Now that you have made the choice to upgrade/install windows 8 (good for you!) I won't mention the amount of people that have asked me, due to the negative press, is it really worth upgrading and quite simply put..YES IT IS!
This is a VERY LONG and detailed write up, thanks to Mary Branscombe from TechRadar for the meat and potatoes portions of this, along with my notes and other commentary throughout. You can view her original complete review here.
INSTALLING AND UPGRADING
When you buy Windows 8 online you'll get a step by step download and installation, complete with the Windows 8 Upgrade Assistant to warn you about program and hardware compatibility issues, or you can buy a DVD.
If you're upgrading, how much of a previous Windows system you can keep when you install RTM depends on which version you're upgrading from.
Upgrade from Windows 7 and you can keep programs, Windows settings and files; upgrade from Vista and keep settings and files. Upgrading from Windows XP only gives you your personal files.
Unlike Windows 7, you can't do a full upgrade from any of the preview versions of Windows 8; you'll need to either restore your previous version of Windows from a backup, do an upgrade that only keeps your files or do a clean installation.
This option only appears with Windows 8 and Windows 8 Pro; if you have the Enterprise version, you have to upgrade from another Enterprise edition of Windows, and the previews of Windows 8 were all Windows 8 Pro, so the only option is a clean install.
A button asking if you want to upgrade and keep apps, settings and files does show up when you run the installer from Release Preview, with the warning that this only works on 'supported versions of Windows' but the installer then told us that indeed, it couldn't upgrade this version of Windows and we had to close it and start over.
If you're installing Windows 8 Enterprise, you activate it once it's installed (the system for that was still being set up when we started testing, so it wasn't seamless, but this is what you'll see as a normal user).Again, you won't see this if you buy Windows 8 normally, only if you're looking at the evaluation or MSDN version now.
With Windows 8 Pro the installation is the same experience as you'll get if you buy a Windows 8 upgrade - it checks your system, tells you what you can keep and which programs won't be compatible (and helpfully removes them and then restarts the installation) and asks you to enter your product key as a normal part of the installation.
Scanning a fully loaded Windows 7 system with a lot of apps installed and many gigabytes of files takes around 10 minutes, then another hour (or on a really loaded system, two) to set up Windows 8 with all your compatible programs intact.
If you're doing a clean installation without keeping any applications, or an upgrade where you just keep files and settings, it's far faster.
On a variety of PCs it took 10-15 minutes from starting the installation and entering the licence key to get to picking the colour scheme and choosing whether to accept Express Settings or customise the setup.
One of the items under Express Settings is the controversial default of turning on the Do Not Track setting in Internet Explorer 10. Choose Customize and you can change that, but there's an ongoing argument about what Do Not Track means and how websites will treat the IE10 setting, because it is the default.
It's clearly marked and you can easily change it, but advertisers and some ad-funded organisations remain unhappy.
After this you can set up a local account or log in with a Microsoft account such as a Hotmail address, which synchronises settings with any other Windows 8 PCs you use and gives you access to the Windows Store.
While Windows 8 finishes the set up, which takes a couple more minutes, you get a brief on-screen tutorial showing you how to move your mouse into the corners of the screen to open the charm bar.
If you have a touchscreen, it also shows you how to swipe for the charm bar, but only if you have the right screen - so an older tablet PC with only an active digitiser just shows the mouse tutorial.
If you've picked a colour scheme, the tutorial uses that for the image of the screen - a little thing, but it's a subtle way of making it feel more like your PC.
Once the mini tutorial has played a few times, the set up screen starts switching between various different colours - presumably to show you the other colour choices as well as reassuring you that it's still working.
Everyone who has an account gets to see the tutorial when they first log in, making good use of the short time it takes to create the desktop the first time (they don't all get the colour show, though).
If you do an upgrade install starting with Windows running, you'll never see the option to set the language for your keyboard or settings for date and time formats. If you boot from USB to do a clean install, you're asked to choose these settings but that's it, apart from Express Settings.
In neither case do you get to choose the time zone; Windows 8 either keeps the current time zone if you do an upgrade or sets it up automatically based on the language of the installer for a clean installation.
A UK Windows 8 image kept the UK time even on a clean installation; a US image set the timezone to Pacific when we did a clean installation (you can change that quickly enough inside Windows without needing an admin account).
On a Sandy Bridge Core i5 PC with an SSD, 15 minutes after putting in the USB stick, we were running Windows 8 RTM, ready to activate and trust the PC to get settings synced from the Release Preview install setting showing up - such as SkyDrive photos and our Hotmail calendars.
STYLE INTERFACE
Once you activate Windows 8 you can personalise the Start and Lock screens. You can choose from what looks like the same 25 colour schemes as in the Release Preview. Some of these are extremely bright - the vivid pink background is quite the eye-opener - while others have grey or black backgrounds with an accent colour.
If you didn't like any of the six abstract backgrounds for the Start screen in the Windows 8 Release Preview, there's a much wider selection of 20 different designs, ranging from plain to detailed to some quite strange and quirky images with floating mountains and swimming birds.
Pick an animal, mechanical or musical theme or choose from the more abstract designs. Some of the designs have a mix of related shades, while others have a range of colours that change to match and contrast with the colour scheme you pick.
Some of the combinations of these are gorgeous artworks that wouldn't be out of place on clothes or furniture, and we're hoping to see tablet sleeves, notebook cases or Artist Edition mice to match. Spend a little time here and you get something far more stylish than the original primary school feel of the preview releases.
A nice touch is that as you scroll the Start screen, and the design you choose scrolls along - especially on a touchscreen tablet, we reckon you'd probably get a bit of motion sickness if it didn't.
The designs are so carefully put together that they scale smoothly to the size of the screen, and you never see an ugly join where it wraps. That's another reason you can't use one of your photos for the Start screen; it's unlikely it would scale, stretch, scroll and wrap around these screen anything like as neatly.
There are plenty of other places you can use your own images, such as the Lock screen, the picture password and the desktop.
There are six new images to choose from for the Lock screen, including a stylised Seattle skyline that blends photographic mountains with painted and sketched hills and clouds in what could easily be an attempt to say that familiar desktop apps and the flatWindows 8-style interface can look just fine next to each other.
The whole point of Windows 8's Modern UI interface is to make the most of the Metro design language Microsoft came up with for Windows Phoneand is rolling out across all the Microsoft interfaces, from Xbox to Office. It's the WinRT apps that use the new Windows Runtime, run in a sandbox for safety.
And if you don't like the piano, train, honeycomb, nautilus shell or abstract art, you can pick any of your own pictures instead.
Navigating the Windows 8-style interface is no more puzzling than any other new interface (and has no substantial changes from the preview releases, so if you didn't like the interface then, RTM may not change your mind).
Swipe up from the Lock screen, press the right arrow or right-click to get started. If you've added your Microsoft account or set a password you can type it in, or add a Picture Password so you can tap or swipe rather than typing on a touchscreen.
The Lock screen isn't just a prettier way of getting started; you get the same kind of status information as on a phone - date and time, battery life and connectivity, unread messages plus your next appointment.
You can pick which apps can put notifications here, which becomes much more important when we get PCs with Connected Standby (all Windows RTdevices plus all Windows 8 System on Chip models), since these will be the apps that stay connected when the screen is off.
That's why a Windows 8-style WinRT version of Outlook would be such a big deal (and why it's a disappointment it's not in Office 2013) - the Mail and Calendar apps will stay up to date overnight on a Connected Standby system, but Outlook won't get mail until you turn your PC on.
Start screen
Press the Windows Start key (or turn on your PC) and you get the new-look Start screen instead of a Start menu. It's bigger, brighter, bolder, much more personal and much more controversial, even though you can go for hours or days at a time without seeing it.
