Windows 7 has made its own place but soon Windows 8 will taking up that place. This makes it important to know some cool facts about Windows 8 before it finally makes room on your system in the near future.

Network Management:

Creating Wi-Fi network connection has always been super easy on Windows 7 platform, but 3G connection could never be a cake walk. As in the words of Billy Anders, the Wireless & Networking Services Group Program Manager for Windows at Microsoft, “you needed to locate and install third-party device drivers, and in some cases software, before ever getting your first connection. If the drivers for your device and software from your mobile operator were not available locally, you had to find another connection type (perhaps Wi-Fi) to the Internet to search for software on the websites of the PC maker or mobile operator.”

Changing this is what is being aimed at by upcoming Windows 8. This OS will come packed with Mobile Broadband Interface Mobile (MBIM) standard based generalized broadband driver. MBIM is a USB-IF developed standard that supports 3G as well as 4G and also LTE. Windows 8 OS will be offering an expanded support for wireless radio that will include a comprehensive monitor/control screen enabling the users to view their connection related information and turn the radios on and off.

The other interesting networking features offered by the OS are – really short reconnect time, carrier to carrier switching on the fly ability, bandwidth usage monitoring for Wi-Fi as well as 3G. The OS offers the ability of being configured to any type of available connection you prefer to stay away from overage charges and know when the preset limit is approaching.

ReFS Storage System:

Windows 8 is offering a new storage system called ReFS or Resilient File System. This new and unique storage system is so designed to provide you with several data integrity guaranteeing features that even brought about apparent changes in the way your system storage is organized.

Data reliability is well maintained by ReFS with the usage of checksums which are then independently maintained from the data to which they are attached. This helps the OS to keep a check on all kinds of data corruption. This is possible because the file metadata updating strategy used by ReFS is the latest one – allocate-on-write strategy instead of direct writing; this simply doesn’t let any chances of power loss leading to incorrigible file corruption.

Major of the storage system related changes made in Windows 8 OS is its concept of Storage Spaces. Years back, Windows Home Server OS from Microsoft offered a feature called Driver Extender that made it possible for the users to make expansion in the total storage that the OS provided by simply plugging in additional drives which didn’t require any kind of formatting or letter assignments. This very concept is being used by Storage Spaces of Windows 8 but in its extended and significantly amplified version.

It will be possible to create storage space with the usage of any storage configuration starting from USB sticks to as old as IDE hard drives. Once you have created space, data stored in it can then be protected RAID-style by mirroring, parity+mirroring, or using both, all of them find presence in the same contiguous block of hard drives. There is again a special provision offered by the OS which lets you larger the amount of total space used by a particular project compared to the total storage space available at a particular time.

However, there is one slight drawback also, i.e. drives/devices which are added to the pool can not be booted. Nevertheless, MS claims to be fixing it up.

Data Restoration:

You must be curious about the data backup or restoration feature offered by this new OS, right?  Well, since the time of Windows 98, Microsoft has been providing a restoration concept called “overtop” also known as repair installation. Sadly, it never proved a totally fool-proof method of solving the problem. To overcome the drawbacks that this concept had, Microsoft then came up with a fresh concept called “Restore Points”, much before but again, this wasn’t totally perfect as it did resolve certain problems but couldn’t prove that well.

Now, in the upcoming OS Windows 8, you’ll find the OS repair system split into two main categories, namely – Reset and Refresh.

Reset is used to restore the OS to defaults offered by the company with all the added personal data or information removed.

Where as Refresh works as described in the following steps:

-          First, the hard drive is scanned for all your data, settings, applications, etc and placed aside by the Windows RE or Recovery Environment.

-          This step takes place on the same drive.

-          After this, a fresh copy of the Windows is installed by Windows RE.

-          Now all your data, settings, applications (that were set aside earlier) are restored into the newly installed copy of Windows by the Windows RE.

-          And finally, your PC restarts with the newly installed copy of Windows.

But again, there still remains a little trouble as Microsoft has yet to decide which settings should exactly be copied as certain issues can take place on using the settings saved by the user.

Internal benchmarks suggest that around 8 minutes, 22 seconds are taken in “Refreshing” a system and just 6 minutes are further needed to have it reset, in case BitLocker is enabled. BitLocker helps the system in wiping the drive through encrypted metadata erasing.

Windows 8: A Final Thought

Windows 8 is Windows fresh and new with lots of changes made however several of them appear faltering. This upcoming OS will be offering support for non-x86 and Metro UI, and interestingly, Metro UI has received a lot of attention and notably, Metro UI (which is indeed a very important offering) is the only unique component that this new OS has in its offerings.

The long-term plans of Microsoft for their desktop users as well as their plans to ship ARM devices along with locked bootloader do catch our concern; however, it is equally clear that the company is looking for lots of core improvements. It appears that Microsoft first studied each and every aspect of their system usage only then came up with the idea of UI overhauling. Media is found to be saying that the Windows 8 is one of the biggest launches from Microsoft and has the before launch magic and splendor as their Windows 5 had.

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Filed under: Tips & Tricks • Windows 8

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