Paul Thurrott - Windows 8 Secrets

Здесь есть возможность читать онлайн «Paul Thurrott - Windows 8 Secrets» — ознакомительный отрывок электронной книги совершенно бесплатно, а после прочтения отрывка купить полную версию. В некоторых случаях можно слушать аудио, скачать через торрент в формате fb2 и присутствует краткое содержание. Город: Indianapolis, IN, Год выпуска: 2012, ISBN: 2012, Издательство: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Жанр: Программы, на английском языке. Описание произведения, (предисловие) а так же отзывы посетителей доступны на портале библиотеки ЛибКат.

Windows 8 Secrets: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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Tips, tricks, treats, and secrets revealed on Windows 8
Amazon.com Review
Q & A with the authors of From the Back Cover Microsoft is introducing a major new release of its Windows operating system, Windows 8, and what better way for you to learn all the ins and outs than from two internationally recognized Windows experts and Microsoft insiders, authors Paul Thurrott and Rafael Rivera? They cut through the hype to get at useful information you’ll not find anywhere else, including what role this new OS plays in a mobile and tablet world.
Regardless of your level of knowledge, you’ll discover little-known facts about how things work, what’s new and different, and how you can modify Windows 8 to meet what you need.
Windows 8 Secrets
•  •  •  •  •  •  •  •  •  •  •  •  •  •  •  Windows 8 Secrets Should consumers adopt Windows 8 or Windows RT? Windows RT offers both advantages and disadvantages compared to Windows 8, and which you choose will depend on your needs. The biggest issue with Windows RT, of course, is the lack of desktop application compatibility: Though it comes with most Windows 8 desktop utilities and a version of Microsoft Office, Windows RT is not compatible with any third party or Microsoft desktop Windows applications that are already included. That said, Windows RT should offer much better battery life and amazingly thin and light form factors when compared to similar PCs and devices designed around a traditional PC microprocessor.
What’s best way to upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 8? Upgrade or clean install? Is an upgrade safe? Generally speaking, you will actually see better results with an upgrade with this version of Windows, which is different than our experience with previous versions. To be safe, backup everything first, perform the upgrade, and if it doesn’t go well, you can always do a clean install afterwards.
One thing to watch during an upgrade, however, is Internet Explorer: If you have configured a different browser as your default browser in Windows 7 and then upgrade to Windows 8, you will actually lose the ability to run the Metro-style version of Internet Explorer 10. You can fix this by configuring IE as your default browser after the fact.
Does Windows 8 really run faster and better than Windows 7 on the same hardware? Yes. But in real world usage, you won’t notice much of a difference in usage. That said, Windows 8 boots, resumes from sleep, and performs other power management functions much, much faster than does Windows 7. You can also use Push Button Reset to refresh or reset a Windows 8 PC in just minutes.
Will all of my Windows 7 apps and drivers work with Windows 8? For the most part, yes. Microsoft claims that if it works with Windows 7, it should work with Windows 8. And in our experience, that has definitely been the case. Even the now-ancient game “Halo: Combat Evolved,” from 2003 installs and runs just fine. That said, you may need to uninstall some applications if you’re upgrading from Windows 7 to Windows 8, and then reinstall them after the fact. And of course there will always be some exceptions.
What are the most important keyboard combinations we should memorize? If you remember just one keyboard shortcut, it should be WINKEY + C, which enables the Charms and access to several key system functions, including Search, Share, Start, Devices, and Settings. Some other useful keyboard shortcuts include WINKEY + D (to navigate directly to the desktop), WINKEY + I (for Settings), and WINKEY + L for lock. And let’s not forget our favorite keyboard combination: WINKEY + X, which displays a power user menu of sorts containing lots of useful shortcuts.
In their introduction, the authors of this book say that “with Windows 8, suddenly, everything is different.” And they are right—with a completely new interface presenting users with a completely new experience, Windows 8 and its device-based cousin Windows RT are arguably the biggest change in Windows ever. But bestselling authors Paul Thurrott and Rafael Rivera have you covered with Windows 8 Secrets, a completely new, written-from-scratch guide to the ins and outs of this new Windows experience. Covering topics both large and small, ranging from how the new immersive experiences and familiar Windows desktop interface coexist to the subtle differences in interacting with Windows 8 via touch, keyboard, or mouse, this book digs in to reveal helpful and advanced insight in all major Windows areas: application management, data backup and security, networking, and much more.
The Insider’s Guide to:
•  •  •  •  •  •  •  •  •  The Secrets series reveals:
•  •  •  •  •  [Contain tables. Best viewed with CoolReader.]

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SmartScreen uses a Microsoft hosted “reputation” service that uses actual user feedback to help determine whether files are trustworthy. So that means you can help make the service more useful for everyone simply by using this feature.

To help protect you against malicious software more globally, Windows 8 includes a special version of SmartScreen, called Windows SmartScreen, which protects the filesystem against malicious files, no matter where they come from. Windows SmartScreen works exactly like IE 9’s SmartScreen feature, meaning it utilizes both holistic sensing technologies and an Internet-hosted service to determine whether files are malicious or at least suspected of being so.

Configuring Windows SmartScreen

To configure Windows SmartScreen, you’ll need to launch Action Center, which is available via the system tray (it’s the icon that resembles a cute little white flag) or through Start Search.

