Yep, the same one you might already be using for Hotmail, SkyDrive and Xbox Live. When you first boot up Windows 8 you'll be prompted to sign into your Microsoft account. (We'll circle back and explain all those new user interface elements in just a moment.)įrom there, getting set up is a quick, painless affair. If this is your first time starting up your Windows 8 machine, you'll see a 30-second video tutorial explaining some of the controls that otherwise might not be so obvious - the so-called Charms Bar which you pull out from the right side of the screen, for example. The whole process takes not a minute, but just 20 seconds in some cases - a short sequence marked by a brief splash screen and redesigned Windows logo. Here, booting Windows feels like turning on an Android tablet, or some other mobile device. Depending on how slow the system was, it could have taken a while longer for the desktop to fully load. The chain of start-up screens could be long, sometimes taking more than a minute to complete. We can remember when we first started using Windows 7 the start-up sequence wasn't that different from Vista, which in turn wasn't unlike versions of Windows that came before that. It's all about the cloud The whole boot-up sequence takes not a minute, but just 20 seconds in some cases.
In addition to walking you through the operating system's various gestures and built-in apps, then, we'll spend some time talking about which form factors are best suited to this redesigned version of Windows. Combining a traditional desktop with Windows Phone-inspired Live Tiles, Windows 8 was designed to be equally at home on traditional PCs and more finger-friendly devices, like tablets and hybrids. It's even tougher when the software was built for so many different kinds of hardware. With the OS now on sale (alongside dozens of new PCs), it's finally time for us to double back and revisit everything we've previously written in the form of a final, comprehensive review.Īnd what a challenging assignment this was: it's hard enough to give an OS the full review treatment without burying the reader in minute details. And yet, we've never tested a final version of the software running on brand new, made-for-Windows-8 hardware.
Even our readers have had ample time to get acquainted with the OS - it's been available as a public download since February. In the case of Windows 8, we've written thousands of words already, starting with our first hands-on in September of 2011, followed by deep dives on the Developer Preview, Consumer Preview, Release Preview and RTM build. It's unusual, to say the least, for us to spend a year with a product before publishing our review.
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