Heard of Windows 8? Learn all about Windows 8 and what Microsoft's plans are for the next version of Windows due in 2012. Click the Windows 8 orb above!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
(View Legal Code)
Hey, IT Crowd: Are You Looking Forward to Windows 8?
With all of the details that leaked a few months ago about Windows 8 — as well as Steve Ballmer’s recent comments about Windows 8 being Microsoft’s riskiest product currently in development — I wanted to take a moment to address the IT crowd and see what you folks have had to deal with where Windows 7 is concerned and to find out if you’re looking forward to Windows 8 at all. For those of you who have worked with Windows 7 machines, do they seem much more “healthy” than the other machines you deal with? Are there features you already know you would like to see present in Windows 8?
Where my personal experience is concerned, I only deal with XP and Windows 7 machines. Although there are a number of features I would like to see happen in Windows 8, Windows 7 definitely seems to have made an impact on the improvement of IT-related problems people still experience with Windows XP today. I am forever pushing for the company I work for to consider upgrading from XP to Windows 7 even if only for the resolution of certain issues that continue to plague them today (which equates to a LOT of money being spent on the proper individuals who maintain system health).
So, thanks to all the enterprises who *still* adopt XP (and Windows 2000, amazingly), there are plenty of individuals and companies providing IT services that won’t be going out of business any time soon! What about you, though? Are you an individual or a company who gets to be hands-on with current and past iterations of Windows? If so, what’s your opinion of Windows 7 and what are some of the features you would like to see built in Windows 8 that you think could help make your job easier? Please weigh in your opinions below as I really would like to read what those of you in the field think!
-Stephen Chapman
http://msftkitchen.com
I like Windows 7 more than any previous version, so I hope Windows 8 doesn’t take any steps backwards obviously. But given that I work in a large municipal IT environment, I’d like to see some features improved and others simplified. The image deployment process is becoming a confusing mess with too many tools and moving parts. We deploy using MDT and SCCM task sequences and it could be simplified quite a bit. I also work with software re-packaging and deployment, and would therefore love to see App-V features built into the core OS to help customers move away from legacy “setup” pains, component and version conflicts, upgrade deployments, and process isolation. Other than that, the rest of Windows 7 works fine for us.
Stephen – super pumped for Windows 8. Now that I have seen the leaked info about it, I think there is a lot to look forward to.
Virtualising the shell is a brilliant idea – it makes sense to be able to dump the shell and reinstall it without losing data, this would be helpful to dummies and IT pro’s alike, especially since the registry gets too clogged up far too often.
I always thought that Windows XP mode in WIndows 7 was a bit counter-intuative, to be running a 2nd windows shell inside of the first one. To run them side by side as virtualised shells would be far more CPU and RAM efficient using the baked in Hyper-V tech.
Looking forward to MinWin finally being seperated from the shell entirely – I think that Microsoft could actually embed MinWin on SoC’s which would be screaming fast in laptops and tablets – I wrote an article about this actually that you might be interested in – http://j.mp/bsQ2y9 – and being able to update Windows and Apps whilst in suspend mode would be really handy.
Also, I can imagine how they would eliminate boot up times – if the shell is virtualised, you never actually boot it up or shut it down except for after the first time you start Windows. After that, you simply power cycle the device and the Windows image is reinstated as is by Hyper-V with stuff in memory in tact – this is wicked. I think Windows 8 tablets would be really exciting.
I think the Windows Marketplace concept is underrated too – the biggest problem in Windows security is that people don’t keep their software up to date – if Microsoft opened up Windows Update to allow 3rd party developers to also distribute driver and software updates to keep computers completely up to date then we’ll all be getting along with our PC’s a lot better.
Keep up the good work with your articles, really enjoy it.
It does sound like Windows 8 could be a big step change from what we have seen in the past. If Steve is calling it one of the riskiest products yet, it must depart quite some way from a Windows 7 mark II build.
Windows 8 needs to lower IT support costs for businesses. its amazing how effort is still required to maintain and protect Windows workstations