Now that the Altech Launch countdown website has been running for a few weeks, I thought it was time to mention a few of the articles that I have been writing for them. For those of you unfamiliar with Altech, they are an Authorised OEM Distributor for Microsoft in Australia, and supply a large range of hardware solutions into the system builder and reseller channel. They asked me to write a series of articles for their channel to help promote the new Windows releases this year.

With each new release of Microsoft Windows, there are usually changes to the versions, and the capabilities that are provided by each edition. In today’s post I’ll discuss the major changes you will see with Windows 8, and how to help determine which edition you should be looking at for your customers.

With each new operating system release there are a handful of must have features that makes the life of the tech much easier, and in this post I’ll give you my favourite capabilities in Windows 8 Pro that deliver this. As discussed a two days ago, there won’t be an Ultimate edition, which means Windows 8 Pro will be the edition that you run on a daily basis.

Windows 8 brings some of the biggest changes to the Windows interface than we have seen for a long time, in many ways it can be compared to the switch from Windows 3.x to Windows 95. The Windows 7 interface has been a gradual refinement to the Windows 95 interface, so over time people have adapted without too much trouble. With Windows 8 however, Microsoft has made some major changes, and if you want to adapt to it as quickly as possible, here are a few of the things I’ve found make it much easier to ramp up your productivity.

In the last post I mentioned that learning some of the keyboard shortcuts in Windows 8 can help to ease the transition to a new operating system and improve your productivity. Combined with the new Charms in Windows 8, you will master Windows 8 much faster.

Each new version of Windows introduces new features that target different customer types, but in this post I will highlight the new or improved capabilities that should benefit almost everyone who uses Windows 8. Upcoming posts will drill into specific customer scenarios and benefits in more detail, but for now, here’s what you can look forward to.