Summary: The coming Windows 8 beta is looking more and more like it will be called the “consumer preview.” Why the change in nomenclature?   Is Microsoft going to position the coming Windows 8 beta as a “consumer preview”? And if so, why? Microsoft officials have repeated recently that the Windows 8 beta release is on track for late February 2012. But one public relations official with the Windows team provided a slightly different message — and one that escaped notice by most of those who re

This sounded interesting so thought I’d share. Microsoft has announced (via a post on its Building Windows 8 blog) that Windows 8 will introduce a new file system known as Resilient File System (ReFS) which will include a next generation on-disk storage engine. I should assure you upfront that this will not cause major compatibility issues with NTFS although it is a re-plumbing of the FS not just an upgrade to NTFS. The blog says that it’s “a newly engineered file system…built on the foundat

In a blog post a couple of days ago on the Windows Team blog Roger Capriotti, Director, Internet Explorer Marketing wrote on the Internet Explorer side about "The US Says Goodbye to IE6".     That’s great, good news! Very nice work with The Internet Explorer 6 Countdown.     Here in Sweden we are down to 0.4%.   But why do 7.33% (acording to Netmarketshare) of all people on the Internet use Internet Explorer 6 in 2012? In December 2011 the number was 7.7%, so after all we are on th

Today we are sharing our plan to automatically upgrade Windows customers to the latest version of Internet Explorer available for their PC. This is an important step in helping to move the Web forward. We will start in January for customers in Australia and Brazil who have turned on automatic updating via Windows Update. Similar to our release of IE9 earlier this year, we will take a measured approach, scaling up over time. As always, when upgrading from one version of Internet Explorer to the

Installing Windows is a complex operation that provides an incredibly unique capability—the ability to run a new version of Windows on a vast array of hardware configurations and combinations that were designed with no knowledge of a future Windows, even a version with substantial re-architecture of the Kernel. While most people do not experience the full code path of setup/upgrade (because they buy new PCs and choose to get a new version of Windows that way), even orchestrating the new PC “out

Before the Internet, updates such as service packs and "patches" were impossibly hard to come by. You ordered upgrade "media" or maybe bought a magazine with a CD in it. Of course, the Internet changed all that. In fact, when ftp.microsoft.com was first set up, among the first services was the ability to get updates for MS-DOS and Windows. With the introduction of Windows Update, we invested heavily in building not just a software delivery service, but a commitment to delivering high quality upd

The flexible Windows 8 start screen     The Windows Developer Preview has been out for a month, and I've had a chance to look more closely at its features. Here's an overview of details, small and large, many of which you haven't seen before. One feature I like about the new Start screen design is that it scales for different screen sizes. Here, for example, is a 1920 x 1080 24-inch display. It offers five rows of tiles instead of the three rows on a 1366 x 768 screen.     The Magnifi

Businesses have dragged their feet on upgrading from the ten-year-old Windows XP to newer versions of Microsoft’s operating system. First, they skipped Windows Vista en masse after the OS was the target of scorn from critics and IT analysts. Now, they are making the upgrade to Windows 7, but analysts at Gartner are worried some XP-using businesses will consider skipping Windows 7 in anticipation of next year’s release of Windows 8.     This would not be wise, Gartner and other analyst firms