7. Turn On Quickly--Really Quickly
A suggestion for how Windows 8 could help you keep your PC starting up quickly – and tell you it’s not only Windows you’re waiting for.Removing unnecessary apps that slow down startup is a good start, but Windows needs to start up like a phone or a TV, not a computer – quickly and cleanly. The ‘power on, self-test’ cycle of powering up and checking the PC hardware and loading the BIOS can take as long as starting Windows; Microsoft needs to press BIOS writers and PC makers to improve that, but Windows might also be able to skip some of that with smart caching and loading.
It’s rare to find a notebook PC that’s set up to use hybrid sleep or hibernate by default even though it’s reliable on the vast majority of current PCs, and it’s unheard of for this to be the default on a desktop – but it’s what every PC should be doing. Unless the user chooses restart, why not have Windows always hibernate; it could close applications if you want, but unless it detects a hardware or system change, shutting down should hibernate Windows so it turns straight back on.
Direct Experience Patent With HypervisorThis Microsoft patent talks about Direct Experience; a way to start a faster operating system than Windows to play media using a hypervisor.
Or how about loading Windows behind your back? Half of what we do on PCs now is browse the Web; if you want to listen to music or watch a video using your PC, you don’t need all of Windows for that. One rumor says Microsoft is planning to let you start up with special versions of the OS that just run Media Center if there’s a movie DVD in the PC when you turn it on. Windows could load just what you need to run the browser or play your media and let you get started straight away while the rest of the system loads in the background so it’s there when you need it.
6. Update Everything From Everyone, Tell Me Once
Some of these messages are more important than others, but you have to go looking for nearly all of them. Windows Update can update Microsoft Office and Live Essential for you if you let it, and Microsoft Security Essentials – but Security Essentials still pops up its own dialog to tell you it needs to get an update. Then there are notifications from the Windows Action Center, ‘toasts’ that pop up from Outlook as new email arrives, icons that flash in the task bar to tell you something has happened, alerts on the titles of Web pages… If you've set up a new PC with 64-bit Windows recently, you’ve probably been irritated by the Java Updater, which installs twice (once for 32-bit and once for 64-bit Java) and wants to check for a new version of Java; if you tell it to wait a month, the prompt comes back as soon as you reboot.
Windows 7 got a lot more polite about notifying you; Windows 8 needs to make everything else play nice by having one way to tell you things from all the apps and services you care about (with settings that let you control which apps can put notifications in there). You could choose whether it was a dialog that popped up on the desktop or an icon in the task bar, maybe with your choice of sounds for really important messages.
Windows Update offers Microsoft software; it should check for other updates too.We also want one way to find out about and get updates. It’s not likely that every software company in the world would want to put updates on the Windows Update servers (or that Microsoft would want to pay for all the bandwidth required), but there could be a section of the Windows Update control panel that shows you the list of third-party updates and a standard way to get those updates.
5. Tell Me If I'll Have To Restart
Too many Windows Updates don’t say whether you will need to restart or not.You’ve heard about a security issue in Windows, or you’ve had a reminder from an app that wants to update itself, or it's just the second Tuesday of the month and your Shut Down button has that little icon on it telling you there are updates ready to install. But you're busy with other things and there’s an email you’ve left open to remind you to answer it and there are a couple of Web pages you opened and haven’t read yet, so you put off installing the updates because you just can’t tell if you’ll have to reboot your PC and you don’t want to do that right now. With hibernation, you can easily avoid restarting your PC for weeks at a time, just picking up where you left off last time and updates are a real interruption.
