Reengineering the Windows Boot Experience

Interesting stuff I guess. Still not really sold on the touch screen stuff though.
 
Term-X said:
Still not really sold on the touch screen stuff though.
Click to expand...

My thoughts exactly. I prefer the physicaly keyboard, I dont ever want to be touching my nice pretty LED-LCD screens! Not to mention the whole touch thing just seems illogical with two screens.
 
I used windows 8 Developers Preview for two days and after a few reboots it booted up a lot faster than windows 7. I went back to windows 7 because some software I use wasnt compatible with it.
 
So the Windows Boot Experience®©™...

Lets you boot off a thumbdrive without selecting it in the UEFI.
Lets you change boot.ini settings without entering Windows.
Lets you turn off your computer before you enter Windows.

Aside from that, it seems to be the existing boot options thrown into a semi-pretty GUI. Anything I missed?
 
ZenDragon said:
My thoughts exactly. I prefer the physicaly keyboard, I dont ever want to be touching my nice pretty LED-LCD screens! Not to mention the whole touch thing just seems illogical with two screens.
Click to expand...

Nobody is making you use a touchscreen, jesus christ people.
 
The kernel session is written to disk so the only thing that is needed to be retrieved is the the user session which speeds up boot.

Most of the things they showed are done by improvements made to WDDM 1.2 and will apply to BIOS based systems as well. They've done a lot of work to eliminated most of the resolution changes and text screens where possible.
 
Term-X said:
Interesting stuff I guess. Still not really sold on the touch screen stuff though.
Click to expand...

i wasnt sure of it either until i got my acer iconia tab which is a full windows 7 tablet. the touch screen actually works pretty well for browsing.. etc.

i do still use the keyboard that it can plus into though for CMD prompt sessions for work stuff.

and she was a perfect example of whats wrong with security.. her admin password was only 123

;>)

LOL
 
Loudspeaker said:
Yup nothing changed... They just gave easier access to tools and utilities you need when a user does something horrible to their machine. :rolleyes:
Click to expand...
So you realize you listed a change after saying there are not changes, right?
Ease of use, especially for the less tech savvy, is a pro people. I am not fond of touch screens, but the fact that they are incorporating a seemless overlay for touch is extreme forward thinking. MS is getting a multi-role OS and is looking to the future. I think they have been doing a good job from W7 and on, many good decisions have been made. The most major thing we can appreciate, is that MS is not *removing* features, as far as I can tell.
 
The part of the boot experience I would like re-engineered is the price! Computers have became cheaper by the minute over the years and soon the OS will cost more than the PC.
 
Well, this is already the case...I bought a Phenom II X3 720 with 2 GB RAM and a 80 GB HDD for $100. The guy upgraded, pulled out the big sticks of RAM, PCIe Video and big HDD's...but still...it is a nice looking, working machine with good enough everything to run Win8.
 
Use the console to remove a bad driver? I know a lot about windows but I have no IDEA how to do that, nor have ever had to. It's an odd thing to bring up in this demo, the preferred recovery method for a bad driver situation would be to select 'Last known good configuration' on boot. Hopefully that's still there.
 
TeeJayHoward said:
So the Windows Boot Experience®©™...

Lets you boot off a thumbdrive without selecting it in the UEFI.
Lets you change boot.ini settings without entering Windows.
Lets you turn off your computer before you enter Windows.

Aside from that, it seems to be the existing boot options thrown into a semi-pretty GUI. Anything I missed?
Click to expand...

Touch support during boot, for one.

Also, boot.ini hasn't been used since XP.
 
drlava said:
Use the console to remove a bad driver? I know a lot about windows but I have no IDEA how to do that, nor have ever had to. It's an odd thing to bring up in this demo, the preferred recovery method for a bad driver situation would be to select 'Last known good configuration' on boot. Hopefully that's still there.
Click to expand...

From the screen she was at you can still run devmgmt.msc in the command prompt which bring up the device manager. If you run explorer.exe your start bar will appear too. It isn't a true command prompt only environment.
 
I like the improvement, wasn't necessary for me personally, but I imagine it'll save some time and grief for alot of people
 
Been using Windows 8 x64 on one of my laptops, a 2009 Compaq with a T4200 @ 2.00GHz, 4GB of RAM and 500GB WD Scorpio Blue 7200rpm and, even though I did the iffy registry hack which enables the Start menu and gets rid of or hides the tablet features, I have had no problems of any kind. Boot times are around 20 seconds, so much faster than when the machine had Vista on it, even after a clean, non-Compaq Vista install. I am sure if I had an SSD instead of the Scorpio, boot times might be more like 15 seconds or less. Boot times are so much better that I often now use "shutdown" instead of "sleep".

microsoft-windows-8-Touch-the-Future1-300x187.jpg
 
Command prompt boots up quite slow. I'm guessing it's a weak-ish tablet computer.

I was watching for connecting using VPN (connect using dial-up) but I don't see it in this demonstration.
 
I'm thinking about putting it on an Acer One. Not sure how will it perform.
 
Tawnos said:
Touch support during boot, for one.
Click to expand...
Aah, didn't think about that. I don't use touchscreens.

Also, boot.ini hasn't been used since XP.
Click to expand...
One of my pet peeves. "I've got a great idea! Let's get rid of an easy-to-use and easy-to-modify configuration file, and instead add another command for admins to memorize!" At least you can still run msconfig on most servers to edit it.
 
TeeJayHoward said:
Aah, didn't think about that. I don't use touchscreens.


