What The Windows 8 Leak Tells Us

How To Upgrade To Windows 8.1 From Windows 8

What you have here is an onscreen keyboard on which you can play chopsticks to your heart's content, but there are also a handful of bundled classics (think "The Entertainer") that you can play along to in a kind of instrumental karaoke. You can also record and save whatever tunes you've made up. In the case of those pre-installed songs, specific keys will glow blue when you're supposed to hit them but, as you can imagine, this is tedious and un-fun if all you've got at your disposal is a mouse. As with Paintplay, we imagine this would make for a better time-waster on a tablet.

If you liked the keyboard before, you'll like it just as much now. Barely anything has changed on it, though Word Flow (the renamed version of Quick Correct from Mango) has been slightly improved. While Word Flow's word predictions and corrections are typically quite accurate, we'd still prefer a dedicated number row and more easily accessible https://www.ehctech.org/services/pc-optimization/ punctuation marks. We also noticed that the keyboard often refused to correct - or even understand, in many cases - contractions. Unfortunately, opponents of the keyboard continue to be stuck with it, since third-party keyboards can't directly tie into the OS and have to resort to making you cut and paste everything you write.

New in Release Preview is a sports hub, where you can follow your favorite teams or digest the top stories across all athletics - yes, even Formula One racing. When you enter, you'll be greeted by a top story (not unlike the new Bing News app described below), with other articles https://www.ehctech.org/services/pc-optimization/ listed over on the right. Scroll far enough and you'll find schedules, followed by a self-explanatory area called "Favorite teams." Adding these is as easy as clicking a plus sign and then typing your team into a field, which spits back autocompleted suggestions in record time.

Microsoft has redesigned the Windows Store to make it look more like a place to find the best apps and less like a context-free white pages of everything available. Where the Windows 8 version of the store had a few spotlighted apps and then showed all the app categories as you scrolled https://www.ehctech.org/services/pc-optimization/ to the right, the new store has one general spotlight column, along with a set of personalized picks, trending apps, and a list of top paid and top free apps. When you bring up the app bar, you can navigate to categories such as Photo, Games, News & Weather and Finance.

Bing's Finance app delivers the same news and stock quotes it always did, but now you can pin various bits of information to the Start Menu. These include watchlists (e.g., "Tech Movers and Shakers") or individual stocks you happen to follow. That seems like a logical feature to add - after all, every native and even third-party app should support pinning. Still, it would be nice if you could glance at the Live Tile and see General Electric's closing price for the day. We caught ourselves glancing after US markets shut down, and were met with a blank tile that had the stock's name on it and nothing more.

Microsoft's certification requirements eventually revealed that UEFI firmware on x86 systems must allow users to re-configure or turn off secure boot, but that this must not be possible on ARM -based systems (Windows RT). Microsoft faced further criticism for its decision to restrict Windows RT devices by using this functionality. https://www.ehctech.org/services/pc-optimization/ 68 105 106 Tom Warren, in an article on The Verge , said that other smartphones and tablets are typically sold in a locked-down state. 106 No mandate is made regarding the installation of third-party certificates that would enable running alternative programs. 107 108 109 Removed features edit

Perhaps the most familiar of Windows 8's native apps is Tweet@rama, a three-pane program listing updates, your own recent posts and a list of the people you're following. There's also a button for uploading photos alongside your status message and the built-in spellchecker even tosses an accent mark over words like "cliché." Between the panes and the black background, anyone with TweetDeck experience should feel at home, though don't expect any functionality in the way of checking and responding to direct messages, searching key words or monitoring mentions. Also, remember we said Windows 8 doesn't play nice with our multitouch trackpad right now?

However, according to research firm NPD, sales of devices running Windows in the United States have declined 21 percent compared to the same time period in 2011. 153 As the holiday shopping season wrapped up, Windows 8 sales continued to lag, even as Apple reported https://www.ehctech.org/services/pc-optimization/ brisk sales. 154 The market research firm IDC reported an overall drop in PC sales for the quarter, and said the drop may have been partly due to consumer reluctance to embrace the new features of the OS and poor support from OEM for these features. 156.