As a follow on to yesterday’s article, here’s the second week of Windows 8 content I created for the Altech Windows 8 launch website. Now that the Windows 8 launch is getting closer, it’s definitely worth jumping in and exploring if you haven’t done so already.

Windows 8 Taking Advantage Of Hardware Improvements

When building new versions of Windows, Microsoft needs to think about not just the hardware that is currently in market, but also the hardware that will be in market during the OS lifecycle. This is one of the reasons why so much effort has gone into making Windows 8 take advantage of things such as touch technologies, which most of our PCs don’t have today. This post doesn’t set out to be a comprehensive list of technologies that Windows 8 can take advantage of, instead it’s a handful of areas that have seen improvements, and what you can expect to see.

32 Bit Versus 64 Bit – Is 32 Bit Windows Dead?

With Windows 8 still shipping in 32 and 64 bit editions, the big question now is why would you still be deploying 32 bit? In this post I will cover off the pros and cons of 32 and 64 bit versions of Windows 8, which have changed slightly from the same discussion on Windows 7. With the passing of time some of the traditional arguments for sticking to 32 deployments, such as 64 bit capable PC market penetration, systems with 4GB or more of RAM, and legacy applications usage, have all changed.

Windows 8 Features For Small And Medium Business

The upgrade cycle for the desktop operating system for SMB customers has become more closely aligned to the new PC deployment process. The days of doing a desktop operating system upgrade just because there is a new version available are long gone, and instead the world has moved to one where change on the desktop is not embraced as it once was. In today’s post I will discuss some of the things that should help SMB customers see value in what Windows 8 delivers.

Is the Windows Experience Index Still Relevant?

When Microsoft introduced the Windows Experience Index (WEI) with Windows Vista, it had grand plans of making it easier for customers to determine whether their system was capable of running upcoming software titles, as well as giving an easy way to compare the top level performance of multiple PCs.

Hyper-V In Windows 8 Pro

In case you’ve missed it, virtualisation is one of the biggest trends to hit IT in a long time, and Microsoft had fallen behind on the client side with Windows 7 and Virtual PC. Virtual PC did offer some nice capabilities, such as XP Mode where you could publish applications that would only run on Windows XP based from within a virtual machine. It also provided the ability to access the USB devices connected to your PC. There was one primary area where it fell behind though, and that was performance. It was limited to a single CPU and didn’t have accelerated graphics, so overall the performance wasn’t that great.