Windows 8, as evident from the name, is the upcoming successor to the Windows 7 operating system. Although a release date hasn’t been announced as of now, a developer preview has been out and a consumer preview is slated for February 29, 2012. Then comes the quintessential question, what’s new? Well, most of it is all new, it’s quite a leap forward from everything Microsoft has ever done. The changes are vast in number, but we will try to cover most which affect the average user.

Windows 8 : Metro UI

When you see it initially, the first thing you’d probably notice the changed UI. The snazzy new minimalistic interface is called “Metro”. This new design language is being applied across Microsoft’s range of products and is currently visible on Windows Phone 7/7.5, Zune and the Xbox 360 dashboard. It’s based on typography and is neat, sophisticated and modern. If you have a basic idea of how Windows Phone 7/7.5 looks, you pretty much know how Windows 8 will look.

Technical Changes

On the technical front, Windows 8 will be the first to support the ARM processor architecture along with previously supported Intel and AMD x86 architectures. ARM processors are mainly used in low power applications such as netbook, tablet PC, mobile phone processors, so you can expect to see Windows 8 variants on netbooks and tablets in the future. Also, Windows 8 will introduce a new file system called ReFS…

Read rest of the story to What New and Advanced Features Can We Expect in Windows 8: A Preview

Microsoft reminded everyone with some stats on its cloud computing progress and updates to Office 365 and SkyDrive. However, beneath today's announcements there are signs of drought, with only a small number of enterprises embracing Microsoft's cloud.

The Redmond, Wash.-based company is enhancing both services and has broadened availability, 22 more countries includes Argentina, Iceland, Indonesia, South Africa and Taiwan — for Office 365. SkyDrive gets a modern makeover, including HTML5 enhancements that are in line with broader Microsoft development objectives for Internet Explorer 10 and Windows 8.

But Microsoft isn't a cloud company like Google, which profits from what it and third-parties sell around services like search. Microsoft sells software. Think of Microsoft's cloud quite literally — rain falling to the earth and evaporating into the sky. Office 365 and SkyDrive depend at least in some way on desktop software, which utility they extend to the cloud and return to users.

Read rest of the story to Small businesses embrace Microsoft's Cloud

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2. iPhone & Android Apps for Bloggers

Keeping up with your blog can be hard if you don’t blog full-time for a living and you don’t have constant access to a computer and internet. Luckily, smartphones have given us 24-7 access to the Internet and have opened up a whole new world with all of the various apps available to make every aspect of our lives easier – blogging included. More Here:

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Mozilla has been working real hard, pushing new Firefox releases every month. Mozilla just launched the latest version of Firefox – Firefox 8. More Here: Read the rest of this entry »

1. Two Ways to Share Files Between Windows 8 in VirtualBox to Host OS

Microsoft has recently released the Developer Preview of Windows 8. You can also download that here. Since it’s still a developer preview, most of the users don’t like to take risk and use it as their primary OS. That’s why most of them tend to use virtual machines to do this, including VirualBox, VMware Workstation, maybe some others. More about it here

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3. Tools To Help You To Write A Post Without Any Sort Of Distraction

There are so many things to do online so it is very obvious to get easily distracted by other internet activity while writing a post. This happen to me often. While writing a post on wordpress dashboard I get distracted by other tab on my browser especially if Facebook is opened on other tab !What you can do is close all the other tabs on your browser except the tab where you are writing a post but chances are there that you will open a new tab and log into Facebook or engage in other online activity like surfing websites, email, IM etc. So, writing on a separate tools like windows live writer, notepad or Microsoft Word is a better option but then again you have visual distractions: flashing icons, notification on system tray, noisy reminder etc. More about it here:

4. What Is ChromePlus?

From time to time, users have been using various browsers to get the internet services. Initially, Internet explorer have been used by many people for accessing the internet, but these days many other browsers have been developed and ChromePlus is one of them. Currently, this browser is being used by several users as it is really convenient and easy to use as well. Day by day the developers are bringing advancement in this web browser. As going through the reviews, if they find any shortcoming they try to fix the issue and thus as a result they introduce all new versions to the ChromePlus users. Recently, the developers have brought ChromPlus 1.6.3.0 version for chrome lovers. More about it here:

Windows 8 is going to be a truly great operating system is all the rumours are true. We already know a great deal about the tablet interface, which seems to have won universal acclaim, and other announced and leaked features are getting significant interest such as cloud / SkyDrive integration. Not the least of these is Microsoft’s announcement of a “Windows 7 Mode” and the discovery of the company’s Hyper-V virtualisation client in some x64 builds. Together these hint strongly as the final dropping of internal legacy support.

Throughout all of this however the one aspect of the operating system most people seemed concerned about was what it would be called. Microsoft had a policy of only referring to it as Windows Next. Steven Sinofsky, the Microsoft vice-president heading up the Windows division wouldn’t even go that far, only referring to it as “the next version of Windows”. Finally in May at a conference in Japan, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer let slip the Windows 8 name.

Microsoft almost immediately issued a retraction though saying that “no final decision on a name had yet taken place”, so there was still no official name for the product. Now though it has been confirmed on the website for Microsoft’s forthcoming BUILD conference in September. This conference, formally called the Professional Developer’s Conference (PDC), is where Microsoft have now announced they’ll be unveiling Windows 8, and they refer to it by name many times on the site.

The headline states “in 1995 Windows changed the PC. Build will show you how Windows 8 changes everything.”

I find it curious then that, after all the commotion and hype surrounding the name of the operating system, that there’s no discussion any more about it. It’s even more curious as the proportion of people talking about the name before compared to those discussing the new features in the OS, certainly in the early days of the alpha, was huge. It’s an odd acceptence that’s taken place. Read the rest of this entry »

The research and development of Windows 8' client and web serve have entered the planning stage, with Windows 8 Embedded Version also taking shape. Just as Windows Embedded Standard 7, Windows 8 also has Windows Embedded Version.

Researched and developed for a lot of special device class, the tools and programs of Windows Embedded can be used for a variety of embedded computing devices, such as cash registers, ATM, industrial controllers, gateways, IP telephony, servers, thin client, senior consumer electronics and a variety of specialized handheld devices.

In an official handswanted, Microsoft is looking for the software test engineer for the Microsoft Embedded product. As the wanted shows, Microsoft describes the Windows Embedded software test engineer duties. One said, "Develop a program extended to other areas, including thin client, POS, MFP and Windows 8 Embedded…" This is the first time Microsoft reference to Windows 8 Embedded system.

According to some reports, Microsoft's Windows group is stepping up development of the company's next-generation operating system Windows 8, and planning to substantial improvements. As we all know, compared to Windows Vista, Windows 7 is not lot of change, but made improvements in performance, security, simplified features. A few days ago, Microsoft said they will release a significant update Windows 8, which means there will be a substantial improvement.

In accordance with Microsoft's plans, Windows 8 will be officially released in 2012, which will include features of "face recognition login", "a key to restore the backup", "Windows Store App Store", and so on. No doubt, in addition to these features, the Microsoft Windows 8 will improve the natural user interface (NUI) synchronously. The multi-touch technology is only a part of Windows NUI, which also includes voice recognition capabilities.

In Microsoft Windows 7 also provides a complete voice recognition feature, users can completely control the computer by voice, of course, we can use touch and voice operations. Let's look forward to the new Windows 8, to enjoy the perfect voice control function out of the traditional PC experience.