The new interface has now been revealed to all, but what is under the hood? A comparison with the current version gives us surprising results.
The next version of Windows promises a lightning-fast boot in just 8 seconds, fast data transfers thanks to USB 3.0, new immersive webbased applications, and smooth game graphics. How many of these claims Microsoft manages to deliver on will only be known in the long term. No doubt, it will be many months before the final Windows 8 release, and performance will continue to improve while development is in progress. What we have now is the first Developer Preview release, which is by no means indicative of the final product. We are testing it against an everyday PC running Windows 7 with Service Pack 1. This will show how much Microsoft has developed the core of its operating system in comparison to its predecessor. We will disregard the other milestone builds that are circulating on the Web, as they were never officially released or intended for testing.
Installation and boot up
The Developer Preview acts a little difficult during installation, but the irritation is offset by a simple new boot manager which you can control with the mouse. It’s worth noting that if you try to install while running Windows 7, the setup wizard is very different from that of Windows 7. It can check whether any installed applications will not run properly on the new operating system. However if you decide to boot your computer directly from an installation DVD, the process you follow will be largely similar to that of the older version—and it will take 8 minutes longer. While booting the installed system, a loading screen appears and later you will see a brand new graphical boot manager in which you can select the operating system with the mouse. We noted that an available XP partition was missing in the list. The boot manager only recognizes operating systems from Vista onward, because the new boot manager is designed to take advantage of new capabilities of UEFI-enabled computers, which replace the BIOS currently found in most PCs. This behaves strangely on older PCs: in some cases selecting a different operating system, even Vista, causes the computer to restart itself before loading the different selection. The developers are working on a better compromise for systems with BIOS chip, but Microsoft definitely needs to pay attention to the XP problem, as many users still find it useful. Apart from that, the boot manager lets you change a number of settings through the graphical interface, including shortening the amount of time it is displayed for. However, boot time of Windows 8 is quite good: it loads twice as fast as its predecessor. The reason is a drastic change in the list of running programs. Microsoft has finally heard our prayers! Windows 8 does not automatically activate all the available services with each boot like earlier versions do. Shadow copies, Family Filter in Internet Explorer and many other applications that are not used by everyone are switched off and must be activated explicitly with a right click. If you choose to run all these services, you will see boot just like with Windows 7.
Quick start for applications
Windows has also changed the way large applications are loaded, to a great extent. The starting of programs like Adobe Photoshop feels as smooth as the starting of an app on tablets and smartphones. Moreover, the new Metro interface programs essentially do run the way mobile apps do. If you have a touchscreen, just tap once on a tile. Alternatively, you can also click once on it with the mouse as people without touchscreens will do. Almost all programs that run in Windows 7 can be installed in the Windows 8 Developer Preview. You can do that fastest by clicking on the ‘Windows Explorer’ icon and double-click the setup file as you have always done. Once the installation is done, however, Windows 8 creates a new tile through which you can later run the program. This replaces the previous Start menu. In order to see this icon, scroll to the extreme right side of the screen—Windows 8 basically puts new icons at the end. If you do not like this position, just drag the icon to the front. Starting standard Windows programs like Notepad and MS Paint is a bit unusual. You can tap the ‘Desktop’ tile to change to an interface which strongly reminds you of Windows 7. Click on the Start button there; you will not see the usual menu with the search bar, but again the icons. Move the mouse cursor over the Start button: a menu opens, in which you have to select ‘Search’. Now click on ‘Apps’ on the right edge of the screen and enter the name of the program you are looking for. A click on the search result starts the program of your choice—visibly faster than seen in Windows 7, apart from the long drawnout process of getting to it in the first place. Many Windows programs are equipped with the ribbon-style interface that was first seen in MS Office. Once you get used to it, you will be using the programs faster and in a more efficient manner. Just like the change from icons to tiles, the ribbon also demands openness for new control concepts.
How much power is in there?
With a new and clearly improved task manager, you get a look into the inner workings of Windows 8. The keyboard combination [Ctrl]+[Alt]+[Del] brings up a menu for selecting the task manager as always. Immediately after a bootup, the tool shows all running processes in a newly optimized view. In the columns you can see the how much a certain process is demanding of the CPU, RAM, network, and hard disk. You can get a more comprehensive view of the system’s current load by clicking on ‘Performance’. You can see more details in the tab ‘Details’. In an especially welcome touch, the new sections ‘Startup’ and ‘Services’ display the programs that run automatically at bootup time, and allow you to turn off services. We did not find a Windows Experience Index rating in the Developer Preview, so only specialized benchmark tools such as PCMark 7 could be used in the test. They revealed visibly higher performance, but failed for applications with high graphics requirements. In daily tasks like compressing files into a ZIP archive, we did not see any noteworthy improvements in comparison to Windows 7. Browsing the Web with the new Internet Explorer is a bit faster according to the measured results, but this is not obvious to the user. Rendering an image using a ray-tracing utility takes just as long as in Windows 7. It’s possible that this will change as soon as graphics cards that support DirectX 11.1 are available.
Lightening fast shutdown
Microsoft has not only clearly hastened the startup of Windows 8, but also its shutdown. The only problem is that the ‘Shut down’ button is well hidden—you have to find it before you can use it. Hover the mouse cursor over the Start button and select ‘Settings’ in the menu. Click on the right margin on ‘Power’ and select ‘Shut down’. Windows 8 shuts down quickly: according to the event log, it needed only seven seconds. Its predecessor required twice as long for the same action. The hesitation in Windows7 was caused by the numerous processes and services running in the background that need to be ended in the correct order. Since many of these services are deactivated in the Windows 8 Developer Preview (and a lot of processes have also been cleared out), this problem does not arise. Hopefully these improvements will remain in the final version. Task Win 7 Home Premium SP1 Win 8 Preview
Installation (stopwatch) 21 minutes 30 minutes
Boot time according to event log 87.501 ms 45.577 ms
Total performance (measured with PCMark 7 Basic Edition) 1,502 PCMarks 1,579 PCMarks
Graphics performance (measured with 3DMark 06) 1,844 3DMarks 904 3DMarks
Loading a large application (Photoshop CS5.5) 10 seconds 4 seconds
Compressing a 317 MB file with 7-Zip 114 seconds 113 seconds
Decompressing a 98 MB ZIP file (7-Zip) 27 seconds 28 seconds
Playing videos (PCMark) 19.23 fps 17.99 fps
Converting videos (PCMark) 1,226.65 KB/s 1,940.09 KB/s
Surfing the Web (PCMark) 7.48 pages/sec 7.72 pages/sec
CPU performance for rendering (measured with CineBench 11.5) 1.34 points 1.33 points
Shutting down according to event log 12.250 ms 6.970 ms 