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Infoworld reports that with Microsoft scheduled to provide a technical preview of its new Windows 9 operating system at an event on September 30, screenshots and videos of the Windows Technical Preview have been leaking that show the addition of a new Start menu, a virtual desktops feature, and a Notification Center. Here's a recap of what's been revealed so far:
The desktop's Start Menu returns, with Windows 7-like cascading menus on the left and Metro tiles on the right. Menus and tiles can be dragged, dropped, pinned, unpinned, resized, and sliced and diced. We haven't seen any fully functional "interactive" tiles as yet — Metro apps that respond to interaction with their tiles without popping up on the screen — but I expect that will be coming soon.
Metro apps running in resizable windows on the desktop. There appears to be some debate about whether the Charms bar will get the axe in the process, but all of the Charms you're likely to want will be in the right-click menu in the upper-left corner of the title bar.
Virtual desktops, which will undoubtedly get some sort of whiz-bang marketing name, because "virtual" is supposedly too spooky for consumers. Windows has had virtual desktops since Windows XP, but you had to install a third-party app (or something like Sysinternals Desktop, from Microsoft) to get them to work.
A Notification Center, which displays and lets you get at both bubble and toast notifications. It's long overdue.
(Score: 2) by tynin on Saturday September 20 2014, @03:52PM
Can you explain what WIM is? I tried looking into it, and as best I could tell it is a file based Windows disk image, similar to qcow or maybe raw in concept. How does a file based disk image translate to increase in performance?
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Saturday September 20 2014, @10:09PM
Because instead of having the entire OS unpacked all over the hard drive AND having another copy in backup AND the whole SXS keeping copies piled up for every version of a .DLL you need? they can be kept packed in WIM files instead. With modern PCs having such powerful number crunching ability its often much faster to do a decompress than having to do a lot of seeks on a HDD, even an SSD is limited by the top SATA throughput. With WIM instead of spending all that time loading a bunch of files splattered all over the drive the PC simply loads a single compressed WIM file and decompresses what is needed and from talking to those that have tried it it makes nearly any system faster to boot, more responsive, and on SSDs it uses less write cycles which translates to longer life.
Anyway hope that answers your question, be sure to check out the tech preview when it hits and time it yourself and compare it to your current Win 7 install to see for yourself, I know that is one of the first things I'm gonna be doing with my netbook!
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 2) by tynin on Saturday September 20 2014, @11:07PM
Thanks for the answer :)