphics, we added functionality for what we call “mainstream” graphics. Mainstream uses center on the typical desktop applications most people find themselves using every day, including web …
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Using your feedback to make Narrator work better with touch
by Guest Steven Sinofsky- 0 replies
- 316 views
Shortly before we released the Windows 8 Consumer Preview in February, we blogged about our work to make Windows 8 more accessible to people with disabilities. This included our work on Narrator to enable customers who are blind to use Windows 8 on touch screens. This work has continued to evolve in the Release Preview, and will also improve as we move toward the final release of Windows 8. This post details some of the work we have done to improve Narrator when using a touch-enabled PC. This post was authored by Doug Kirschner on our Accessibility team. –Steven First off, we would like to thank all the people who have given us feedback; there has been a lot of pos…
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Designing the Windows 8 touch keyboard
by Guest Steven Sinofsky- 0 replies
- 391 views
Starting with the earliest TabletPC enhancements to Windows, we have been working on “on-screen keyboards.” With Windows 8, we started fresh and took a "first principles" approach to developing the touch keyboard. Given the amount of experience many of us have with touch keyboards for phones, and the myriad of touch devices we interact with these days, we set a very high bar for the quality of the experience and effectiveness of input with the new Windows 8 touch keyboard. In this post, Kip Knox, a member of the Windows User Experience program management team, details this work. --Steven When we began planning how touch and new types of PCs might work on Windows 8, …
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Protecting user files with File History
by Guest Steven Sinofsky- 0 replies
- 382 views
Backing up your critical files is something we all know we should do. Even with everything in SkyDrive, it is still something we need to do. With Windows 8, we took a new look at the way backup can work and set out to solve the perennial problem of not just restoring all your files but restoring a previous version of a critical file you have been editing through the course of a day. To achieve this, we're introducing a new feature in Windows 8, File History. Bohdan Raciborski, a program manager on the Storage team authored this post. --Steven Note: Comments have been off topic. Please maintain community standards and focus on the topic at hand. What is File History…
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Readying Metro style apps for launch
by Guest Steven Sinofsky- 0 replies
- 263 views
We know many folks are looking forward to RTM. Developers currently working on apps in the Store are especially excited. We have hundreds of apps in the Windows Store now and many more on the way. There’s a broad set of developers around the world that we have been working closely with since the first Developer Preview. The WinRT platform is evolving rapidly during development based on feedback, and we have the dual task of keeping the Store up and running so we can supply apps to the millions of Preview users, while also getting ready for the next build. It means that if we change or add APIs or improve the tools, the apps will change and require an updated OS to test an…
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Introducing the Photos app for Windows 8
by Guest Steven Sinofsky- 0 replies
- 309 views
Wrapping up our series of posts on some of the new apps in Windows 8, we take a look at the new Photos app. With this app, along with Metro style design principles, we set out to design an app that allows you to bring together photos from many different sources and to then view and share them. Brad Weed, a group program manager in the Windows Live team authored this post. --Steven We take a lot of photos that end up in a lot of different places. Some are on our PCs, others end up on a photo sharing service like Flickr or Facebook, and even more are on our phones—sometimes indefinitely. How and where we store and share photos has changed and will continue to change a…
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Designing the Windows 8 Calendar app
by Guest Steven Sinofsky- 0 replies
- 319 views
This post builds on the Mail app and People app posts, and details the Calendar app. We’ve worked hard to integrate these apps together into a seamless communication suite that connects to the cloud services most important to you. This post details the integration with Windows 8, some of the features in the current preview, and features on the way. We also look at a little bit of the design history and iteration as some background. Colin Anthony, a lead program manager on the Windows Live team, authored this post. --Steven When we set out to design the Calendar app for Windows 8, there was no shortage of directional possibilities. Given the long history of calendars in…
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Building the Mail app
by Guest Steven Sinofsky- 0 replies
- 428 views
Hundreds of thousands of folks have been using the “App Preview” of Mail on a daily basis since the Windows 8 Release Preview. We’ve also been updating it along the way through the new Windows Store with more updates planned. In this post we go into the background of the Mail app and talk about the design and features, especially relative to Metro style design principles. This isn’t an exhaustive list of Mail features or features yet to be added and primarily focuses on the design and integration with Windows 8. This post was written by Jeremy Epling, a lead program manager on the Windows Live team. This is the second in a series of posts on the new apps. --Steven W…
