WINDOWS 8

 Windows 8 is expected to have the same system requirements as Windows 7, and will run on existing PCs/laptops that run Windows 7. Here are the following minimum system requirements to run Windows 8:

Processor: 1GHz or faster 32-bit or 64-bit processor

RAM: 1GB (32-bit) or 2GB (64-bit)

HD Space: 16GB for 32-bit (or 20GB for 64-bit)

WINDOWS 8 TASK MANAGER

 Based on all of the data and our background research, we decided to focus energy on three key goals

• Optimize Task Manager for the most common scenarios. Focus on the scenarios that the data points to: (1) use the applications tab to find and close a specific application, or (2) go to the processes tab, sort on resource usage, and kill some processes to reclaim resources.
• Use modern information design to achieve functional goals. Build a tool that is thoughtful and modern by focusing on information design and data visualization to help achieve the functional scenario goals.
• Don’t remove functionality. While there are some notable core scenarios, there is a really long list of other, less frequent usage scenarios for Task Manager. We explicitly set a goal to not remove functionality, but rather to augment, enhance, and improve.

This model allowed us to optimize the default view (“Fewer details”) around the core scenario of finding an application and closing it. It also allowed us to add much more detail in the other view because it would only show up when someone asked for it. In the “More details” view we decided to stay with the existing tabbing model of Task Manager and focus on improving the content of each of the tabs. This would help us to augment, enhance, and improve what we already had, without removing functionality.

Scenario 1: Ending processes quickly and efficiently

Scenario 2: Diagnosing performance issues

Network and disk counters

Many power users supplement their usage of Task Manager with other tools such as Resource Monitor simply because in the past Task Manager did not show per-process network and disk attribution. This was a gap, when you consider that a spinning disk or multiple applications competing for network bandwidth are the root cause of many perceptible PC performance issues. The new Task Manager now shows these resources at the same level of detail as memory and CPU.

Lighting up the resource usage

One of the biggest causes of PC performance issues is resource contention. When a particular resource is being used at a rate above a threshold number, the column header will light up to draw your attention to it. Think of this as a warning indicator, letting you know a good place to start looking if you are experiencing performance issues. Below, you can see that the CPU column header is highlighted to draw your attention to the fact that you may have multiple applications competing for CPU time.

Grouping by applications, background processes, and Windows processes

A big challenge with today’s Task Manager is that it is hard to know which processes correspond to an application (apps are generally safe to kill), which are Windows OS processes (killing some of these can cause a blue screen), and which are miscellaneous background processes that may need to be explored more deeply. The new Task Manager shows processes grouped by type, so it is easy to keep these separated while still providing an ungrouped view for situations where you need it.

Friendly names for background processes (and services, and everything else)

Looking at the screen shot above, do you see the line item for "Print driver host for applications"? In the old Task Manager, this showed up as “splwow64.exe”.

But if you still want to see the executable name, of course you can add it back as an optional column.

CUT COPY PASTE with Windows 8

A small change always makes a big difference so as now microsoft has decided to better out the basic file management such as COPY CUT PASTE etc..normally users find it hard to navigate to the file they are coying when u are copying multiple files so Windows8 comes with a new UI were all the files you copy are displayed in a single customized UI where users would be able to stop resume cancel perform any function on any copied file all in the same dialog box without having to navigate into multiple floating dialog boxes..

The users are also given the priority to resume one copying action to speed up the one the need in the same window.To make things more fun and detailed Microsoft has added new feature to specify  data transfer rate , how much data left to transfer etc in the form of a real time throughput graph..

When a file is paused it is denoted with an yellow color graph instead of a  green one.One of the major issues when we copy files is the one that occurs with file name collisions for instance when we copy multiple data , dialog boxes keep popping up asking us whether to replace or delete or copy those files when we have the slightest hint what the file is.. to sweep of the confusion Microsoft has come up with a new enriched UI that gives us all the files with same names with thumbnail views so that we can sort all those files in one click in one window altogether...