Windows 8 Over Windows 7 by Mark Fidler

Microsoft‘s new operating system has so much more to offer than its predecessors, both for the home user and business user alike. Microsoft has taken notice of the trend of consumers going down the route of buying a tablet rather than a Desktop PC and Windows 8 is evident of this with its metro home screen. Windows 8 supports arm processors which are quite commonly installed on mobile devices such as a tablet.  A big advantage of installing windows 8 on a tablet with such a processor is the power consumption is much less than a desktop or laptop.

Microsoft Windows 8 comes with its own app store, broadening the choice for end users so they are not limited with Apple or Androids app stores. So you may ask yourself Is Windows 8 right for you? Below is just a few of the improved tweaks over previous Microsoft operating systems.

Windows 8 Touch
 

The first thing you will notice when using Windows 8 is its user interface. Windows 7 supported touch technology, in my opinion, is really not that good. However, in Windows 8 it is vastly improved and the home screen is now composed of tiles instead of the traditional desktop we have all become used to. Windows 8 has ‘built in’ intelligence so it knows what you are trying to do. Some old features carried over from previous OS versions have vastly improved due to the touch screen capability, like the on-screen keyboard or handwriting recognition.

 Windows 8 Cloud Integration

With Windows 8 you now have the potential to sync your data to SkyDrive, Microsoft’s cloud storage, as well as the ability to save data to and from your own cloud storage. It is not only Windows 8 that is starting to use cloud based technology, Microsoft have included this in their new release of Office 2013.

Account Sync

Windows 8 can sync your user account settings across multiple PCs. This in itself is a fantastic feature, saving you time and effort when you use more than one computer.

Improved Multiple monitor Support

The new improved multiple monitor support now allows you to have a taskbar on each screen as well as different wallpapers for each display.

New file copy features

Windows 7 permitted you to copy more than one file at a time but it appeared in separate dialogue boxes and you only had one option for cancelling the copy. In Windows 8, when you begin to copy more than one file, it shows in the same dialogue box and users now have the option of pausing multiple file copies from one dialogue box.

Storage Space

Storage space allows you to manage all of your internal and external storage as if they were one huge drive, called a storage pool. This feature also duplicates your data across multiple drives in the pool to create redundancy in the event of a drive failure.

These are only a handful of the many improvements brought to you in Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating system, which are set to make it yet another excellent product from Microsoft.