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The People app: the complete, cloud-powered address book for Windows 8
by Guest Steven Sinofsky- 0 replies
- 371 views
Managing "contacts" has been a bit of a challenge for many, especially as the number of places that contacts can be stored and the number of PCs and devices we use to access those contacts has increased. Storing contacts in the cloud for easy roaming and connectivity is a part of the solution. With Windows 8 and the new People app, we are taking cloud storage a step further by optionally connecting it to other services you already use. This brings together email contacts and contacts from your service / social accounts in one easy to access and use place that roams across your Windows 8 PCs and phone. In this post, Jeff Kunins, a group program manager on the Window…
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Activating Windows 8 contracts in your app
by Guest Steven Sinofsky- 0 replies
- 374 views
One topic that we’ve demonstrated quite a bit is how apps on a Windows 8 PC can communicate with other apps and web services. At the start of Windows 8 we chose an approach where apps can be the source or destination for data you want to share—sort of like a clipboard, but with a richer interaction model and clearer semantics. When an app implements a contract, Windows 8 can provide glue between that app and any other apps on the system, and the system itself. You can see this in action when you do something simple like use the Share charm from a web page in the Metro style Internet Explorer—you can share the link via the Mail app, with someone whose contact info you've …
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Building a rich and extensible media platform
by Guest Steven Sinofsky- 0 replies
- 658 views
Windows provides a broad set of technologies for consumers to experience video and audio and for developers to tap into these technologies through rich APIs. This post goes into depth on both of these aspects of the Windows media platform, which has been substantially improved for both desktop and Metro style apps. The landscape for media playback has changed significantly since Windows 7 was released, with an increased focus on streaming, and the desire for content owners to offer playback of their content on a broader array of devices, all while significantly reducing the battery power required for playback. With these new capabilities, which are part of both Windows 8 …
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Connecting with IPv6 in Windows 8
by Guest Steven Sinofsky- 0 replies
- 421 views
With World IPv6 Launch upon us, we thought it would be good to provide a look at the work in the Windows 8 Release Preview supporting IPv6. Christopher Palmer on the core networking program management team authored this post. --Steven IPv4 is the Internet Protocol that has been used for Internet connectivity for decades. However, IPv4 was never designed for such load and scale, and it is beginning to show signs of strain as the Internet grows—even though the incredible foresight of the original designers continues to power the Internet at a massive scale. Internet service providers are finding IPv4 increasingly costly to maintain; it will require an overhaul to…
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Web browsing in Windows 8 Release Preview with IE10
by Guest Steven Sinofsky- 0 replies
- 531 views
In the Windows 8 Release Preview, we continue to deliver the re-imagined experience of the web browser, incorporating your feedback to provide the best browsing across all Windows 8 devices, including more of the web you browse every day. Rob Mauceri, the group program manager for Internet Explorer, authored this post. --Steven We built a new browsing experience in lockstep with Windows 8 to give you all the advantages that Metro style apps offer. We built that experience by extending IE’s underlying architecture to provide a fast, fully hardware-accelerated browsing engine with strong security and support for HTML5 and other web standards. Internet Explorer …
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Delivering the Windows 8 Release Preview
by Guest Steven Sinofsky- 0 replies
- 315 views
Today, Windows 8 Release Preview is available for download in 14 languages. This is our final pre-release, and includes Windows 8, Internet Explorer 10, new Windows 8 apps for connecting to Hotmail, SkyDrive, and Messenger (and many more), and hundreds of new and updated apps in the Windows Store. Since our first preview release last September, millions of people now use the pre-release product on a daily basis and millions more have been taking it through its paces, totaling hundreds of millions of hours of testing. We genuinely appreciate the effort that so many have put into pre-release testing, and of course, we appreciate the feedback too. Direct feedback and feedbac…
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Designing for PCs that boot faster than ever before
by Guest Steven Sinofsky- 0 replies
- 484 views
While we're hard at work making sure you never have to turn off your PC and can run in a connected standby state, we know that there will still be reboots for updating key system components. We've previously talked about reengineering the Windows boot experience and how we modernized and touch-enabled the core boot loader and choices. We've also made boot go by very fast. In fact, it is now so fast that we had to look at the design to enable the kinds of diagnostic boots required by those who do want to dig into their BIOS or load in alternative ways. In this post, Chris Clark, a program manager on our User Experience team, talks about the design of an incredibly fast…
