The Windows 8 lock screen can display information from Metro apps, including the weather.
Windows 8 arrives
- The new and updated games of Windows 8
- Review: Bing Apps are fast, slick, and responsive
- Gentlemen, start your benches: Measuring Windows 8's performance
- Windows, reimagined: A review of Windows 8
- The Windows 8 upgrade install experience
Windows 8 is easy on the eyes. Microsoft made a lot of adjustments to the operating system since it was first revealed in its Consumer Preview, and many of those have bettered the fit and finish of both its user experiences: Metro and Desktop. The Windows team also tried to add a few things along the way to ease users' transition from previous Windows releases, while also helping people who may have never touched a Microsoft platform before.
To help you find your way around this new, undiscovered country of a user interface, we've put together a tour in images beginning with your first startup. Here are the landmarks you'll need, and a few points of interest along the way.
Starting up
Enlarge / On your first login, Windows 8 runs a short animated tutorial on how to find your way around with mouse (and for tablets, with touch). It may do a little to blunt the confusion some users will experience trying to get around the interface.
Enlarge / For example, launch Settings from the Start screen, and you get contextual options for settings at the top. More universal settings commands are at the bottom: information about your network connectivity, volume settings, screen brightness, a tool to hide pop-up notifications, and a Power button to turn the PC off or put it to sleep. There's also access here to "Change PC Settings," which opens up a Metro version of the control panel.
Setting up and getting around
Enlarge / The PC Settings menu is where most of the tasks associated with setting up Windows 8 are handled (though many, such as adding a Windows 8 PC or tablet to a domain, still require the use of the more traditional Control Panel from Windows 8's desktop interface). Personalization includes a selection of lock screen images (including your own photos), Start screen themes, and the ability to set the picture associated with your account.
Enlarge / Some of the themes for the Start screen are a little bit frightening.
Enlarge / When you set up Windows 8, Microsoft encourages you to set up a "Microsoft account" using Microsoft's live service. This links an e-mail address to your personal login (it doesn't need to be a live.com or Hotmail address), and gives you the option of syncing your personalization settings between multiple Windows 8 computers. When you open PC Settings after your first login, you're prompted to "trust" the PC, adding it to a list of computers associated with your account and allowing synchronization to happen.
Enlarge / With a mouse, you can escape from PC Settings by hovering over a corner on the right and clicking on the Start charm, or going to the left side and clicking on the upper right to bounce back to the last screen you were on. You can also use a mouse movement from the upper left to bring up this view of all your open application screens. Then, navigate to a specific one or right-click on it to close the app (or in some cases, "snap" the window to the right or left side of your screen for a split-screen view).
Enlarge / You can even do the "snapped" thing in Desktop view, splitting your view between a Desktop app and a Metro app to, for example, Facebook message a colleague while writing a review.
Enlarge / The Desktop screen is where all non-Metro applications run in Windows 8, and it's where you need to go to access more advanced setup features for the OS. Just as with the Start screen and Metro apps, the "charms" come up on the right side of the screen.
Enlarge / Clicking the Settings charm from the Desktop brings up a contextual menu again. But all the choices in the top of this menu take you to Windows 8's Control Panel.
Enlarge / The Control Panel is largely the same as it was in Windows 7. Here you can handle adjust Windows Firewall, configure network and storage devices, and do other tasks that aren't fully exposed in Metro's PC Settings.
Enlarge / You can also access Windows 8's "Action Center" from the control panel to take care of tasks like "trusting" the PC and performing recommended steps to get your system optimized.
Charmed, I'm sure
Enlarge / Within Metro apps, the Devices charm provides access to devices you can send content to (such as printers). And the Devices menu is also where you control the use of second monitors—setting them up as "mirrored" or as extensions of the primary screen's real estate, or toggling between the two displays.
Enlarge / The Share charm allows you to send content from an app out to the world through e-mail or social networks.
Enlarge / Choose social network sharing, for example, and you can publish to Facebook or Twitter.
The view from the Metro
The built-in Metro apps (well, they don't call them "Metro" anymore, but you've got to call them something) that come with Windows 8 have also been prettied up a bit since we looked at the Consumer Preview. They've gained some more features, so here are some of the highlights:
Enlarge / The Metro Photos app accesses images from the services you link to your Microsoft account (Facebook, Flickr, and SkyDrive), as well as your local image library.
Enlarge / The Mail app has improved considerably, at least in terms of its usefulness. It now accommodates Gmail, AOL, Yahoo, and standard IMAP mail accounts as well as Outlook.com/Hotmail and Exchange/Office 365 mail accounts.
Enlarge / The People app gives you a view of all your contacts from social networks and e-mail address books. From the "Online" view, you can see who's connected to Facebook, for example.
Enlarge / Drill down on a specific contact, and you can see all their social network updates, as well as photos shared through Facebook
Enlarge / Calendar combines information from Facebook, Outlook.com, Google, and Exchange mail accounts into a single full-screen view.
Enlarge / The Music app has now been re-branded as Xbox Music. It connects to the new Xbox Music store as well as anything in your Windows media libraries (and other media servers on your network).
Enlarge / The News app, now branded as "Bing Daily," pulls articles from a variety of news sources, including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Fox, and the Associated Press.
Enlarge / The Bing Travel app pulls content from different travel sources and shows photos of destinations. It also provides access to weather, currency exchange rates, and flight booking info through Kayak.com.
Enlarge / Maps, based on Bing Maps, ties into location info (either based on your IP address or your tablet's GPS) and provides both traffic information and driving directions.
Enlarge / The "Metro" version of Internet Explorer 10 is very low on chrome (and things like history). But it's very touch-friendly, presenting bookmarks and frequently visited pages as Start screen-like tiles. You can toggle over to the Desktop browser if you need more bells and whistles.
Enlarge / Microsoft has also shipped the new Metro client for Skype. It binds your Skype account to your Microsoft ID, and provides a much-simplified voice, video, and chat interface.
Enlarge / Skype's call and chat screen for Metro is all big buttons and whitespace. But the default profile images for Skype show up ugly and bitmapped.
Desktop
While Windows 8's desktop preserves some of the look and feel of the familiar Windows world, some elements have been tweaked—and there are a few features included in Windows 8 Pro and Enterprise that are improved or new.
Enlarge / Hyper-V is now integrated into Windows 8. Both the Hyper-V Manager and Virtual Machine Connection are included, and even if you can't run a virtual machine on your older desktop, you can connect to VMs running on other desktops or servers.
Enlarge / File Explorer, the successor to Windows Explorer, includes a set of drop-down ribbons similar to the Office interface for file and folder-related tasks.
Enlarge / Speaking of tasks, Windows 8 features a new Task Manager that gives much more detailed views of what applications are stealing away your system's performance.
Enlarge / There's also a detailed view of CPU, memory, network, and disk utilization over time in Task Manager. And you can get a look back at application history and other data to track usage in depth.
There's a new progress bar in File Explorer that helps you deal with disk processes that are crushing something else you're working on. You can pause a file copy from the progress bar or kill it outright with button controls within the window.
The new thing you don't want to see
One thing hasn't changed about Windows's "Blue Screen of Death"—it's still blue. But Microsoft has added an emoticon to show that they feel your pain.
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