Windows 8 NEWS Part 5/5

Windows 8 security, networking and performance

Hands on: Windows 8 review

In Depth: Up close with the developer preview of Microsoft's new OS

Windows 8 security

When you first turn on a Windows 8 PC it asks if you want to use a Windows Live account with it. Say yes and that becomes your Windows account, with the same username and password.

If you don't want to type that in on a touch screen every time you unlock your PC, you can use a PIN or set a picture password. Choose a picture and draw three gestures on it - it could be a smiley face on a photograph or three squiggly waves on a picture of the ocean, or whatever you'll remember to draw every time you see the photo.

That's a nice combination of easy to remember and easy to do, and it's also secure enough to protect you. With the number of fingerprints we put on the screen in just a couple of hours, your password gesture won't stand out the way some unlock gestures do on smartphones.

Windows 8 repair

Hardware fails and PCs crash. And sometimes Windows gets in so much of a mess that it's easier to start from scratch. That's all easier to deal with in Windows 8, with yet another Metro-style interface.

This enables you to choose between a full reset and a refresh. A full reset requires an admin account, because it formats the drive and deletes all your data. A refresh installs a clean copy of the Windows 8 operating system but keeps your files, favourites, pinned tiles and applications.

Windows 8 networking

The new Metro Settings charm and control panel make it very easy to connect to Wi-Fi or mobile broadband, with built-in drivers for 3G dongles as well as built-in radios.

Windows 8 will automatically use the fastest connection, and it knows that you have to pay for mobile broadband and keeps track of what you're spending.

It won't download Windows Updates on your 3G connection and it can automatically use less bandwidth - for example telling photo apps to send low resolution thumbnails rather than full images.

Windows 8 performance

It's hard to judge the performance of code that's this early in development, but running Windows 8 on a recent notebook gave the same excellent performance as Windows 7, at least for desktop apps.

Cold boot and full shutdown are both impressively fast, even on hard drive systems (not just with an SSD).

If anything, the system requirements for Windows 8 are less demanding than Windows 7, thanks to the need to write code that can run on an ARM tablet. Microsoft tells us to expect slightly improved battery life on x86 laptops compared to Windows 7, too.

The minimum spec is a 1GHz processor, 1GB of RAM (2GB for 64-bit PCs), 16GB of disk space (32GB for 64-bit) and DirectX 9 graphics with WDDM 1.0.

The system tries to save on memory by sharing it between applications rather differently. Because a lot of apps use the same libraries and runtimes, they can have a lot of the same code in memory. So whenever Windows 8 finds that one of the 4K pages of memory one app is using is the same as the one another app is using, it only keeps one of them and shares it between them.

Initially, Windows 8 seems to be using less memory than Windows 7 on similar hardware, but we need to test this in more depth to see how it affects performance.

If you're going for something more modern, Windows 8 supports the new sector sizes on larger hard drives. It also supports a range of interesting sensors - temperature, pressure and current as well as the usual light, motion and location. It even supports specialised sensors such as blood pressure, for building health-tracking tools.

With the developer preview of Windows 8, you have to do a clean installation on your PC, and that's going to be true of the beta and any release candidate version too.

The release version of Windows 8 will be able to upgrade Windows 7 PCs. The problem for pre-release versions is that there's no way of undoing the installation, so you can't go back if anything goes wrong. It's also likely that you will have to do a clean install of each new test version of Windows 8 as they come along.

From the testing we've done so far, the developer preview of Windows 8 itself is pretty reliable, but the same isn't true of some of the Metro apps.

Initially some of these froze or showed only a blank screen. And because Metro apps get suspended automatically if you're not using them, there isn't an easy way to close an app except through Task Manager. This is finger-friendly enough, but isn't as easy as dragging the app off the top of the screen the way you can on the HP TouchPad, say.

We don't expect to see reliability problems in the long term, and Microsoft is very clear that this is a pre-beta preview version of code. We've already seen a newer build with more interface features running, so issues at this stage don't necessarily mean a black mark for the release version of Windows 8.

Our early Windows 8 verdict

Although it has previously hinted at a Windows 8 release date Microsoft isn't officially talking about a release date for x86 PCs or for new ARM devices.

We don't know anything about price, or about which different versions of Windows will be on sale.

This is a developer preview to encourage developers to start writing Metro applications, and to remind users that an iPad or Android tablet isn't the only option.

We'd say it succeeds in that. Windows 8 is on target to give you a tablet experience that's very like Windows Phone on a bigger screen, with the same fluid and responsive and very personal experience, plus the same sort of smart integration between different applications.

But you also get the desktop that's almost what you're used to, with all the applications people are still buying PCs for - at least on x86 PCs.

The Start screen is a very different way of working from the Start menu, and we're not convinced everyone will take to it. However, upcoming features such as semantic zoom may make a difference there.

The transition between the Start menu and the desktop is also a little jarring, even though switching from Metro to desktop apps works well.

It may be that Microsoft will refine the experience, or it may be that people will get used to it. At this stage there are certainly rough edges, but the Windows 8 experience is also extremely compelling and genuinely innovative.