RJNox

Windows 8 is the next desktop operating system coming from Microsoft in 2012. Here is some news as well as my opinions on what features need to be added or improved.

Every user of Windows 7 noticed the great performance and reliability improvement when transiting from Windows Vista to Windows 7. And their faith in Microsoft and Windows operating systems had been somewhat regained.

Windows 8 will more than likely only come in a 64 bit version and possibly support 128bit processor architectures. 32bit operating systems should now be considered ancient history since 64-bit processors have been around since the 1970s and x64 operating systems have been in the desktop market since 1985 and Windows XP 64-bit edition was released nearly a decade ago!

Microsoft have said that they are going to rework the core engine for Windows 8 for yet more performance improvements. They also say Windows 8 will bring new innovative features including one which will "revolutionise" file access in branch offices. It will be called the Distributed File System Replication (DFSR) service and wiil be a multi-master replication engine set-up for synchronising folders across multiple servers. It will come with local server caching for faster access to recently open files. And it will probably be something we will be seeing in server version of Windows 8.

There is a rumour that Windows 8 will have some new networking features and this is more than likely since IPv6 will be coming further into the mainstream.

I found a pretty cool video which demonstrates an operating system concept that would be nice to see in Windows 8. The author has adapted some concepts straight from Windows 7, but the design is a breath of fresh air:

In Summary, it looks as though Windows 8 will be an as big success as Windows 7 was with Microsoft stating that it will offer even more performance improvements and new and innovative features.