Hands On With Windows 8.1
Does the latest version of Microsoft’s operating system fix the faults in their troubled OS? We go hands on to find out…
Windows 8 has been a problem for Microsoft. With this new version of Windows, the software giant tried to shift from a mouse-driven interface of Windows 7 to a touch-centric one, focusing on devices like tablets and laptops with touch screens. But the move was met with hostility, from those who dislike the Metro design style to those who lament the loss of the Start button, replaced by a tiled touch-screen interface to the programs that you install.
Microsoft hopes that Windows 8.1 will address these problems, bringing the skeptics back into the fold. They just announced a preview version of this, so we went hands-on to find the differences. You can install the Preview by going to the Microsoft Store on a Windows 8 PC, or by downloading the ISO from here.
I installed the update onto a Samsung Series 7 slate that was running Windows 8. The update installed smoothly from the Windows Store, although it does require downloading a hefty 2.4GB of data.
The first thing that you notice is the return of the Start button, now a small windows logo in the bottom left corner. However, this does not take you into a menu like on Windows 7. Instead, a single touch takes you into the Metro-style start screen.
This screen looks mostly unchanged from Windows 8, but there are some minor tweaks. There are two new sizes of tiles: very small and huge, and programs and tiles can be put into named groups, which makes things easier to organize. UPDATE: This was possible in Windows 8, but the appearance of the groups has been changed.
If you swipe down, you get a menu of all of the programs installed as small icons. If you want to organize your programs, this is a definite plus.
But if the Start screen is something you never got used to, Microsoft now allows you to get away from it, to a degree. By right-clicking on the desktop toolbar, selecting preferences and then Navigation, you can enable two options called “Go to Desktop instead of start when I sign in” and “show my desktop in the background of the start menu” (tip found on the Windows Supersite). These two make Windows 8.1 more like Windows 7: you go straight to the desktop when you log in, and the Start page shares the same background as the desktop. It won’t satisfy everyone, but it is an improvement that will make some users more comfortable.
If you are using a mouse, the Start button also, oddly enough, makes an appearance on the Start screen, which can get rather confusing. It appears when you move the mouse into the bottom right corner of the screen, and moving the mouse up shows you thumbnails of the running programs.
If you prefer to use your tablet in portrait mode, the interface has also been reworked, so the Start menu makes better use of the space.
There are several new apps included with Windows 8.1. including a health and fitness tracker and a Food & Drink app that allows you to collect recipes and meal plans and then to create a weekly shopping lists from these.
These new apps also offer a hands-free mode that apparently allows you to flick between pages by moving your hand over the tablet or saying “next page”. The hand did work, as long as you did it slowly and paused initially to let it recognize the hand, but I was not able to get the voice feature working.
The other interesting change is direct support for 3D printers. If you have a supported 3D printer, it will now appear in the list of printers alongside your inkjet or laser. This didn't work with my Makerbot Replicator, though: the device produced an error when plugged in, and the Makerware software refused to print. Again, we can probably put this down to it being a preview version of the software or a glitch, but with 3D printers becoming more mainstream, this is a step in the right direction.
Microsoft will be offering a new API that will allow apps to print directly to 3D printers, but there are not many details of this available at the moment.
My initial impressions of the Windows 8.1 preview are mixed. There are some interesting new features and twists, but I don’t see that it will win over the skeptics. The Start screen still doesn't work well for me, and the addition of the Start button feels like a band-aid - it covers the missing hole, but does not replace the cut out missing feature. I still use Windows 7 as my main OS, and there is nothing here to make me feel that I have to change over. I will eventually, but for the moment there is no real reason to do so, and nothing in this preview changes that.
The key is, as Microsoft boss Ballmer once declared, “Developers, Developers, Developers”. Software developers have been slow to move to Windows 8 as a requirement because so many people still use Windows 7. And users have been slow to upgrade to Windows 8 because there is no immediate reason to do so, and it changes the way that things work: the change is too abrupt to do casually. And Windows 8.1 does not change that.
To be fair, this is still only a preview, and Microsoft may have more features up their sleeves for the full release of Windows 8.1. However, they will need to be aces, and this preview feels more like Microsoft is bluffing.
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