Using the Action Center route, you’ll see an option on the left of the window called Change Windows Start Screen settings. Click this option to display the window shown in Figure 12-17.

Figure 12-17:Windows SmartScreen settings

We recommend using the default setting which is Get administrator approval - фото 410

We recommend using the default setting, which is “Get administrator approval before running an unrecognized app from the Internet.” Unless you’re regularly hanging out in torrent sites or other gray areas of the Interwebs, you’ll find this isn’t too annoying.

Using Windows SmartScreen

When Windows SmartScreen fires up, you’ll know it: The full-screen notification shown in Figure 12-18 displays, interrupting whatever you were doing.

Figure 12-18:Windows SmartScreen notifications are a bit hard to miss.

As with any fullscreen notification youll want to deal with this before - фото 411

As with any full-screen notification, you’ll want to deal with this before proceeding. And while SmartScreen can certainly suffer from false positives, our advice is to think very carefully before just dismissing this. It’s warning you for a reason.

Action Center Improvements

If you’re familiar with Action Center from Windows 7, you know that it’s an improved version of the Security Center that dates all the way back to Windows XP with Service Pack 2. In Windows 8, Action Center carries forward largely unchanged in that it still performs the same function of tracking security and troubleshooting items in the OS and popping up notifications when something goes wrong.

What’s changed is that Action Center now tracks far more items than it did in Windows 7. And while many of the items it tracks are, as you might expect, related to new features in Windows 8, some aren’t. It’s just fleshed out better.

In Windows 8, Action Center now tracks these additional items:

• Windows SmartScreen:This security feature, described earlier, debuted in Windows 8 and provides anti-malware protection directly through the Windows filesystem.

• Windows activation:While activation is hardly new to Windows 8, Microsoft has created an Action Center experience in this release that tracks whether your copy of Windows is activated, and thus valid. You can see this interface in Figure 12-19.

Figure 12-19:Windows is activated

Microsoft accountThe ability to sign in to Windows 8 with a Microsoft - фото 412

• Microsoft account:The ability to sign in to Windows 8 with a Microsoft account is obviously new to this version of the OS, but the underlying technology that Action Center is actually tracking here is whether your account is working properly and syncing settings from the PC to SkyDrive (and thus to other PCs) and vice versa.

• Automatic maintenance:Like previous Windows versions, Windows 8 will automatically run a scheduled maintenance routine at a set time, 3:00 a.m. What’s changed in Windows 8 is that this activity is now tracked by Action Center to ensure that it completes successfully. But you can use the Start maintenance link to run a manual check or Change maintenance settings to configure a new time.

• HomeGroup:Action Center now checks to see whether you’re part of a homegroup. This is important because signing in with a Microsoft account breaks the normal workgroup-style home network sharing we used to use.

CROSSREF

We examine networking issues in Chapter 13.

• File History:The new File History feature works with the Push Button Reset functionality in Windows 8 to create a more flexible way of restoring lost data than the old method, a combination of Previous Files (which no one even knew existed) and Windows Backup (which was ponderous and slow).

• Drive status:Action Center now checks to see whether all of the fixed disks attached to your computer are working properly.

When Action Center detects an issue, it provides notifications via its system tray icon. Clicking these, or the associated warnings that appear in the Action Center control panel, brings you to the user interface you need to mitigate the issue. For example, as part of its overall system performance and reliability tracking, Action Center could eventually warn you to disable app[lication]s to help improve performance. This slightly off-base recommendation—it really means, “disable startup applications to improve boot-time performance” and has nothing to do with Metro-style apps—links to the Task Manager. In Windows 8, the Task Manager now provides a Startup tab that lets you enable and disable applications (but not Metro-style apps) that are configured to run at boot time. This can be seen in Figure 12-20.

But Wait, There’s More

In addition to the features discussed previously, Microsoft has improved a number of security features that debuted in previous Windows versions, too. Most of the features don’t require any user interaction. They simply work in the background, ensuring that Windows 8 is as secure as it can be.

Figure 12-20:Task Manager now helps you disable boot-time applications.

A small sampling includes the following Credential ManagerWindows has long - фото 413

A small sampling includes the following:

• Credential Manager:Windows has long included a Credential Manager interface—previously called Windows Vault—that helps you combine the usernames and passwords for the local network and for websites with your Windows user account. New to this release is that you can now tie these other sign-ins with your Microsoft account for the first time, since most people will be signing in to Windows 8 with that account type.

• Windows kernel:The innermost part of Windows has been shored up with protection technologies that were curiously available only to other Windows components in previous OS versions.

• ASLR:Since Windows Vista, Windows has employed a technique called address space layout randomization (ASLR) to randomly load code and data into different memory addresses at run time, cutting down on an entire class of memory-based attacks. In Windows 8, ASLR has been improved with even more randomness. And it’s been extended to even more Windows components.

• Memory:Modern Windows versions have of course always included various forms of protection against memory-based attacks, and the move to isolated Metro-style apps will help in this and other regards. But Windows 8 also includes new protections against “use after free” vulnerabilities, where rogue or malicious applications are able to examine and exploit freed up memory that still includes valuable data or other code.

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