This may be the biggest week in 37-year history. The company is releasing its very first computer , a new phone operating system (Windows Phone 8), and, believe it or not, two PC operating systems.Related
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I’m not talking about Windows 8 and Windows RT, which are, in fact, two new and distinct operating systems from Microsoft. I mean the two different worlds within Windows 8 alone, one designed primarily for touch screens, the other for mouse and keyboard. Individually, they are excellent — but you can’t use them individually. Microsoft has combined them into a superimposed, muddled mishmash called Windows 8, which goes on sale Friday at prices ranging from $15 to $40, depending on the offer and version.
You can easily imagine how Microsoft got here. “PC sales have slowed,” some executive must have said. “This is a new age of touch screens! We need a fresh approach, a new Windows. Something bold, fluid and finger-friendly.”
“Well, hold on,” someone must have countered. “We can’t forget the 600 million regular mouse-driven PCs. We also need to update Windows 7 for them!”
And then things went terribly wrong.
“Hey, I know!” somebody piped in. “Let’s combine those two Windows versions into one. One OS for all machines. Everybody’s happy!”
Whoops.
Let’s tackle each version one at a time. (A note: I have written a how-to manual for Windows 8 for an independent publisher; it was neither commissioned by nor written in cooperation with Microsoft.)
DESKTOP WINDOWS This is my name for the traditional Windows: the land of overlapping windows, menus and the taskbar across the bottom. Here, you can run any of the four million traditional Windows apps, which Microsoft calls desktop apps: Photoshop, Quicken, tax software, games.
Windows 8’s desktop is basically the well-regarded Windows 7 with a few choice enhancements, like faster start-up, a Lock screen that displays a clock and notifications, and more control over multiple-monitor arrangements.
You can now log into any Windows 8 PC with a Microsoft ID. Boom: your wallpaper, online mail accounts, contacts, photos and SkyDrive contents are instantly available. (SkyDrive is Microsoft’s free seven-gigabyte online hard drive.)
The Task Manager now offers a table of open programs, showing which are the memory and processor hogs. File Explorer (formerly Windows Explorer) now has a collapsible toolbar. A new Refresh option lets you restore Windows to its virginal, factory-fresh condition without disturbing programs and files.
There’s a superb new feature called Family Safety, which provides you, the all-knowing parent, with a weekly summary of how much time your offspring have spent on the PC, and which Web sites, searches, programs and downloads they’ve used. You can also set time limits for weekdays and weekends.
Finally, there’s no more Start menu. The taskbar is still there, but the Start-menu icon isn’t on it. More on this in a moment.
TILEWORLD The enormous, controversial change in Windows 8 is the overlaying of the second “operating system,” intended for touch screens.
(It’s not really called TileWorld. But Microsoft doesn’t have a good name for it. Insiders know it as the Metro interface — that was its code name — but Microsoft simply refers to it as Windows 8, which is so infuriatingly confusing you feel like firing somebody. I’m going to go with TileWorld.)
TileWorld is modeled on Microsoft’s lovely Windows Phone software. It presents a home screen filled with colorful square and rectangular tiles. Each represents an app — and, often, that app’s latest data.
For example, the Calendar tile displays your next appointment. The People tile (your address book) shows the latest post from your social networks. The Mail tile shows the subject line of the latest incoming message.
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