This shows tiles for key apps, desktop programs and settings, but not everything that's installed. For that you right-click or swipe up from the bottom of the screen and pick All Apps, or you can just start typing the name of an app or setting to search for it (remember, you have to specifically select Settings to see those results).
As you install new apps and desktop programs, they're added to the Start screen as tiles.
Drag to move tiles around, from group to group or to make a new group. As you drag a tile into the gap between two groups, when you position it between them a vertical grey bar appears to show that you're creating a new group to put it in.
Working with tiles is a little faster and more responsive, but otherwise much the same. The Semantic zoom enables you to pinch to shrink the tiles on the Start screen to tiny thumbnails so you can see everything at once or move an entire group. Select a group and drag it down to get the option of naming it.
If you drag a tile to the top or bottom of the screen, Semantic Zoom turns on automatically to make it easier to move an item a long way across the screen without disturbing the arrangement of all your tiles and groups.
The charm bar
Swipe from the right edge of the screen and you get the charm bar, with Search, Share, Start, Devices and Settings. If you don't want to learn keyboard shortcuts, you can do the same thing by leaving your mouse pointer in the top or bottom-right corner.
First the charms appear as white outlines, then if you don't move your mouse they disappear, because Windows assumes you didn't want to trigger them, since you might be moving the mouse to scroll or close a window at the side of the screen instead. If you are, you don't have to wait for the charms to vanish to do so.
Move the mouse towards the charms and the black bar and charm titles draw in on the screen.
Swipe from the left side of the screen and you switch to the next app in the stack (which might be the desktop); throw your mouse into the top-left corner and you get an icon showing you what app you can click to switch.
Putting your mouse pointer in the bottom-left corner shows an icon to click for the Start screen, which feels more like a rectangular Start button than an unwelcome reminder of the Windows 8-style (unless you're on the Start screen already, when it gets you the icon for the next app on the stack), plus hints for the thumbnails in the switching pane.
Drag the mouse up or down from the top or bottom-left corner and you get the switching pane with a list of apps with labels under each thumbnail that look so much like TechRadar's new caption style that we're flattered.
On a touchscreen you do that by pausing as you drag from the left and then drag back. If you only drag back a little, you snap the next app into a window taking up a third of the screen. If you drag further back, you get the switching pane, where the desktop and any desktop apps show up as a single thumbnail.
If you snap the desktop next to a Windows 8-style app you can have a desktop slightly smaller than full screen, or a thumbnail list of running desktop apps, depending on whether you snap it into the smaller or larger tile.
You can also use the Start button to jump between the Start screen and the app you were just using. Or use Alt+Tab to switch between all running apps, Modern or desktop. If there's a Windows 8-style app pinned at the side of the screen, Alt+Tab respects that and switches the app in the pane you were working in last.
Windows plus the '.' key swaps apps between the different window positions on the screen at top speed, and on a touchscreen you do that by dragging. In fact, there are far more ways of switching between apps than in previous versions of Windows, so you can pick the ones you prefer and ignore the others.
This is all much easier and more natural to use, even with a mouse, than it is to describe. It feels more fluid and responsive than in the Release Preview, and if you've only tried the Developer or Consumer Preview, it's so much smoother that it's a very different experience.
Using the charms
Microsoft has continued tweaking the charms and the controls they bring up, such as the Settings bar. Where the Release Preview always favoured boring and obvious over cute but potentially confusing, RTM nails the interface with controls that are both cute and functional.
For example, the keyboard icon on the Settings bar has gone from an icon to an abbreviation for the keyboard language you're using, to an icon that opens a menu with two options - open the on-screen keyboard so you can type something, or change the keyboard language.
The speaker icon opens a volume slider with a mute button, the screen icon opens a slider for brightness with an icon to manually rotate the screen. Notifications enables you to turn off the sometimes intrusive 'toasts' that pop up for alarms and new messages for a set period.
The network icon shows you the current network connection and opens a pane with available networks and an airplane mode slider to turn off all the radios.
And the power icon produces a pop-up menu with Sleep, Shutdown and Restart (if you want to add Hibernation, that is hidden away in the advanced power options in the desktop control panel, because it will be much less relevant on new machines with Connected Standby).
It's all remarkably clear and simple, once you relearn habits such as pressing Start to shutdown.
Search, Share and Settings are what Microsoft calls contracts; they're something apps can 'sign up' to use. Settings shows you the settings for the current app, but you can always choose Change PC settings at the bottom for a much simpler version of the key options from control panel.
There's one new feature here in RTM; under General you can see how much space all the Windows 8-style apps you have installed use up.
You can uninstall any Windows 8-style app, even one pre-loaded by an OEM, by right-clicking its icon on the Start screen and choosing Uninstall.
Whether you want a file, a program, an email message or a specific photograph, you can search for it wherever you are using the Search charm. The initial results are context-sensitive (unless you use the keyboard combination to start a file search).
If you're at the Start screen you get a list of apps, if you're in IE when you choose it, you get results from Bing first, but you can repeat the search in any app that has signed up to the search contract by clicking its icon in the Search pane.
When you search files, you can hover with the mouse to see more details; right-click (with mouse or finger) and you can open the file location in Explorer.
Similarly, a variety of Windows 8-style apps use the Share charm, and share is about more than sending tweets or emailing links to web pages; you pick Share to send a photo from a viewer to an image editing app or to print it, or to copy a figure from a web page into a calculator. Think of it as the new universal clipboard.
This could be one of the more exciting tools in Windows 8, and we're starting to see apps take advantage of it. In the end, the Windows 8-style interface is only going to be as useful and interesting as the apps that run in it.
DESKTOP INTERFACE
Windows 8 lacks the Windows 7-style Start button or the Start menu on the desktop. Instead, it moves a little further still from the Windows 7 look towards the flatter Modern UI look of the Start screen that started with square corners to windows and square, flat edges to tabs in the ribbon interface of desktop apps rather than curves.
The most obvious difference is that Aero Glass is all but gone - the title bars and borders of windows are no longer translucent, so you don't see a blurred version of the window underneath.
It's an open question as to whether this was ever more of a useful feature than a gimmick - it made it easier to see what window was behind the one you were working in, but it could also be distracting. And it certainly chewed up battery life and graphics power that can be put to better use in hardware accelerating applications.
If you're used to it, the difference can feel just a little jarring at first, but remember that the Office 2013 applications will have solid title bars to make the small icons of the Quick Access Toolbar easier to spot.
The taskbar retains a certain amount of transparency; you can still see hints of the darker elements in your desktop background image under the taskbar, but it picks up a hint of the window colour rather than having the background show through as completely as in Windows 7. The effect is to blend the look of the desktop and Start screen a little more; they remain different experiences, but without glassy edges to windows, the contrast between desktop programs, the Settings bar and the Start screen is much less dramatic.
The default wallpaper is a simple flower photograph (meant to make you think 'fresh as a daisy', perhaps) and there are two new themes - earth and flowers - neither as quirky as the Start screen designs.
Of course you can still choose from a multitude of free themes on the Microsoft site, including the panoramic Nightfall and Starlight theme that stretches across multiple monitors
There's no denying that Windows 8 is a different way of working; press the Start key on your keyboard and yes, you get the Windows 8-style Start screen. But if you roll your mouse into the familiar left-hand corner you get a thumbnail of the Start screen.
It includes Mobility Centre - the handy collection of shortcuts that the Win-X keyboard used to bring up in Windows 7. Frankly, this addresses any complaints we had about losing the old Start menu; there are neat and efficient ways to get to everything you want in the desktop without ever taking your hands off the desktop or having to see the Start screen unless you want to.Right-click there and you get a handy menu of most of the admin tools you need in Windows, from Task Manager to Event Viewer to the Run dialog. You can Search, open Explorer or Control Panel, run tools such as Disk Management, Device Manager or Power Options (it works in the Start screen as well).