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Enhancing Windows 8 for multiple monitors
by Guest Steven Sinofsky- 0 replies
- 399 views
This post goes into the details around the multi-monitor experience for Windows 8. From the very first public release and demonstrations of Windows 8 we have shown improvements over Windows 7 for multi-monitor scenarios and have shown how we support new Metro style apps within a multi-monitor environment. We have continued to develop and refine features for multiple monitors and have significantly enhanced the experience as we move to our next milestone, the Release Preview. This post provides a bit of a preview of work that was not yet complete at the Consumer Preview, and serves as a reminder that the Developer Preview and Consumer Preview were works in progress. Mark Y…
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Creating the Windows 8 user experience
by Guest Steven Sinofsky- 0 replies
- 650 views
This blog often focuses on the bits and features and less on the “philosophy” or “context” of the product. Given the level of brand new innovations in Windows 8, however, we think it is worth putting Windows 8 in the context in which we approached the design. As with any significant change to a broadly used product, Windows 8 has generated quite a bit of discussion. With millions of people using the Consumer Preview for their daily work, we’ve seen just as many points of view expressed. Many people—from David Pogue of the New York Times to Mat Honan from Gizmodo and many more—have been quite positive, and others less so, most notably in the comments on this blog, where we…
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Delivering reliable and trustworthy Metro style apps
by Guest Steven Sinofsky- 0 replies
- 360 views
As we developed the app model for Windows 8 and the new Metro style apps, a key architectural requirement has been to deliver apps to customers that can be used with confidence--confidence that apps will be well-behaved with respect to resources, that apps will not interfere with other apps, that apps use system resources with your permission, that apps can be installed and uninstalled with ease, and so on. These attributes require a robust platform and strong set of tools for developers. This is an effort that requires a fresh start and cannot be retrofitted on an existing system. Windows 8 is a fresh start in this regard. This post details some of the work we have d…
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Keeping your family safer with Windows 8
by Guest Steven Sinofsky- 0 replies
- 291 views
One of the intrinsic capabilities of Windows 8 is the ability to use multiple accounts on any PC. This makes it much easier for parents to use tools that can help protect their children from content on the Internet as they see fit. It is also a great way for each family member to maintain their own unique online identity while still sharing a single PC. Microsoft has been a leader in creating tools to help maintain a safe computing environment for all users as well as for parents in particular. With Windows 8 we have substantially improved the family safety features and services available. Phil Sohn, the senior program manager lead for Family Safety, describes how Family …
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Redesigning chkdsk and the new NTFS health model
by Guest Steven Sinofsky- 0 replies
- 458 views
We’ve written about tons of improvements in the OS kernel, networking, and file system. While for most client PCs, the tried and true chkdsk utility is one we rarely use anymore except in very rare circumstances, we are using Window 8 as an opportunity to improve this utility. We wanted to focus on rethinking how the utility works to increase availability and reduce downtime due to chkdsk operations. In looking at the real world usage of chkdsk, we note that corruptions are exceedingly rare though running chkdsk is not. While we’ve worked hard to reduce the manual invocation of disk tools (like defrag) we know many prefer to run them manually “just in case” and so we …
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- Administrators
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- 281 views
We have a question from a customer who's purchased Windows 8 licenses without SA, and asked for a Media Kit to be sent to them. Windows 8 medias to my understanding are only available as a benefit together with SA, other customers have to download the media from VLSC and burn it themselves. We already do have digital copies of the media kits which come as a SA benefit (e.G. A100.02117.EN). Is this the same media the customer would find in their VLSC? So, if the customer would get this installation disk from us, could he install Windows 8 even though he doesn't have SA? Indu Biswakarma View the full article
Last reply by AWS, -
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- Administrators
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- 247 views
Hi, I have a Server 2012 and Win 8 running in my lab environment. Folder redirection is working well except for the following niggle. Even with Full Control and Owner set to the redirected folders for the logged in user I can not save exe files from IE either to the desktop or any of the redirect folders e.g. My Docs, Downloads, Music etc.... I also get prompted for UAC when deleting files from the desktop. I am certain it is a group policy but I was hoping someone could help narrow down which one! Many thanks, Tony View the full article
Last reply by AWS, -