Summary: This morning, Microsoft officially took the wraps off of Windows 8, unveiling its radically revised new operating system in front af an audience of software developers. I had a chance to get my hands on the new system (literally) last night. Here’s what you can look forward to. If you think you know what to expect from Windows 8, just wait till you get your hands on it. I stayed up far too late last night, experimenting with the developer preview build that Microsoft will show off to

Summary: Windows 8 client — and not just server — will include Microsoft’s Hyper-V hypervisor in some still unspecified SKU/SKUs, Microsoft officials publicly acknowledged in a new “Building Windows 8″ blog post. As those dissecting leaked Windows 8 leaked builds discovered months ago, Microsoft’s hypervisor is part of Windows 8 client, and not just server. On September 7, Microsoft acknowledged this fact officially in a new post to the “Building Windows 8″ blog. As the new Microsoft post on H

Are you the sort of person who prefers to shut your PC down at the end of the day rather than hibernate it or put it to sleep, but do you still want the system to start up fast? Windows 8 has a new feature that will be of great interest to you. The feature is called ‘fast startup mode’ and it is a hybrid between a standard cold boot and restoring your PC from a hibernated state. How does it work? Gabe Aul, director of program management in Windows, explains over on the Building Windows 8 blog:

In a new post by Steven Sinofsky on the Building Windows 8 blog, we learn that Windows 8 will not only have native VHD, but also native ISO support in Explorer (finally!). Windows users can now rejoice at no longer having to use a third-party application to view ISOs. A video created by Rajeev Nagar, a group program manager on the Storage and File Systems team at Microsoft, explains the process and gives us another great glimpse of the new Ribbon UI in Windows 8, as well as the updated Taskbar

Windows Explorer is a foundation of the user experience of the Windows desktop and has undergone several design changes over the years, but has not seen a substantial change in quite some time. Windows 8 is about reimagining Windows, so we took on the challenge to improve the most widely used desktop tool (except maybe for Solitaire) in Windows. Alex Simons on the program management team authored this post with a detailed look at the evolution of Explorer and the major improvements to its interf

As the Windows team did with Windows 7, the Windows team is going to be are blogging about the engineering process and decisions with Windows 8. Microsoft kicked off the new “Building Windows 8″ blog with an August 15 introductory post by Windows President Steven Sinofsky. As usual with Sinofsky posts, there are lots of words (1,250 of them) and not much a Windows watcher would consider to be “news.” In fact, Sinofsky’s post stressed that the purpose of the blog isn’t about generating traffic,

If you’re a Windows watcher, circle this date on your calendar: April 10, 2012.   That’s the date when mainstream support for Windows Vista officially ends. And it cannot come soon enough for Microsoft, whose public image was badly damaged by the massively unliked Vista. If the rumors about a possible Windows 8 release in April 2012 are true, it will be an almost perfect changing of the guard.   But vanquishing the ghost of Windows Vista is the easy challenge for Microsoft. Windows XP is sti

At long, long last, Windows XP is no longer the number one, end-user operating system. It only took, Microsoft, what? Not quite two years to get desktop users off XP to Windows 7? Well, you could look at it that way, but you’d be wrong.   The truth is that users haven’t been moving from XP to 7 of their own free will. They’ve been moving only because their old XP PCs are finally giving up the ghost. Then, and only then, are they getting Windows 7. Or, are they? If you look closer at Net Applic