On the other hand, you need to get used to the charm bar in the Windows 8 desktop as well as in the Start screen and Windows 8-style apps. Again it ghosts in to view when you put your mouse into the right corners of the screen. Like the app thumbnails in the switching pane, this hints at what you can do without getting in the way of working with windows and controls on the edge of the screen.
The Share charm doesn't work in the desktop, though it appears for consistency. Search takes you to the same full-screen search as it does from the Start screen.
Settings is especially useful on the desktop; you can jump to the control panel, personalisation, PC info and help or get the finger-friendly PC Settings screen.
That's the same whatever programs are running, because desktop programs can't link their options to the Settings bar, so you do have to do things different ways depending on whether you're using a Windows 8-style or desktop application.
But compared to the jumble of ways you could navigate to key tools, control panels and utilities in Windows 7, this is a streamlined and efficient interface - and once you pin your key apps to the taskbar the same way you would in Windows 7, you never leave the desktop unless you want to.
One welcome feature from Windows 7 survives, but it's hidden; although it's no longer marked specifically as a button until you hover your mouse over it, when you press or click on the very end of the taskbar you get the full Aero Peek behaviour of minimising all open programs and showing you the desktop. Click again to get all your windows back.
WINDOWS 8 STYLE/APPS
The whole point of the 'modern' interface isn't just to make the most of the Metro design language Microsoft came up with for Windows Phone and is rolling out across all the Microsoft interfaces, from Xbox to Office. In almost all cases, it's the WinRT apps that use the new Windows Runtime, run in a sandbox for safety
In the past Microsoft referred to these as Metro style apps; that name is out of fashion and they're variously known as Windows 8-style apps, Windows Store apps (even though there are desktop apps in the Windows Store) and (also confusingly) Windows 8 apps, but whatever they end up being called, they're apps written in WinRT that run in the new user interface rather than the desktop and work with contracts like Search and Share. Some are installed automatically, others you download from the Windows Store.
Essentials
Until you have the bundled apps set up, the Start screen can look flat and rather childish. Once you connect it to your online accounts, pin some friends, choose your city for weather and start seeing your photos scroll by, you'll find having your email, photos, appointments and friends pinned to the Start screen livens it up considerably. Live tiles paint in instantly and there is none of the lag or clumsiness we complained of in the preview apps. They've been significantly updated even since Release Preview; they're faster, far more reliable and have more features too. Plus there's a new Bing search app.
The apps you get automatically are in three groups; the ones with content from Bing like Sport, Weather and Finance, Music, Video and games from Xbox and those that come from what used to be the Windows Live team – Mail, Calendar, Photos, Messaging, People and SkyDrive, plus a couple of extra like an excellent PDF Reader app. So that's some essentials, some Microsoft services and some showcases for the features and interfaces 'modern' apps can have, like semantic zoom, photo galleries and the app bar. All of these are being updated regularly, with performance improvements and extra features.
The People hub goes from being a rather pedestrian address book with social network connections for all the services you link Windows to (through your Live account or by adding specific accounts for email and calendar) to a way to stay up to date with your friends.
Read the stream of social updates (it works well snapped to the side of the desktop), see replies all in one place or see all the contact details from friends. (A good address book is useful, after all). Pinch zoom and you go straight from tiles with photos on to an alphabet you can navigate with; you can also just stat typing a name to jump to it.
Compared to the earlier versions, the People app is snappy and responsive and makes much better use of the space to show you lots of updates without looking crowded. The last thing we'd say is missing is the ability to post to more than one social network at once, but the People app turns into a great way to stay in touch.
The Messaging app is still purple and it still makes good use of the screen to show you multiple conversations on Facebook and Windows Live, with details about your contacts so you can see what they're talking about on other services.
Snap it into the smaller window, next to the desktop or another app, and you see your most recent conversation, so you can chat while you work (or play) You can also send group messages, but it's just text chat; no voice or video. The latest update lets you search for contacts; vital when you have lots of people on your list.
Mail still isn't an Outlook replacement; you don't get categories, you can't flag messages for follow up or mark them as spam - but it's fast, simple and easy to navigate and the latest update finally adds threading and conversations.
You see your tree of folders without having to swipe back and forth between panes, you can tap on attachments in a message, download them and tap to open them without delving into the app bar. You can also pin any folder to the Start menu as a secondary tile to see message subjects as they arrive.
And you can now connect to IMAP and POP email accounts as well as Hotmail, Gmail and Exchange (now called Outlook as it includes Outlook.com) accounts, and choose which accounts you see email notifications for.
The Calendar app aggregates calendar feeds from multiple accounts (Hotmail, Exchange/Outlook and Google, all of which use EAS to sync calendar and in some cases to do items). There are nice month, week and day views (actually two days at a time unless you're in portrait on a tablet when you only see one).
You can now turn individual calendars on and off and pick the colours the way you can on Windows Phone. And you get on-screen notifications for meetings and alerts that you've set. It's a shame that you can't pinch to zoom in and out from month to week to day view and you have to get used to the way tapping on a day in week or month view creates a new event rather than zooming in to that day.
The Photos app's tile shuffles through your images from both your PC and cloud services where you store photos, like Flickr, Facebook and SkyDrive, plus other PCs in the same homegroup. These all show as different albums inside the app, along with any PCs you're running the SkyDrive app on. If they're turned on, you can browse photos remotely so it doesn't matters which PC your baby photos are on – you can sit on the sofa and show them to the family on a tablet.
This is a nice app that's ideal for touch; you can swipe through images, zoom out to see thumbnails, play a slide show or pick an image for the Lock screen, simply and elegantly. You can also import images from a USB stick or camera card directly. The backdrop to the app is a lovely professional photograph of a Ferris wheel; or you can choose your own favourite image to see here.
Handy new features in the latest update include being able to crop and rotate pictures from the app bar, so you don't have to flip your screen round or zoom in. This saves a copy in case you don't like the result and is very easy to use on a touch screen.
If you enjoy the random slideshow view of photos that Media Center uses as a screen saver, you'll love the new collage slideshow view in the Photos app. This selects a handful of photos that work well together and arranges them beautifully on screen, switching them in and out of different positions and then gradually switching to a new batch of images.
Every now and then it pops up a label, which might be the folder name or the month the pictures are from (or Shuffle if you're getting a mix of images from different folders and sources). This is an absolutely delightful way to enjoy your photos.
The Metro SkyDrive app still doesn't sync files the way the desktop SkyDrive app does; it's for viewing files when you're online in a clean and simple interface with tiles for folders and thumbnails for images that looks just like the redesigned SkyDrive website, with the same detailed view if you prefer, and tools are similar. Select a file and you can open, download or delete it from the app bar.
It's a great way to work with your online files; documents on your SkyDrive open in either the Office apps on the desktop if you have them installed or the Office web apps in Metro IE. And PDFs open in Windows Reader, which is an excellent and simple PDF tool. Large files open quickly and scrolling through documents is equally fast.
There are no confusing toolbars floating over the page like the irritating Adobe Reader; you can pinch to zoom in and out or double tap to zoom into a page, and the commands on the app bar enable you to search, switch views, rotate a page or see what you have permission to do with a password-protected PDF. This is far more pleasant to use than Acrobat Reader - and noticeably faster.
The latest update lets you search inside your files on SkyDrive (the contents as well as the file names), rename and move files as well as deleting them and check the new SkyDrive recycle bin for files you didn't mean to delete. That's particularly handy if you share files and someone else deletes one of your files without warning. The only missing feature is that you can't use it to preview PDFs in File Explorer on the desktop.
