For those who haven't been keeping a close eye on Windows 8's development, here's a rundown of how Microsoft will tweak Windows 8 before launch.
One of the last major vestiges of the unfortunate Windows Vista era is going away. Good!
A long-lost 1990s instruction sheet neatly sums up computing and the Internet in a long-ago era.
Microsoft will let users try a near-final version of Windows 8 starting the first week of June.
There will be four versions of Windows 8, but you’re never going to be faced with the prospect of standing at Best Buy staring at four shrinkwrapped boxes and trying to figure out which one to buy.
Even if you started out assuming that Android tablets would be the iPad’s most serious competition, you might now be ready to contemplate the possibility that they’ll never catch on. Which might leave you wondering about the one obvious iPad rival that isn’t quite here yet: Windows 8.
Here are my first impressions of the Windows 8 Consumer Preview, using it exclusively on a desktop PC with three monitors.
Today, the company is back with a further-along draft of Windows 8 that it’s calling the Consumer Preview–and this time, everybody’s invited. If you’re interested enough in operating systems to install one that’s still a work in progress, you can download this version for free and install it on any computer that’s capable of running Windows 7.
Last month, cloud gaming pioneer OnLive put its sophisticated technology to a new purpose: running Windows 7 on an iPad. It launched OnLive Desktop, a free service that let you use Word, Excel and PowerPoint–the real, full-fledged editions, not stripped-down iPad applets. It also said that it was working on a more powerful Pro edition that would permit you to install apps and customize your environment, for $9.99 a month. OnLive Desktop Pro still isn’t ready. But rather than making everyone wait for it, the company decided to add another edition to the mix, with Word, Excel and PowerPoint, plus Internet Explorer.
It figures. I wrote a post about Windows 8 that included the current Windows logo, a fancy multicolored-waving-window-thingie-hovering-inside-a-glossy-circle. And then, shortly after pressing “Publish,” I read a Microsoft blog post that unveils the new, extremely different Windows 8 logo, seen above.
Over at Cult of Mac, John Brownlee has an in-depth explanation of why it seems unlikely that Apple intends to ditch the Intel chips inside Macs for ARM-based ones akin to the processors it uses in the iPhone and iPad. His reasoning is long and technical–though he does a nice job of explaining it clearly–and [...]