If you don’t want to restart after an update, you have to keep postponing it; Windows should let you say ‘no reboot’ when you install the updates.Windows 8 could make this a better experience in a few ways. First, tell you when an update will actually require a restart; some updates, like Microsoft Security Essentials, explicitly say they will need a reboot but far too often the description says that the update ‘may’ require a reboot. If Microsoft can’t say in advance for every update because systems vary so much, put a button on the update that will check my system quickly and tell me if it will need that reboot. Or give me the option to only install updates that don’t need reboots right now, and save the others for later. Or do all of the updates but let me choose not to reboot afterwards until I’m ready – without a nagging reminder that pops up and counts down to the reboot unless I keep postponing it. Because if that somehow gets on top of the window I'm typing in and I happen to type the letter that selects ‘Restart Now’ and I lose everything I'm doing, I'm going to be very unhappy.
4. Make Windows Stay Fast
Quick: what should you do to make this PC faster? If you can find the alerts, you can fix things, but it shouldn’t be hidden.Get rid of the OEM bloat and Windows 7 is pretty zippy. But over time you install more software, you update drivers and your system fills up with a certain amount of crud. We’d like to see Windows 8 deliver performance that doesn't degrade. Some of that should be automatic; sweeping away the detritus of old temporary files, optimizing applications, telling you if there’s a faster Wi-Fi connection to use. But most of the performance issues aren’t coming from Windows; again, it’s all the software you install. Windows should be much more aggressive about naming and shaming drivers that cause crashes, services that slow your system down, applications that hog the CPU or network or slow down hibernation and Windows settings that are misconfigured.
A lot of this information is hidden inside Windows already, if you go digging into the Advanced Tools under the Performance control panel or you remember where to find the Reliability Monitor, you can see if there’s anything Windows has noticed as causing a problem and what apps have been hanging right after you updated something else. But those messages don’t make it all the way up into the Action Center where you’d see them, and there’s nothing like the excellent IE 9 dialog that tells you exactly which add-ons are slowing down every tab you open and by how many seconds.
You can see what software has affected Windows 7 if you remember to look; we’d like Windows to tell you.Some of the other features we want in Windows would make it easier to start from scratch without losing your whole Windows setup but we don’t want to have to remove everything and add them back one at a time to spot the culprits. We want Windows to take all that information it’s getting about system performance, compare that to the anonymous reports from other users on similar systems and tell us that the app we’re using or the USB stick we’re copying files to is slowing us down so we can make an informed decision about what software and hardware to use.
3. No More Crapware
The pale pink line shows pre-installed Windows 7; it starts more slowly than retail copies.Want the Windows 7 PC you bought to start up faster? Buy a boxed copy of Windows 7 and install that instead. According to Microsoft’s internal figures in a leaked presentation, pre-installed versions of Windows 7 take on average 2.5 seconds longer to start up than if you install Windows 7 yourself (and five times as many DIY Windows installs start up in 15-20 seconds compared to pre-installed copies). Setting up a new notebook, with the OEM version of Windows and the retail version, Microsoft measured the time to get Windows ready the very first time as just over 18 minutes – or just under five. Taking the average of six different models, start-up was 39% faster, resume was 51% faster, sleep was 23% faster.
Nearly twenty minutes to get your PC running the first day and OEM crapware can keep slowing you down.What’s the difference? A lot of it’s down to the extra software that PC makers install. Some of that’s useful, some of it’s not – and most of it starts up automatically with Windows. Anti-virus and security software is the worst culprit, but system utilities that want to check your PC or look for new drivers on the PC maker’s site or just give you a pretty volume indicator on screen are all cluttering up your startup. PC makers defend the practice by saying they’re giving you valuable extras, but often they’re being paid $5 or $10 for putting third-party software on the PC--so it’s not all altruism.
Free software can be a good thing; put it
in an uninstalled area, like Device Stage,
where it won’t slow you down unless you
want to use it.There was a plan to have an ‘OEM folder’ in Windows 7 to put all the extra software in but PC makers objected. And Microsoft actually sells the Microsoft Signature version of Windows 7 in the Microsoft Store and puts it on all the PCs it sells; all the drivers you need and none of the crapware.
That should be standard with Windows 8; Microsoft should force PC makers to use something like Device Stage-a housing for uninstalled files--to show you the software you get for free instead of installing it all for you.