Bringing Bing to you
The News, Sports, Travel, Finance and Weather apps are great examples of what a rich, content-filled 'modern' app can look like; the images and typography are gorgeous, the layout is great for a widescreen tablet and the intention is that you swipe, tap and flick your way through the screens. You can browse through stories, watch videos or pick a topic, team or destination and pin it to the Start screen to see updates.
There's enough content to keep you busy for a while, especially in the News app where you can pick individual topics like Kinect , linear equations or Lindsey Lohan. This gets as specialist as you want (linear equations got us stories about Olympic performance, the Higgs Boson and the Babylonians and education as well as more traditional mathematics). You can read quite a bit of that offline as well.
The Travel app combines guides from recent Google purchase Frommers with 360 degree panoramas, photo albums, maps, currency, restaurant, hotel and flight tools, so you can browse or book a trip.
The Maps app is a joy to use on a touchscreen (and as functional as the Bing Maps website with a mouse). Turn on aerial views and spend some time flying round the world; it's the kind of fun Google Earth was when it first came out, but at your fingertips and with high resolution photography (you can see a glacier in Greenland from 20 yards or a sheep farm in Scotland from seven yards).
The latest update adds bird's eye views with a simple button that you can tap or grab hold of to swing your view around (with zoom buttons if you're using a mouse). Want to see the other side of that building to check where the entrance is? Just zoom in until the bird's eye view appears and tap the button that appears on the side of the screen – or even put two fingers on screen and twist to change the angle.
Or you can check traffic and get turn by turn directions to addresses and towns, or anything else you can find through Bing. That's a big improvement in the latest update; before we couldn't find any businesses and now even obscure locations are easy to find; often you get opening hours and contact details as well as directions. There are some indoor maps as well, mostly for US locations.
The Bing Search app is new for RTM, with more features in the latest update, and will look familiar to Windows Phone users (although it doesn't have the audio and video search (yet). Again, it's very finger friendly; suggested topics appear in large boxes as you type.
The results show up with large previews so you might see what you need to know immediately and you're likely to see exactly which page has the details you want. Zoom out and you get suggestions for related search terms. Image results are particularly nice; you can zoom in and out and browse through the like an impromptu photo album.
You can search Bing using the File Picker in other apps to get images and work with them as if they were any other file (and you can restrict that to Creative Commons images so you're respecting copyright). If you like the Bing background of the day you can swipe up the app bar and turn it into your lock screen. And the Bing Search tile flips between the (often stunning) daily image and trendy search topics. It's eye candy, but it's useful eye candy.
Apps in the Store
The few thousand apps in the Windows Store (2,825 for the UK when we last counted and over twice that for the US) already include a handful of desktop apps like WinZip and some pay-for apps. Expect lots more once Windows 8 is on sale. The New Releases tile shows the latest 100 titles, you can browse by category or search for specific apps.
And if you change PC, there's the Your Apps option on the app bar, which shows you a list of all the apps you've downloaded previously, which you can sort by whether they're currently installed and filter to show which apps you have on which PC. We were able to reinstall the vast majority of apps we'd tried during the different previews; of course it's up to developers whether they want to carry on making free apps available.
If the 'modern' app idea is going to take off, the Windows Store is going to need lots of great apps. But if Windows RT tablets sell anything like as well as the iPad, there's every incentive for developers to create them, especially as Microsoft has powerful development tools.
DESKTOP APPS
The Windows 8 desktop looks and works much like the Windows 7 desktop, with many familiar desktop tools from Calculator, Paint, WordPad, Notepad (which doesn't have a ribbon), Windows Media Player, Control Panel, Sticky Notes, Character Map, Sound Recorder and the Snipping Tool to Explorer.
The latter is renamed from File Explorer to Windows Explorer, given that you might be looking at libraries and networked PCs, mapping a drive, connecting to a media server, opening the settings for your DSL router or opening control panel from the Explorer ribbon.
You'll find them on the All apps screen rather than pinned to the Start screen, organised into Windows Accessories, Windows System and Windows Ease of Access - or you can press the Start button and start typing the name of what you want.
This uses the same rich list of synonyms as in Windows 7 so if you type 'remove' you get links to deleting search history and uninstalling programs, as well as removing devices and users. Or you can use Windows-X (or right-click where the Start button used to be) for a handy list of useful desktop tools.
One set of Windows desktop apps that have vanished from Windows 8 is familiar games such as Minesweeper and Solitaire. You can get Windows 8-style equivalents for them from the Windows Store, but they're not installed automatically.
Task Manager and Explorer
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Some of the desktop apps look very much as they always have, including Notepad and Calculator.
Task Manager's clean new layout works as a simple task switcher. Expand it and you get a screen that's still easy to navigate but is packed with useful information, from historical data about which apps use the most bandwidth, to how much items in your Startup list slow Windows down, to what all the strangely named Windows services are doing.
When you switch to detail view, Processes is now divided into Apps and Background processes, so you don't have to scroll past COM Surrogate and Device Association Framework to see Internet Explorer.
This is much easier to understand, and numbers at the top of each section give you a quick feel for how busy your PC is.
You can disable startup apps you don't want directly from the Task Manager. It's interesting to note that commercial applications that want to get a 'certified for Windows 8' logo won't be able to install startup applications (which run all the time), just background services that Windows can start and stop automatically as necessary, which may well improve performance and save battery life.
WordPad, Paint and Explorer get the Office-style ribbon, although not with the Office 2013 look.
The ribbon works well for exposing buried features in what we now have to call File Explorer, such as extracting compressed files, selecting every file that isn't currently selected, opening a command prompt and doing things Explorer has enabled you to do before, but in awkward ways you had to be an expert to remember.
It's also context-sensitive, so navigate up to the Computer level and you get options such as uninstalling programs without having to delve into the Control Panel.
Navigate to your Homegroup and you see options such as sharing libraries and viewing the password. Windows Explorer becomes a way to explore tools and settings, as well as files.
Turn on the status bar, which is now off by default, and you get two very useful buttons in the corner of the Explorer window for switching between detailed and thumbnail layout.
We also like the Up button next to the address bar. Maybe you shouldn't need it with the breadcrumbs that Windows 7 introduced to navigate folders in the current path, but it's handy, so ignore the purists and enjoy the efficiency.
Windows Explorer also handles both ISO and VHD files; you can burn an ISO to an optical disc just as in Windows 7, but you can also mount an ISO directly as a drive so you don't need to burn it or run mounting to utilities to open ISO images.
VHD (virtual hard disk) files are treated as a virtual hard drive; that means you can open a VHD backup as if it was an external drive and drag out an old version of a file instead of having to boot into the VHD just to copy a file out.
Backup and storage
You don't have to create VHD files of your entire system to do a backup, of course. Fewer than 5% of Windows users use the Windows Backup feature, and Microsoft has replaced it with File History - a simpler system than Previous Versions in Windows 7 (which you can still right-click on files to use if you're working with a Windows Server).
If you upgrade from Windows 7, you'll still have Backup installed and if you have it configured it will carry on running. If not, you can find it under Windows 7 File Recovery in the control panel but it's probably better to turn on File History.
This is a simpler replacement for the Previous Versions feature in Windows 7, which had much less of an impact on performance in our tests. It insists on using an external or network drive (backing up to the same hard drive won't help if the drive crashes), and it doesn't do full system backups.
Instead it takes hourly copies of files in libraries or on the desktop, as well as contacts and favourites.
Remember, you can use System Restore, or create an image that adds your installed applications to the built-in recovery tools so you get them back when you refresh Windows with the new troubleshooting tools. Your Windows settings are synced through your Microsoft account, so having a full system backup is less important than it used to be.
You can choose to exclude files, change how often file history takes a snapshot or how long it keeps copies for, or you can just turn it on.
Restoring an old file is nice and simple; go to the folder where it ought to be, select the file if it's still there, or the folder if it's gone completely, click the History button on the ribbon and browse back through files day by day, hour by hour or pick a file and see the different versions of it in Explorer.