One of my pet peeves. "I've got a great idea! Let's get rid of an easy-to-use and easy-to-modify configuration file, and instead add another command for admins to memorize!" At least you can still run msconfig on most servers to edit it.
Click to expand...

Perhaps, but you still don't need to be a rocket scientist to modify Windows Vista and 7 boot. Download BCDEdit and you're golden.
 
I'm impressed overall with my week on Windows 8 on a my EP121 pen and touch slate and my QX9650 single screen desktop. Windows 8 is the beginning of a notion that I think is incredibly important for computers and that is being able to use the SAME operating environment across a broad array of form factors and input devices. It's the clearest and most powerful goal that a Windows release has had since Windows 3, perhaps ever.

I do find it odd that in tech forums you see so many people resistant to the idea that a single OS can serve this purpose and that somehow doing keyboard and mouse input well precludes going touch well. Yes this developer preview has some rough spots and yes it might mean some differences in the way this used to work but as is often the case with Windows changes lead to grumbling and very often Microsoft seems be able to prove that it's not as bad as you might think once a person gets used to a change, many often come about from thinking the change was a bad idea to thinking that it was better than they originally thought.

Overall I love what Microsoft is doing and I hope that it's successful because it means that Apple and Google will have to respond in that a $500 touch only limited functional device just won't cut it. I'm sure the iPad will continue to do great but I think it puts a lot of downward pressure on tablet pricing assuming that good $500 Windows 8 tablets that can do it all come along.
 
Win8 looks like MS finally is listening. The boot options are nice, but I found something even better: driver installation without rebooting! How long have we been asking for that?
 
TeeJayHoward said:
Aah, didn't think about that. I don't use touchscreens.


One of my pet peeves. "I've got a great idea! Let's get rid of an easy-to-use and easy-to-modify configuration file, and instead add another command for admins to memorize!" At least you can still run msconfig on most servers to edit it.
Click to expand...

"Let's get rid of something that is accessed by any text editors which can save it in different formats (ASCII, UTF-8, UTF-16) with different byte order markers! Additionally, make it so that access depends on a programmatic contract where sanity checks can be done on requested changes!"

Replacing boot.ini with bcd was like replacing other .ini files with the registry. It's a great idea that people who haven't considered the deeper implications complain about.
 
With the price of All-In-One PCs with touchscreens really coming down, I wonder how this runs on them. Good, I would imagine.
 
yankee495 said:
The part of the boot experience I would like re-engineered is the price! Computers have became cheaper by the minute over the years and soon the OS will cost more than the PC.
Click to expand...

So has everything else that requires actual human input/face - face contact, i.e., healthcare, auto mechanics, etc.

Coding an OS isn't the same as programming a CNC mill and requires a heck of a lot more thought than just schlepping off a list of requirements to India for coding.
 
looks like win 8 is going to be another great hit, but I bet win 9 will be even better once they figure out what needs to be changed in 8.
 
DOOMHAMMA said:
So you realize you listed a change after saying there are not changes, right?
Ease of use, especially for the less tech savvy, is a pro people. I am not fond of touch screens, but the fact that they are incorporating a seemless overlay for touch is extreme forward thinking. MS is getting a multi-role OS and is looking to the future. I think they have been doing a good job from W7 and on, many good decisions have been made. The most major thing we can appreciate, is that MS is not *removing* features, as far as I can tell.
Click to expand...

Sorry I'll make sure to "/sarcasm" next time... :)
 
Tawnos said:
"Let's get rid of something that is accessed by any text editors which can save it in different formats (ASCII, UTF-8, UTF-16) with different byte order markers! Additionally, make it so that access depends on a programmatic contract where sanity checks can be done on requested changes!"
Click to expand...
Amazing how Solaris, BSD, OS X, and all variants of Linux don't have the format/byte order issue, despite having text-based configuration files. ;) Really, I'm just an old fart who doesn't like change. I normally change the boot configuration via msconfig or System Properties/Startup and Recovery. If I hadn't of stumbled across BCDEdit in my MCITP training, I would have been confused the first time I remoted into a headless Win2K8 system and tried to change boot.ini. I still see the change as being unnecessary.

Replacing boot.ini with bcd was like replacing other .ini files with the registry. It's a great idea that people who haven't considered the deeper implications complain about.
Click to expand...
I'm not a fan of the registry either. The way it's set up, any program can overwrite a registry entry for any other program. When a program is uninstalled, it doesn't necessarily remove all it's registry entries. There's redundant entries for single objectives. (Seriously, how many places can you stash a command to start a program when the user logs in?) Not to mention it's a single point of failure, and I'm quite against those!
 
ZenDragon said:
My thoughts exactly. I prefer the physicaly keyboard, I dont ever want to be touching my nice pretty LED-LCD screens! Not to mention the whole touch thing just seems illogical with two screens.
Click to expand...

same, touch screen has it's place but it is not for me, it seems so much less efficient and tiring to always be touching everything.. heck typing alone would be a workout.
 
I don't know what the deal is with this supposed new love for touch screens. Last thing I want to do is put my fingerprints on my monitor. I don't get the attraction. As for the text appearing at boot, I rather like to see what's going on rather than just a blank screen. Overall I'm not a bit impressed.
 
I haven't been interested in this OS since its focused on tablets only. The UI is terrible for a desktop so unless that changes, I have no interest in windows 8.
 
it really isn't that hard to adjust, and you can't take what is essentially a prebeta and say that the final won't have a way to make it more traditional.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top