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.]

Windows 8 Secrets — читать онлайн ознакомительный отрывок

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Oddly, and humorously, Wiley not only agreed, but they had also separately come to the same conclusion, and were likewise worried that the daunting task of starting over from scratch would be uninteresting to us.

Problem solved.

The resulting book, the one you now hold, is the product of this reimagining. It is significantly shorter than the previous book—about a third shorter, I guess—and doesn’t drift into surrounding ecosystem products and services unless they’re central to the discussion. Part of the reason we’re able to do this is that Microsoft has simply built so much into Windows 8, while extending its support to cloud services in more seamless ways. But part of it is us just saying no to peripheral topics as well.

Our goal, as always, is to make you more efficient and proficient in Windows. It’s to take you from your current skill level to the next level by revealing information about this new Windows that is new—simply because Microsoft has added whatever new features and functionality—and, as important, because it is new to you. In the old days, before the pervasive online connectivity we all now enjoy, the notion of “secrets” was pretty straightforward, and you could safely assume that you’d pick up a copy of whatever Secrets book and discover unique information—often obviously called out in gratuitous “Secret” boxes—that was not available anywhere else.

Today, that’s not possible.

Both Rafael and I have discussed virtually every topic in this book online in some form already. I often test content on my own website before writing about it in the book to gather feedback and questions from users, which I can often present to Microsoft for further internal insights. The value of this book, then, is manifold. It’s not just some simple compendium of previously published online articles. It’s a deeper, more thorough examination of what’s truly new in Windows 8, backed by months and months of research and usage, and feedback from the people at Microsoft who actually made the product. And it’s all gathered in one organized and convenient place: this book.

Things have changed for you, the reader, as well. We’re now making more assumptions than ever before. And while the bar isn’t particularly high, both Rafael and I wanted to make sure that you understood what you are getting into here.

That is, we assume you know how to use Windows. And by this, we don’t just mean how to translate the physical actions of moving a mouse on a surface into on-screen mouse cursor movements. We expect you to know Windows 7 inside and out, and to be familiar with the way it works. This is important, and different, because we’re carrying over virtually no secrets, tips, or information from Windows 7 Secrets . This book is all-new, and assumes you already understand the features that were previously available, often in unchanged form, in Windows 7.

But don’t worry that this book will be daunting in some way. It’s not. We used the same approachable and conversational style that we’ve always used because, well, that’s the way we do things. It’s just that adding the relevant content from Windows 7 Secrets to this book would have necessitated a 1,500-page tome. No one wanted that. So we took what is a bold step for us. We think the book is better for it. And we hope you agree.

But we want to hear from you either way. We view this book in the same way we do our own websites and other work, as a conversation about technology between people who are truly interested in learning more, always. And that includes us. If we did something right or screwed up something terribly, please, do let us know.

These are our personal e-mail addresses and Twitter accounts. We’re interested in continuing the conversation.

Paul Thurrott

thurrott@hotmail.com

@thurrott

Rafael Rivera

rafael@withinwindows.com

@withinrafael

Windows 8: Big Upgrade, or Biggest Upgrade Ever?

Some—including Microsoft—have described Windows 8 as the biggest change to Windows since the seminal release of Windows 95 in 1995. And while it’s convenient to make such a claim—every Windows release in the years since has been compared to that milestone—the truth is far more dramatic.

Windows 8 isn’t the biggest Windows release since Windows 95. It’s the biggest release, ever .

To understand why this is so requires an understanding of the history of Windows and of the technologies that have driven each release. Early versions of Windows weren’t even proper operating systems. Instead, they were graphical shells that ran on top of the real OS, called MS-DOS. MS-DOS was a product of its era—the early 1980s—which is to say it was an arcane command-line system that wasn’t user friendly in the least. But since MS-DOS ran on the most popular computers of the day, many companies, including Microsoft, created user-friendly shells that hid the complexity of MS-DOS while retaining the system’s most vital attribute, its compatibility with MS-DOS applications.

Some of these shells were essentially text-based, like MS-DOS itself, while some ran in special graphical modes. Microsoft’s approach, called Windows, used the latter approach because the company had been deeply involved in the creation of the first consumer-oriented graphical OS, which shipped with the first Apple Macintosh. Sensing that graphical user interfaces, or GUIs, were the future, Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates drove his company to create a PC alternative that worked on top of DOS.

Thanks to its shaky MS-DOS underpinnings, early Windows versions weren’t technically very elegant. They also weren’t very pretty or usable, but by version 3.0 in the early 1990s, Microsoft suddenly had a hit on its hands and the industry began coalescing around this GUI, much as it had embraced plain old MS-DOS a decade earlier.

Without getting too deep into snooze-inducing technical arcana, there was a brief moment in the early 1990s when Microsoft was actually backing three desktop PC operating systems. First was MS-DOS and Windows, a homegrown solution with serious technical limitations. Second was OS/2, a joint project with IBM that would have replaced DOS/Windows on PCs had it been successful. And third was a more obscure project, first called NT, which was a stable and reliable UNIX alternative that had nothing in common with DOS/Windows at all.

But as NT evolved into Windows NT, Microsoft did two things to bring this system closer to its DOS-based cousin. First, it determined that NT would utilize the same GUI as DOS-based Windows, starting with the Windows 3.x Program Manager shell in 1993. And second, it created a 32-bit environment called Win32 that could run DOS-based Windows (and even some DOS) applications, creating a modicum of compatibility. Over time, the Win32 environment was ported to DOS-based Windows versions (starting with Windows 95), the driver models were combined, and Microsoft began its efforts to transition completely to the NT codebase, an event that was originally planned for Windows 2000 but had to be put off until Windows XP, in 2001.

Whew.

The point is that during all of this transition and evolution, Microsoft never changed the user experience, the Windows runtime, and the underlying technologies that developers use all at the same time. But with Windows 8, it has done just that.

Windows 8 includes a completely new user experience we call Metro that offers smartphone-like, full-screen experiences in lieu of (well, in addition to) the old-fashioned “windowed” interface provided by the desktop environment from previous Windows versions. And Metro runs on top of a completely new runtime engine, called Windows Runtime, or WinRT, which in turn offers developers a completely new set of native APIs, with new capabilities and a new way of doing things.

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