If you need to restore files on a new PC, if you use the same computer and user names as on the old PC, file history will just work; if not, tell it you want to use the existing backup rather than starting a new one and you can pick the user name to look at files for.
There might be several users, because more than one person can keep their file history on the same external drive.
If you use a Windows homegroup, you can suggest the drive for everyone to use. And you can use Storage Spaces to treat multiple smaller drives as one big drive for File History, just as you can for anything else in Explorer.
Frankly, Storage Spaces is one of the neatest features in Windows 8. Forget the complexity and rebuild issues of RAID; you can plug multiple drives into a PC and see one large storage 'space' whether the drives are the same size or all different.
Like File History and other new features, Storage Spaces hides the complexity and makes what used to be advanced setup so simple almost anyone can do it.
USE WITH A TOUCHSCREEN
There's no denying that Windows 8 works best if you have a touchscreen computer.
Swiping across the Start screen, swiping in charms, pinching for semantic zoom, playing games; if you treat Windows 8 as a tablet OS, you get the fast and fluid experience Microsoft has been promising all along (even on older touchscreen tablet PCs, although they're not as smooth and often have bezels that get in the way).
This is something that has improved since we first tried Windows 8. Swiping the charm bar and app switcher in from the left edge of a touchscreen with your finger is smoother and less fiddly than in the preview releases.
Dragging apps to the bottom of the screen to close them is smooth and responsive, but it's no longer easy to close an app by accident. Unlike the preview versions where you could accidentally close the picture password setup halfway through by dragging down too far with a gesture, touch control in the RTM is smooth and fluid, even on older touchscreens.
But Windows 8 isn't just the Start screen and Windows 8-style apps. Touch on the desktop is still a hybrid way to work. You can use gestures at the sides of the screen for task switching and working with charms, and you can swipe to switch to Windows 8-style apps.
You can even swipe down from the top of the screen and drag the thumbnail off the screen to close the desktop, like any other Windows 8-style app. You can also touch anything you'd traditionally click with a mouse.
This works extremely well with ribbon controls (and makes it initially annoying that Microsoft has bowed to complaints from people who've never used a ribbon interface with touch, and minimised it by default in tools such as Windows Explorer).
Smaller controls work surprisingly well too, because Microsoft has used machine learning to predict where you're really trying to tap for the desktop and built-in apps. We found this made it easy to accurately select tiny drop-downs and menu items in Office 2010 and the Office 2013 preview, in Explorer and Paint and in third party applications (on a Samsung Slate 7, which has a good touchscreen to start with - slightly less so on an older HP 2730p).
It can get fiddly; multi-selecting files in Windows Explorer didn't always give us all the files we wanted, but Windows 8 does an excellent job of making an interface that was never designed for touch work with your fingers.
The four different on-screen keyboards (including handwriting recognition, which works well - if slowly - when you write with your finger rather than a pen) give you a reasonable way to enter text.
If you're sitting down, the small keyboard layout enables you to type quite fast and reasonably accurately, especially with a decent multi-touch screen so you don't have to tap one key at a time.
If you switch to the full layout to see function keys and the row of numbers always on screen, the keys are a little smaller and consequently less accurate.
If you're holding a tablet in both hands, the split keyboard is surprisingly useful - although the keys look too small to hit accurately, typing with both thumbs was faster and more accurate than we expected.
The large numeric keypad in the centre is handy as well; although we could tap out sums on the Windows Calculator without making any mistakes, tapping the larger number keys on the keyboard just felt more comfortable.
One very handy feature is that when you type in a password there's a 'peek' button you can press to check if you've typed it right.
If you're used to the excellent Windows Phone touch keyboard, Windows 8 doesn't match it. Leaving aside the problems that the keyboard covers a lot of the screen, to be big enough to type on, and that in the desktop you have to open the keyboard yourself for most applications (Windows 8-style applications and most of the Office 2013 preview applications open the keyboard when you tap anywhere you can type), the auto correction and suggestions just aren't as good.
You have to type a lot more of a word before you get a suggestion (usually right but by that time you're almost done) rather than seeing a list of multiple suggestions as you type. And when you tap a word to fix a typing error, you don't always see a suggestion at all.
That might be down to the fact that the press and hold right-click finger gesture, which significantly improved from preview releases, isn't 100% reliable on any touchscreen we tested. We suspect this is a driver issue, since the improvement on Samsung Series 7 tablets is particularly marked.
However, it also seems that some applications get corrections when you tap and others don't. The finger sliders that appear for selecting text and moving the cursor aren't quite as fluid as on Windows Phone either - they work best on web pages when you can zoom in to make them large enough to position accurately.
The touchscreen keyboards in Windows 8 are better than anything we've seen in Windows before. They're fine for searching or tapping out a quick email, but as with Android tablets and the iPad, there's no substitute for a physical keyboard.
USE WITH A KEYBOARD AND MOUSE
There are features that work better with a mouse (or the active pens you get on combination pen and touch tablets) than with your finger, because you can hover with a mouse.
Icons light up to show you can click them on the desktop, and file search in the Windows 8-style interface shows more details about a file as you hover over it. That's nothing to do with the design of the interface, it's just that without something like Kinect, the screen can't see your finger before you touch it.
Using the desktop with a mouse is exactly the same as in Windows 8, with the exception of the charm bar and switching pane. The hot corners for charms and the app switcher bar work well for this (and there are keyboard shortcuts if moving the mouse all the way across a large desktop monitor slows you down).
The sensitivity of the corners has been tweaked since the earlier previews, so they're easier to select on purpose and harder to trigger by accident. Suddenly using the Start screen and charm bar with a mouse feels less haphazard and clumsy - it's like the difference between a drawer that keeps sticking and one that opens and shuts smoothly.
When you use a mouse, just sliding from side to side scrolls the Start screen back and forth very naturally - just push the mouse over to scroll. Infuriatingly this doesn't seem to work in any other apps; you have to grab the scroll bar at the bottom, which will make you long for a touchscreen.
There's a button on the Start screen scroll bar that turns on Semantic Zoom; scrolling through this with a mouse isn't nearly as fluid as using a touchscreen, but you need to turn it on to name and move groups. You can also right-click to get the app bar in Windows 8-style apps instead of swiping.
In truth, it's not that using a mouse is an inferior experience in Windows 8; it's that using a touchscreen is a superior experience, especially if you have a notebook with a touchscreen so you get the fluid touch experience and a real keyboard for typing.
Trackpads
Although it's perfectly possible to use Windows 8 with a mouse and get all the features working smoothly, there's no denying a touchscreen makes it more intuitive, or "fast and fluid", as the Microsoft marketing phrase has it.
To approximate that on notebooks, which increasingly have multi-touch trackpads that are rarely used with more than one finger, Microsoft is adding trackpad versions of the edge gestures alongside the gestures on many multi-touch trackpads.
Two-finger pinch-to-zoom, rotate, two-finger scrolling and side to side panning are already supported by the trackpads in many recent notebooks, as are three-finger gestures for launching an app or scrolling through a presentation.
These aren't frequently used, because they're fiddly and not well integrated with apps - having Windows make more use of these would be welcome.
But being able to slide your finger onto the trackpad from the right to open the Charms bar, from the left to open the task switcher and from the bottom to display the app bar - the same gestures you use on a touchscreen - make Windows 8 on a PC a much nicer experience.
New notebooks often have a trackpad that's flush with the wrist rest, and that makes edge gestures easier to use than on older notebooks with a distinct lip around the pad. Larger trackpads are becoming common - usually imitating Mac notebooks - and that will make gestures work better as well.
To get edge gestures you'll need drivers that support them, not just the usual multi-touch drivers. Many new trackpads are now supported.