2. Only Run Signed Code
Windows already warns you about code that isn’t signed; it would be safer not to run it at all.It costs a developer about $25 to buy a certificate to sign the programs they write. This proves that they wrote it and that it hasn’t been changed since they finished it. This way, you know that the printer driver or the utility you’re installing really is from HP or WinZip, and that a hacker hasn’t slipped a rootkit or bot into the code while it was on the server. In Windows 8 we want to see Microsoft allow only code that’s been signed in this way to run; anything else should be blocked, with a message telling you why.
It wouldn’t stop security holes caused by bugs in the program, but it would make downloading software from the Web more like shopping in a reputable store than the Wild West. Drivers that go onto Windows Update have to be signed, but lots of drivers never make it onto Windows Update and there are far too many apps that aren’t signed (several versions of the Java Updater aren’t even signed, which gives you a really bad user experience in some Web browsers as well as a potential security risk). It would let you set a list of apps and software companies that you trusted and block everything else – and it wouldn’t even be a lot of work for Microsoft. Windows 7 already treats unsigned software differently when you install it; instead of the blue dialog you see for other software, you get a bright yellow warning. How about the next version of Windows tells you that it just won’t install the app?
You can tell UAC not to bother you, but now that fewer apps run as admin, you can leave it on.The main reason Microsoft doesn’t already protect us this way is that developers and businesses would complain; companies don’t want to sign their own internal apps and any developers who aren’t already signing their apps don’t want to have to do the work. Older programs that still work but aren’t being updated would run into problems (certificates expire after a certain time, so the certificate authority can charge you again) but there are ways around it; if you absolutely have to have that program, maybe Windows could install it in a virtual machine like XP Mode? We went through the inconvenience of User Account Control prompts to force developers to write apps for standard users instead of running them as admin; Microsoft should have the courage to force us through the inconvenience of only running signed code until developers shape up and sign.
1. Get In Sync
Connecting to the cloud needs to mean more than Web browsers that remember your password.There are rumors galore about what Microsoft might or might not include in Windows 8, when it might come out and what it might look like. We don't know the real answers to any of those (not even whether it will be called Windows
, but we do know what we'd like to see in Windows 8 - and which Windows 7 bloopers we'd like to see eliminated. Here's our Windows 8 wish list. It covers a lot of different areas: speed, reliability, interface options... but they all have one thing in common: they represent an operating system designed from scratch for the actual users, not the PC companies that buy Windows licenses to pass on to the users.
We're sure you'll have your own Windows wish list; do tell us what you need the most and hate the most
Few of us use the same computer all day, every day and even if we do, we scatter files and information around. Whether it’s your netbook and your office PC, your phone, the Web site you keep photos on, Twitter, Facebook, or Gmail – the files you create, the links you follow and the other useful things you need to remember are in a lot of different places. Windows shouldn’t just be the platform you use to open a browser and your Windows account should do more than let you log in to your PC: it should keep (secure) records of your accounts and usernames and passwords so that when you use your PC, you log in to your services without having to type or click.
If you browse a Web page on your phone or on a PC at work, you should be able to see it in your history in Windows – whatever browser you used. Files should follow you; photos from your phone that upload to the cloud should copy into your Pictures folder, the most recent versions of documents you create in Google Docs should be in your local Documents folder as well, and the files that you create on the PC in your den should show up on your netbook without you having to put them on Dropbox yourself.
Windows Live Mesh syncs files from one PC
to another, or into the cloud, and it syncs some
useful settings, but Windows should do moreWhen you buy a new PC, settings from your old PC, such as your Live ID, mapped drives, custom spelling dictionaries, toolbar customizations and desktop wallpaper should just flow across to the new computer.
Most apps need to be installed rather than copied but there’s no reason the configuration shouldn’t just show up automatically on the new machine.
You can copy files from an old PC with Windows, but once you tell both PCs who you are, we’d like to see the
right files transfer automatically.
