Hi everyone. So it seems that we are just a few hours away now from the reveal of Windows 9
or as I am putting a bet on it, only Windows.
No 9, no XP, no silly numbering
convention. Just Windows.Now my reason for saying this is because the other parts of the
Windows eco system are exactly branded as that. No Windows Mobile, no Windows 8.1 they are simply being branded as Windows devices.
This would track pretty closely with what we expect
from Microsoft which is a kind of unification of their offering. At the moment
there's something like 30 different versions of Windows.
It's crazy out there and essentially they want to try and bring that down into just
a few desktop iterations and tablets obviously
and then Windows Mobile as well.
Effectively they will simply brand it as Windows and it's the Windows kernal running across everything.
Now, what do we know about Windows 9 so far, or Windows as we'll simply call it from here on in?
Well we know that we're getting the start menu back and in fact we're getting two iterations of the start menu,
what we could describe as the fat start menu which includes the tiles interface merged with it
and a cut down start menu which is much more reminiscent of the Windows 7.
We know that the general look and feel of new Windows is not going to change dramatically.
Mostly just some icon tweaks and a few little layout changes. But everything looks like it's going to be pretty similar.
We also suspect, but we don't know which versions of Windows will get this, it may be an Enterprise only thing
but it does appear that we are going to get baked-in virtualisation as well
allowing you to run multiple virtual sessions effectively.
Now this might actually come into play for the consumer versions of Windows as well
because what Microsoft might be thinking here is allowing apps to run in their own protected areas effectively,
so by doing that an app can run in a virtual machine and it can't effectively interfere with other parts of the
Windows operating system, or other applications. Now obviously this kind of technology
virtualisation, does require, generally speaking, fast computers with
multiple cores and lots of RAM.
So it's going to be very very interesting to see how usable this actually is
for old computers, for instance dual core machines with only 4gig of RAM.
I would expect it to be a compromised experience but if you're running quad core or better processors
8 gig of RAM, potentially 16 gig of RAM if you want to run some really big applications on virtual machines
then you should be absolutely fine.
It's also been strongly rumoured for quite some time now that the Windows update is going to be free for all
Windows 8 and 8.1 users. Microsoft attempting to repair some
of the damage it did really with that last release.
Unfortunately for Microsoft it may not actually be enough to get people to shift across, even if it is free because
there is still a large wealth of legacy devices out there running below 7 and older
that may very well not find Windows 9 is particularly suitable for them. At the
end of the day, if Windows 8 didn't run particularly well on those machines I'm not sure what
Microsoft thinks Windows 9 is going to be much better
especially if they're packing in a lot of new functionality there. As we know, Windows
generally doesn't become better at running on older hardware as they release new editions,
it tends to get worse. Overall, it's an exciting time to be in the Windows eco system. We're about to get
a brand new operating system returning a lot of the functionality that we were missing from the last version
and more importantly, adding in all of those new drivers and functionality that we've
come to expect from a modern operating system.
We'll know in just a few short hours how many of these leaks and rumours are absolutely bang on
but I think everything I've mentioned in this video is probably going to come true.
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