For desktop users, the Microsoft Touch Mouse will get the same edge gestures, with a software update soon.
PERFORMANCE
Like Windows 7, Windows 8 will run faster on existing PCs. Thanks to changes under the hood such as making background processes wake the processor up at the same time rather than one after another, and using GPU acceleration for a lot more tasks, plus changing the way shutdown works to make it more like hibernation, Windows 8 boots more quickly and delivers longer battery life. It also runs some tasks faster, especially multimedia, transcoding and anything using DirectX.
This has been true of both Consumer and Release Preview, but Windows 8 RTM is slightly faster than both of those, as well as beating Windows 7 in most tests. IE10 is also faster than IE9 in our tests.
Booting and shutting down Windows 8 is faster than Windows 7; twice as fast in some of our tests on a mid-range second generation Core i5 notebook (upgraded to a fast SSD, but we saw even bigger improvements on a hard drive system).
Hibernating and resuming speeds improved as well, but not by as much. The real difference is that shutting down actually hibernates an image of the core Windows system and booting reloads that (checking that device drivers are working correctly, in case that's why you restarted).
Like the other performance results, these are a slight improvement on the preview releases we tested.
Benchmarks
Startup and shut down speeds
Windows 7 startup: 45 secs
Windows 8 startup: 21 secs
Windows 7 shutdown: 13 secs
Windows 8 shutdown: 7 secs
Windows 7 resume: 25 secs
Windows 8 resume: 16 secs
Windows 7 hibernate: 16 secs
Windows 8 hibernate: 7 secs
Windows 7 startup: 45 secs
Windows 8 startup: 21 secs
Windows 7 shutdown: 13 secs
Windows 8 shutdown: 7 secs
Windows 7 resume: 25 secs
Windows 8 resume: 16 secs
Windows 7 hibernate: 16 secs
Windows 8 hibernate: 7 secs
Browser speeds
Windows 7 canvas speed: 50fps
Windows 8 canvas speed: 60fps
Windows 7 Webvizbench: 4180
Windows 8 Webvizbench: 5190
Windows 7 Webvizbench fps: 17fps
Windows 8 Webvizbench fps: 27fps
Windows 7 speedreading: 12 secs
Windows 8 speedreading: 7 secs
Windows 7 speedreading fps: 55fps
Windows 8 speedreading fps: 60 fps
Windows 7 canvas speed: 50fps
Windows 8 canvas speed: 60fps
Windows 7 Webvizbench: 4180
Windows 8 Webvizbench: 5190
Windows 7 Webvizbench fps: 17fps
Windows 8 Webvizbench fps: 27fps
Windows 7 speedreading: 12 secs
Windows 8 speedreading: 7 secs
Windows 7 speedreading fps: 55fps
Windows 8 speedreading fps: 60 fps
The hardware-accelerated Chakra engine in IE10 continues to get faster, and not just for JavaScript; it accelerates everything from rendering text to SVG to Canvas drawing to the multimedia tests that make up Webvizbench to the mix of tasks in the IE9 Speedreading benchmark.
When IE10 comes out for Windows 7 we'll be able to see how much of the speed is underlying Windows 8 performance and how much is the browser, but whichever it is, it's faster.
PC Mark 7
Windows 7: 2478
Windows 8: 2915
Windows 7: 2478
Windows 8: 2915
This is a definite improvement in the mix of 'real world' tasks in PCMark, such as multimedia, browsing, and other common activities. Much of the speedup is in multimedia and DirectX, but this reflects an overall speedup.
File handling is noticeably speedier than in the release previews, and Windows 8 beats Windows 7's file copy speeds. Copying a random selection of files (documents, images, videos, MP3s, ZIP and EXE files) sped up much more than we expected in Windows 8.
Copy 2.5GB of files over USB 2
Windows 7: 3.05
Windows 8: 2.48
Windows 7: 3.05
Windows 8: 2.48
Often the first graphics drivers for a new OS deliver low frame rates for games, then improve to match the previous OS, then beat it. Even on a notebook with unimpressive integrated Intel graphics, the frame rates for DirectX 11 games are slightly better than Windows 7 already.
Gaming speedsWindows 7 Heaven DX9: 109
Windows 8 Heaven DX9: 111
Windows 7 Heaven DX9 fps: 4.3fps
Windows 8 Heaven DX9 fps: 4.6fps
Windows 8 Heaven DX9: 111
Windows 7 Heaven DX9 fps: 4.3fps
Windows 8 Heaven DX9 fps: 4.6fps
Give an old PC a new lease of life
We also ran some of our benchmarks on an older notebook, the HP EliteBook 2730p Centrino 2 model from 2008, which has a 5400prm hard drive rather than an SSD. While some tasks remain slow in Windows 8 and the Intel integrated graphics still struggle, we saw huge improvements in startup times and some browser tests.
Startup and shut down speeds
Windows 7 startup: 1 min 19 secs
Windows 8 startup: 38 secs
Windows 7 shutdown: 41 secs
Windows 8 shutdown: 19 secs
Windows 7 resume: 26 secs
Windows 8 resume: 26 secs
Windows 7 hibernate: 33 secs
Windows 8 hibernate: 13 secs
Windows 7 startup: 1 min 19 secs
Windows 8 startup: 38 secs
Windows 7 shutdown: 41 secs
Windows 8 shutdown: 19 secs
Windows 7 resume: 26 secs
Windows 8 resume: 26 secs
Windows 7 hibernate: 33 secs
Windows 8 hibernate: 13 secs
Hate how long you're waiting for your PC to start? Windows 8 will speed it up. The only test where we didn't see significant improvement was resuming from hibernation; the 5400rpm hard drive is probably maxed out loading files.
Browser speeds
Windows 7 V8: 1594
Windows 8 V8: 2581
Windows 7 canvas speed: 22fps
Windows 8 canvas speed: 52fps
Windows 7 Webvizbench: 3030
Windows 8 Webvizbench: 4230
Windows 7 Webvizbench fps: 5.89fps
Windows 8 Webvizbench fps: 13.64fps
Windows 7 V8: 1594
Windows 8 V8: 2581
Windows 7 canvas speed: 22fps
Windows 8 canvas speed: 52fps
Windows 7 Webvizbench: 3030
Windows 8 Webvizbench: 4230
Windows 7 Webvizbench fps: 5.89fps
Windows 8 Webvizbench fps: 13.64fps
Again, bigger is better in all these tests; JavaScript speed, canvas rendering and the multimedia tasks in Webvizbench are all significantly faster in Windows 8 than in Windows 7. You'll notice the difference when browsing complex websites.
PC Mark 7
Windows 7: 1038
Windows 7: 1091
Windows 7: 1038
Windows 7: 1091
The improvements here are in the 'creativity' section of the benchmark, which looks at multimedia and DirectX tasks. You might not notice a difference in Word, but processing photos will be faster.
Gaming speedsWindows 7 Heaven DX9: 46
Windows 8 Heaven DX9: 47
Windows 7 Heaven DX9 fps: 1.8fps
Windows 8 Heaven DX9 fps: 1.9fps
Windows 8 Heaven DX9: 47
Windows 7 Heaven DX9 fps: 1.8fps
Windows 8 Heaven DX9 fps: 1.9fps
This old system and the integrated Intel graphics struggle with anything more than casual games, and we saw rendering issues galore, but DirectX 9 was definitely faster with Windows 8, and the benchmark ran visibly more smoothly.
Performance on ARM - Windows RT
We'll be including this as soon as we can get our hands on a Windows RT device.
OTHER FEATURES
There are dozens of features in Windows 8, such as the native support for mobile broadband.
That means as soon as you plug in a 3G dongle it's ready to work, it will connect far more quickly and it's marked as a 'metered connection', so background tasks such as Windows Update don't use up your data allowance. You can set that by hand if you use a mobile hotspot.
