If you skipped Windows 8, here’s some new stuff you get with Windows 10

If you skipped Windows 8, here’s some new stuff you get with Windows 10

t’s a shame that Windows 8’s interface was so divisive. The UI dominated the conversation around the OS to the extent that its other, subtler changes got buried. People who stuck with Windows 7 never saw these updates at all.

Windows 10, as we’ve covered, is Microsoft’s effort to repackage Windows 8’s improvements in a way that will be more appealing to Windows 7 loyalists. As if to drive that point home, Microsoft is giving current Windows 7 users a whole year after launch to hop on the Windows 10 train at no charge.

Microsoft has made a bunch of changes to Windows in the last two years that have nothing to do with the new user interface. This list doesn’t have anything new on it, but if you’re still running Windows 7 and you decide to upgrade to Windows 10, it’ll be new to you, and you'll get to use it all without having to figure out how to live life without a Start menu. (If you're interested in seeing some of the UI stuff that you'll be sidestepping, ZDNet's Ed Bott recently published this piece about Windows 8 features that got cut from Windows 10).

Faster boot time
Any system with a reasonably modern solid-state drive in it will boot quickly no matter which version of Windows it's using, but sadly there are still plenty of systems sold with spinning hard drives. Most low-to-mid end laptops and desktops still choose capacity and cost over speed (though in the last year SSDs have fallen well below the 50-cents-per-gigabyte level).

Windows 8 made changes to the way Windows boots that can drastically reduce your startup time. In Windows 7 and older versions, starting up the system requires the entire OS to be loaded from the disk. In Windows 8 and newer, most of the time the OS will unload the user session from memory but suspend the core OS, saving the contents of memory to disk as it would if the system was hibernating.

Loading that hibernation file into memory is faster than loading the operating system up file by file, and as a result Windows 8 (and Windows 10, by extension) will boot much more quickly than Windows 7 on identical hardware, even if you're using an older spinning HDD. If the hibernation feature is disabled or unsupported by your hardware (for whatever reason), though, this advantage disappears.

Better support for better screens


GO HERE TO READ MORE

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015...rstechnica/index+(Ars+Technica+-+All+content)