http://msftkitchen.com/2010/06/windows-8-plans-leaked-numerous-details-revealed.html

Some power saving options, an App store, a "reset" button, and a few other things.

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For their target developer market they are considering "hobbyists" the largest group, at least that they're worried about.

They're offering an option to reinstall windows, while still keeping your information. Which is a pretty neat idea since the average user will eventually mess something up no matter what OS they're on.

And a very large focus on vendors being able to heavily customize windows for any type of device. Which sounds like it will be something messy(Windows+customization), even if you can be reasonably sure they'll pull it off to some extent or another.

I'm waiting for Microsoft to find some way to "make this go away". As it'll be hilarious seeing them go against their "embrace the enthusiast" slide.

They NEED to rework their search functionality paradigm. Screw the rest. Hard drives are getting larger and larger and having flexibility while searching your data isn't strictly a "prouser thing". Things like disabling legacy folder searching and overminimizing the search terms while hiding the little functionality their Search provides is just plain retarded. They did a fantastic job with 7 in general, but unless they go back and revisit some of the core stuff readily available in 95 and 98, I do not see a reason to upgrade to 8.

Edit: on the other hand, after reviewing the slides, I have to say they really are aiming their focus in the right direction in many cases. The Mac-ripoff Win 8 prototype looks just plain funny though.

Quote: Original post by lithos
They're offering an option to reinstall windows, while still keeping your information. Which is a pretty neat idea since the average user will eventually mess something up no matter what OS they're on.

Not entirely true. The biggest reason Windows users need to reinstall so frequently is the registry, which eventually gets choked with rubbish entries that users don't know are there or how to remove, and that the system has to search through to find stuff it actually needs. It would be a massive backwards incompatibility change, but eliminating the registry and moving (back) toward siloed per-application settings information as well as making the bulk of application install/uninstall effectively a copy/delete operation would significantly lessen the need for whole-OS reinstall.

I hate to be "that guy," but this is the case on OS X and it's actually far less common for OS X users to reinstall. In fact, even when upgrading to new versions they typically upgrade in-place. A few things help: the use of application "bundles" which look like single files but are really entire directory structures that contain both the application binary and any support resources it requires (DLLs, images, etc) simplifies deployment for the average user. Just copy the bundle to your Applications folder and you're done (and just delete the bundle to uninstall). The use of individual .prefs (preferences) and .plist (Property List) files, as well as special .prefsPane (preferences panel widgets that plug into the Software Preferences application, the equivalent of Control Panel) mean you can uninstall and reinstall applications without losing your configuration or gunking up a global database.

Of course, eliminating the registry after spending so many years pushing developers away from .ini files would be the kind of move Microsoft never makes, since the entire value proposition of Windows is its legendary backwards compatibility. So this will never happen. Which makes the "reinstall but preserve data" useful, but still a suboptimal hassle since you'll then have to reinstall all your apps.

Quote: Original post by irreversible
They NEED to rework their search functionality paradigm. Screw the rest. Hard drives are getting larger and larger and having flexibility while searching your data isn't strictly a "prouser thing". Things like disabling legacy folder searching and overminimizing the search terms while hiding the little functionality their Search provides is just plain retarded. They did a fantastic job with 7 in general, but unless they go back and revisit some of the core stuff readily available in 95 and 98, I do not see a reason to upgrade to 8.

Edit: on the other hand, after reviewing the slides, I have to say they really are aiming their focus in the right direction in many cases. The Mac-ripoff Win 8 prototype looks just plain funny though.

Yes I think tagging should be a part of the new file system. You can still save to pathnames but every file should be taggable.

I for one can't understand why nuking the registry with selective options (eg prompting the user specify or scanning the hard drive to automatically detect properly installed applications) couldn't be a case. Most applications only add a handful of simple entries to the registry making a reinstall kind of moot. Exceptions are things like MSVC and, most notably, drivers that may not be as transparent. Having the OS track program-specific registry changes could help further eliminate some of the confusion.

I personally like the registry and I think it's a good thing.

Furthermore, the app store could (or rather should) take care of most driver updates automatically. Free of charge, of course, so the solution becomes to simply click on "Update my drivers" and wait 10 minutes, perhaps only going through one or two restarts int the process.

Quote: Original post by irreversible
I for one can't understand why nuking the registry with selective options (eg prompting the user specify or scanning the hard drive to automatically detect properly installed applications) couldn't be a case. Most applications only add a handful of simple entries to the registry making a reinstall kind of moot. Exceptions are things like MSVC and, most notably, drivers that may not be as transparent. Having the OS track program-specific registry changes could help further eliminate some of the confusion.

I personally like the registry and I think it's a good thing.

Furthermore, the app store could (or rather should) take care of most driver updates automatically. Free of charge, of course, so the solution becomes to simply click on "Update my drivers" and wait 10 minutes, perhaps only going through one or two restarts int the process.

I've posted in the past about my experiences having to reinstall every version of Windows I've ever owned due to registry corruption so needless to say the sooner the registry dies the better!
Anyways, I don't see it happening since Microsoft had their biggest chance with Windows 7 to completely dump it. Even before Win7 they were already trying to get developers not to rely on it as much.
A while back even one of the top Windows expert thought it was safe to ignore the registry problems, but even he found out how pervasive it still is:
Registry Junk: A Windows Fact of Life

Quote: Original post by Oluseyi
[...]Not entirely true. The biggest reason Windows users need to reinstall so frequently is the registry, which eventually gets choked with rubbish entries that users don't know are there or how to remove, and that the system has to search through to find stuff it actually needs. It would be a massive backwards incompatibility change, but eliminating the registry and moving (back) toward siloed per-application settings information as well as making the bulk of application install/uninstall effectively a copy/delete operation would significantly lessen the need for whole-OS reinstall.[...]

My experience differs - the problem I see most often is too many "utilities" (most of which the user intentionally installed) running in the system tray which significantly increase time from boot to usable system and consumes significant computer resources thus slowing all other operations. The next most common thing I see is malware of some type similarly consuming excessive computer resources, and third is malware corrupting user settings (on purpose or not) in a way that prevents them from being able to (for ex) run executables.

I personally suffer more from registry problems, but my experience is that only power users keep their computer clean long enough for that type of slowdown to become a significant factor.

I keep all of my files on my desktop and in My Documents so I tend to format frequently by just dragging the files over to my backup drive. Whatever happened to sandboxing applications :P I guess that never took off.

As for adding better search to windows... I don't know, I don't have a problem finding my files. They're all in one place, and they're organized into folders. If I'm looking for a copy of my resume from 3 years ago, it's in "documents/business/2007". In fact, I've turned the disk indexing service off, and have reaped huge performance gains as a result. The rare times I'm searching for files, it's an obscure system file, so it wouldn't be indexed anyway and I'm desperate enough to wait for a disk scan.

At what point could it be possible for Microsoft to scratch everything and start from the ground up with a brand new OS? Are they going to make everything backwards compatible for the next 20 years? I always wonder (not just about Microsoft, about many companies) about when a company would gain more from maintaining and supporting old software and start from new.

I'm not saying they should do this now, but it has just crossed my mind and wondered what the pros thought :)