Windows 8 comes with support for far more printers, right out of the box - not by shipping ever more drivers to fill up your drive space but by creating a printer framework that can work with more printers, and a new, faster print architecture.
Printers that usually ask you to install a hefty desktop application - which you can't do on Windows RT - should give you at least basic printing using the built-in class drivers.
Printer manufacturers can produce Windows 8-style apps for checking the ink level of changing paper settings, but when you just want to print, you shouldn't get umpteen dialogs popping up.
Other changes are under the hood, such as built-in support for USB 3 - as far as you're concerned, USB 3.0 devices just work, but the PC maker doesn't have to build in a special driver for that.
One of the things Windows 8 is slightly faster and definitely cleverer about is copying files. If you're copying enough files that you have to wait for it to finish, you can pause and resume copying, and you get one copy dialog for all the file copies you have in progress.
There's a nice mini graph to show you how the copying speed is changing.
Microsoft has made several changes to the interface you see when you're copying a file with the same name as one in the folder you're putting the file into, responding to feedback. What you end up with is a two-stage dialog.
You can replace or skip all the files at once or decide one by one from a list of thumbnails with the date and size (the larger or newer file gets marked in bold); choose the checkbox for the file you want to keep, or choose Both to keep both. It's a lot clearer than the same option in Windows 7.
Windows 8 really shines on multiple monitors. You get the best experience if your screens have the same resolution and are at the same height, because then you don't have to worry about a window that's full screen on one screen being the wrong size on the other screen, and windows that sit across the two screens line up properly.
If you have screens of a different resolution, the desktop background won't automatically stretch across both, but you can turn that on by hand. Even with very different resolutions on our two test screens, working with multiple monitors was intuitive and powerful.
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You can treat two (or more) screens as one big screen and drag windows around. When you move a desktop app to the second window its icon moves to the taskbar there, so you can work with it more easily.
Although Aero Snap still only works with the outer corners, the hot mouse corners work on both monitors, so you can get the charm bar or switching pane on either screen.
Press the Start button and the Start menu appears on one screen; any Windows 8-style apps you open will open on that screen - but you can drag them onto the other screen. That enables you to have the desktop full screen on one monitor and another screen dedicated to the Start screen and Windows 8-style apps, which stops them feeling intrusive.
You can still snap two Windows 8-style apps beside each other on one screen, but you can also have a Windows 8-style app snapped next to the desktop, which stretches over one and a bit screens. Just drag the windows around to get them in the arrangement that works best for you.
ACCOUNTS AND SECURITY
If you want, you can set up a Windows account the way you're used to and ignore all the new features. Or you can use a Microsoft account (Xbox Live, Hotmail, SkyDrive, Windows Messenger or any of the other Microsoft services you use) as your Windows account, which the Windows installer makes the first suggestion.
It works the same way - you can have multiple accounts on the same PC, reset your password as normal, log in to your PC when you're not online and generally do what you've always done.
But you can also use it to get your PC connected in a whole new way.
Getting the cloud right
Windows 8 is the first version of Windows designed to make sense of the way we use the internet these days.
That's not just having the kind of glossy, touchable apps that turn pages from websites into virtual magazines, or an endless stream of social updates at your fingertips that you can get on iPads or Android tablets - though Windows 8 does that just as well, with apps such as Pulse or the Bing offerings.
Windows 8 plugs the cloud into almost everything you do. Preferably the Microsoft cloud, of course; you need to at least have a Microsoft account to make the most of Windows 8, but that can be a Gmail address if you want it to be (you'll get the information from that account in Windows, but you'll have to verify that before contact, calendar and message information starts arriving).
But when you're saving or opening a file, that could be using your Google Drive sync folder just as easily as SkyDrive, and you see Facebook and Twitter connections in the People app.
Really, this is the cloud enabling a personal computer done right. Your Microsoft account becomes your Windows account, with your profile picture. The first advantage is that you automatically get your contacts, calendar and messages and you'll be signed in to SkyDrive when you download the SkyDrive app.
But that spreads beyond individual apps. If you use SkyDrive, it automatically adds your pictures on SkyDrive to the Photos app; if you've linked Windows Messenger to Flickr in the past, you get your Flickr photos there, and the same for Facebook - so you can use an image you have online as your Lock screen as easily as you can use a picture on your hard drive.
Plus you see your Facebook friends in the People app and Facebook chat in Messaging. Install the SkyDrive app and even the desktop version syncs files, and because your Windows account is your Microsoft account, it doesn't need to ask for your password to sign you in. Your content is right there for you to do whatever you want with, wherever you keep it.
Your Microsoft account is what you use in the Windows Store to download apps. If you have an Xbox Live account, use that as your Microsoft account and you'll see your Xbox and Windows Phone Xbox Live achievements, avatar and friends.
You can also use your PC to control your Xbox or buy a game and start playing it on your Xbox straight away (more of that later).
Got more than one PC? Whether that's a desktop and a notebook or a notebook and a Windows RT Surface tablet, using the same Microsoft account on them interconnects and syncs them. You get the same Lock screen, the same desktop background or theme and the same Start screen design and colour scheme.
Annoyingly, you don't get the same Start screen layout and tiles - Microsoft says that's because you might not have the same programs installed, but we'd like to see Windows 8 download your apps from the Windows Store automatically.
Being able to see the list of apps and pick individual ones is a good start, but it's not enough - after all, the Bing and Live apps install automatically, so why not the apps you've chosen?
You do get your Internet Explorer favourites and history, from both desktop and Windows 8-style IE, plus your logins and passwords. Looking for that news story you read on your tablet? You can get to it easily on your desktop when you get to work. Want to authorise a Twitter app on a new PC? You won't need to type your username and password in again.
It's as if every PC you use is your own PC that you've spent time setting up (apart from having your programs on).
It just works, you might say - and it brings together so many of the online services you already use into something that feels seamless and connected and natural much of the time. Of course that makes the places where the experience doesn't join up even more annoying.
Obviously security for your Microsoft account also matters rather more than it did when it was just for your Hotmail address. Some of that's common sense, such as setting a strong password, and then setting a picture password so you don't have to make your password simpler to avoid worrying about typing it in every time you restart your PC.
But you also have to explicitly trust your PC to use it with your Microsoft account, and you can do that using two-factor authentication - giving Microsoft an alternative email address or phone number to send a code to that you then type in on the PC (set up prompts you to do both), or using another PC that you've already marked as trusted to trust a new PC.
That takes advantage of the fact that, again, most of us have more than one computer these days, and a phone that's around all the time.
When it comes to Windows 8, this is by far the most secure version of Windows ever. In fact, it has security features other operating systems should aspire to.
Family Safety
Windows Live account or not, the first account you make on Windows 8 is automatically an admin account. When you add a second account, which you now have to do through the Windows 8-style PC Settings app rather than the control panel, the first (and heavily recommended) option is to use a Microsoft account to do it.
There's no option to make a new administrator account directly, as you realise the first time you try to install an app and have to put in the password of the original account.
You can go into the control panel to change the account type. It's a good idea not to have more administrative accounts than necessary, but if you share a PC it's irritating not to get the option in the first place.
The assumption is that you're setting up an account for a child, and you get the option to apply Family Safety to their account as you create it (this only works on standard accounts). This gives you reports of what they do and enables you to control what websites they can visit, which apps they can install (by type or age rating) and when and for how long they can use the PC.
It combines the previous Parental Controls feature with the Windows Live Family Safety tool, and enables you to manage settings locally on the PC or on the Family Safety website (where you can manage the accounts of users on different PCs from the same place).
This is a nice way to seamlessly merge the previous Windows and Windows Live tools, and means you don't have to spend money on separate tools to give you control over kids' PCs.
