Since the release of Windows 7 in October 2009, Microsoft has been working on new technologies, culminating in the release of (codename) Windows 8, expected in late 2011/early 2012. With fierce competition in the form of Google Android and Apple’s Mac OS and iOS, Microsoft must fight hard to stay relevant in a rapidly changing industry. So rapid, in fact, that predicting the success of Windows 8 isn’t at all easy at this stage, in comparison with the Windows 7 pre-release beta which showed genuine inspiration and truly outstanding performance improvements over it’s predecessor, Windows Vista.

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What we’re looking at today then, is a near-to-beta build of Microsoft’s next OS, which seeks to fulfill a long term goal of Microsoft (since the early eighties) and that is to unify the mobile, desktop and enterprise versions of their OS. Up until now there have been various re-iterations of Windows CE, the desktop Windows NT, and various server flavours of Windows, tailored for different processor architectures. With ARM support, Windows 8 seeks to unify all phones, tablets, desktops, servers and datacentres with a single kernel, offering a single udate pack with possibly even a single service pack.

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Microsoft commented last year that Windows 8 will be their ‘riskiest bet’ – it’s becoming easy to see just why.

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When Windows Vista was introduced, I liked the new refined start-menu. Coming from XP,, it was refreshing and it felt all new not having the big green childish ‘Start’ button – prior to that, all we had was a plain grey rectangle.

With the release of Windows 7 in October 2009, Microsoft revised the taskbar again, yet did not retain the Vista-style as a legacy option. This article will explain how to achieve exactly this. (more…)