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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 Hairyfeet on Saturday September 20 2014, @09:42PM
Because 1.- Its gonna be cheap and you can pass that savings onto your customers, 2.- its gonna be easy, with fast image based installs, less time for you should equal less cost to your customers, and 3.- Its gonna be as much as 40% faster on the same hardware thanks to improvements under the hood, oh and don't forget 4.- It will extend their support until 2025 which considering how powerful even low end machines are today there is no reason to think those systems couldn't be viable in 2025. I have customers with Phenom I X3s and X4s that have gone from XP through Win 7 and they still have cycles to spare, no reason to think with up to 40% better performance those systems wouldn't keep happily chugging along.
I had my customers skip 8 because the improvements simply weren't worth putting up with the "LULZ I Iz A Tablet, LULZ" UI bullshit and NO I do NOT consider hacks like Start8 a viable path and here is why...I have seen in the past what happens with those kind of hacks, a security update to a critical subsystem the hack depends on comes along and BAM! you reboot to a black screen or worse, you get really hard to pin down random BSODs days or even weeks later. Its just not worth the risk to hack something as critical as the desktop. But with this there won't be any need, it will have a sane UI for desktops and laptops and the Metro crap will only be an option in tablets and convertibles. Its supposed to be faster, easier, better search...whats not to like?
Oh and as I said for us system builders there were a LOT of dual core systems built with XP or Vista on them that could still be great netbox units today but the cost of upgrading just isn't economically viable, this fixes that if the $20 price tag is true. I have put Win 7 on Athlon64s and Pentium Ds and for basic web surfer boxes they ran just fine, with a 40% speed boost? They would have been great for day to day tasks. I have a LOT of businesses on Vista and 7 thanks to the steals I was getting thanks to the TLB bug in the Phenom I ($35 triples and $45 quads? Hells yeah!) and this would allow them to upgrade all those systems without putting a huge dent in their wallet. Remember in 2007, early Vista era, we had quad core systems that could hold 4GB+ of RAM and take PCIe 2 GPUs, these systems are frankly overkill for nearly every task Joe and Jane business user has so there is really no reason they couldn't continue humming along for another decade. hell the system I'm typing this on is a Vista era Pentium Dual Core that I use as my main system at the shop, for a lousy $50 I can upgrade to a C2Q and with it having long life solid caps I see no reason I couldn't have this system in 2025, just as my previous netbox was a 2003 Sempron that managed to last until 2011. Hell if it could have taken a dual I'd probably still have it, last I heard its still surfing the web for the checkout girl of the local grocery store, so no reason to think that a quad capable from 2008 couldn't last even longer so why not give it another 10 years of support if its cheap?
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.