Security: sandbox to heap
The security features in Windows 8 go much deeper than accounts. It's the first operating system to use the UEFI secure boot feature that signs and validates boot components to make sure than a rootkit hasn't tampered with your system.
Yes, if secure boot is turned on older operating systems won't boot, but that includes Windows XP and Windows 7, so it's not a dastardly plot to exclude Linux, and you can turn it off on all x86/64 PCs.
You can't turn it off on Windows RT, but then you can't load other operating systems on an iPad, so again, this is about security rather than lockout.
Many more Windows 8 PCs will have Trusted Platform Modules (TPMs), as will all Windows RT systems. This is used for additional security checks at boot (that applications will be able to see later; your online banking site could check if your PC is fully trusted before authorising a very big transaction, for example).
Windows 8 includes Windows Defender (the new version of the excellent Microsoft Security Essentials). If you buy a different anti-virus package that will also be able to load before Windows starts up, to protect you against malware that starts up first and circumvents your security software.
Windows 8 uses the SmartScreen app reputation technology from IE to check applications you install on the desktop; if they're well known or signed by a well known developer they'll install as normal.
If they're a new file or have the same name as a well known installer but not the same details, or they're signed with a key that's also signed malware, you'll get a full screen warning about the application. You can still install it if you want, but you'll know that what you have isn't the normal Adobe Acrobat, for example.
Any malware that does find its way onto your system will have to be a lot smarter. Any specific security holes that have been found will be fixed in Windows 7 by updates, and Windows 7 will keep on getting updates for years.
But only Windows 8 gets new protections in the kernel and the memory management system that mean there are no predictable areas of memory for malware to target. It's also harder to attack the way Windows keeps track of the 'heap' of allocated memory, none of the memory allocated to applications for storing data can be used for running code, and malware can't force the kernel to allocate and release memory for a virus to use.
Not only are the specific exploits for the Windows 7 kernel fixed, but the design that enabled those exploits is much improved. Writing malware for Windows 8 will be far harder, and many attackers will turn to attacking third-party applications instead.
Windows 8-style apps are harder to attack as well. They run in their own sandbox with fewer privileges than desktop programs, with only the permissions to access files or your location that you agree to when you install it. They can't get into the sandbox of another app.
Even the hackers at Black hat this year could only find ways of attacking Windows 8-style apps through the desktop (using techniques that Microsoft says anti-malware software will already protect you against).
There are improvements to BitLocker, the whole-disk encryption feature that stops someone taking your drive out and reading it in another system. The main one is that only the disk space in use is encrypted, not the whole drive; that makes encrypting your drive far faster.
That's good news if you get Windows 8 Pro. The equivalent of BitLocker it also turns on in Windows RT. Oddly though, Windows 8 users still don't get this feature - so Windows RT is more secure than plain Windows 8 because of encryption, and because old Windows malware just can't run.
MEDIA AND GAMES
Games and media on the Windows 8 desktop are very much the poor relations. Windows Media Player has a slightly higher build number but no obvious changes, beyond no longer playing DVDs.
The Play To features in Media Player and on the Windows Explorer ribbon when you're in music folders that enable you to play music on third-party devices such as a Sonos or on other PCs in your home group didn't show up on any of our test PCs, although we have seen it working on other Windows 8 systems.
DLNA features such as Play To weren't always reliable in Windows 7, but they worked on all our test systems before the Windows 8 upgrade, and they didn't work any more afterwards.
Media Center is now something you have to install separately using the Add Features option, which replaces Windows Anytime Upgrade. It's not yet available for RTM, but we expect it to remain almost identical to the Windows 7 version. We did spot a Netflix streaming app for the RT version, so we hope that sticks around.
The small charge Microsoft will be making for Media Centre after the upgrade pricing feels like a direct response to the small but vocal group of users who contacted the Windows team offering to pay extra for the app; it's nice to see they get a new content source as well.
The familiar Windows games are gone completely - Windows Games no longer shows up in the list of Windows features at all. Get the versions ofMinesweeper, Solitaire and FreeCell from the Windows Store and start building up your Xbox Live achievements instead.
Third-party games run better than on Windows 7, of course, thanks to the much improved multimedia handling. Even with the graphics card drivers available today, frame rate in games is as good or better than in Windows 7.
Windows 8-style media
Zune is dead at last; the Windows 8-style music and video apps you get with Windows 8 are xbox music and xbox video (yes, no capital X). When you first open these they feel like little more than store fronts - your own music and videos are tucked away on the left of the screen, out of sight, with no indication that you need to swipe or scroll in that direction.
You can change that under Settings, at which point you get a rather monochromatic view of your media as thumbnails of individual videos or albums.
The only files that show up here are the ones in your Music and Video libraries, although you can open and play any media file on your system. The Music app quickly added all the files in our large test music library, but for some reason the Video app got stuck after indexing a single folder inside the library for quite some time.
Music carries on playing in the background as you use other apps. The name of the current track shows up on the Music app tile on the Start screen, but not the album art (unlike Windows Phone).
You can see that if you press your PC's volume keys, which also shows a handy playback control like the one on Windows Phone.
Video stops as soon as you switch away from the app (so you can't listen to just the soundtrack, unless you snap the video app to the side), but oddly you do see a thumbnail for the last video on the Start screen tile.
The in-app player controls in both Music and Videos are minimal and very much designed for touch; tap on the screen for standard play, pause and a very finger-friendly bar for scrubbing through playback.
Open the app bar and you get buttons to set repeat (and shuffle for music) or choose Play To or open a different video or song, as well as the playback controls. Play To ought to find any DLNA-compatible devices on your network, such as a TV you can send videos to, a Sonos music streamer or Pure internet radio for music.
Those all worked with the Play To feature in Windows Media Player in Windows 7, but the Music app told us we had no devices to send music or videos to. Hopefully this is a question of Microsoft certifying devices slowly.
- Read DLNA explained
As it stands, though, this is a frustrating and confusing experience. Media purchase and playback is something Microsoft has to nail to stand a chance of competing with Macs and iPads, and what we're seeing today simply isn't good enough.
The Music and Video apps don't have enough features - there are no automatic playlists and no 'find me something else like this' tools.
The xbox media content has biographies and discographies for artists, and great reviews for videos you can buy, but you don't see any of that for your own content. It feels like the desktop media tools have been abandoned but the Windows 8-style media tools aren't mature enough to replace them.
Windows 8-style games
We like the Windows 8-style replacements for the most popular Windows games in the Windows Store: Minesweeper and the Microsoft Solitaire Collection (which includes Klondike, FreeCell and Spider, as well as two new versions, Pyramid and TriPeaks), plus Microsoft Mahjong.
The xbox Games app (again without the capital 'X') looks reminiscent of the new Xbox interface but with fewer intrusive ads. As with the Music and Video apps, you have to swipe over to the left find your avatar and those of your Xbox Live friends, but there's no clue to suggest you do that. You can see your achievements from Windows 8, Windows Phone and Xbox games and share them to social networks for bragging rights, or see what games your Xbox friends play.
The most exciting Xbox integration might be Xbox SmartGlass. Like the previous Xbox Controller app, this enables you to control your Xbox from your PC or tablet. It's responsive enough to control a simple game or a video, and it's a great way of getting to games you've been playing recently without going through the whole Xbox interface, or of searching in things such as the Xbox YouTube app.
You see what you can do on your screen, and you touch or click things on the PC screen rather than seeing a replica of the Xbox controller the way you do on the similar Windows Phone app.
At the moment it only seems to be possible to send video from your PC to an Xbox if you bought it from the Xbox video marketplace, but we're hoping that changes. You should be able to browse through your content on a PC or tablet, where it's easy to search, then sit back and watch it on the big screen, where it looks good.
