Windows 8.1 full Review

The new version of Windows 8 is what you're
expecting and probably what you want
We've finally had some hands-on time with an
official build of Windows 8.1 - and yes, many of
the rumours and leaks are accurate. The Start
button is back, you can boot to the desktop and
use the same image as your desktop. SkyDrive is
built in to sync files - on Windows 8.1 and
Windows RT.
Full details: Windows 8.1 release date, news
and features
But this isn't Microsoft backing away from what
we still want to call Metro; key Microsoft apps
like Mail and Xbox Music have been updated,
there are new apps for food and fitness and there
is a 'modern' version of Office on the way.
If you're reading this in the UK, note there have
been some issues with installing the Release
Preview on British English devices. Find out more
here.
Microsoft is still convinced that Windows can
scale from an 8-inch tablet all the way up to the
27-inch twin screens on your desk at work, so
there are changes to the Start screen, new ways
of laying out multiple apps side by side on
screen and almost all the configuration options
from the control panel make it into PC Settings
(except for those boot to desktop settings, which
stay on the desktop - right-click on the taskbar
to get them). So how coherent does it all feel?
The Lock screen turns into a photo gallery,
powered by the same Microsoft Research tech
behind the screensavers in Windows Media
Center and the Windows 8 Photos app, picking
related and timely photos automatically. You can
unlock the camera or answer a Skype call quickly
without needing to fiddle with a password. If
small tablets get popular, that will be useful.
The Start screen gets new large tile sizes for
select apps like Weather and Finance so you can
see more information at once, although apps
have to be specially built to use this. You can
pick from far more colours to customise the Start
screen backgrounds - some of which animate
subtly as you scroll sideways - or you can use
your desktop background, in which case your
tiles scroll but your background is fixed.
If you're used to the small swipe you use on the
Windows 8 start screen to select a tile, get
unused to it. That now swipes you down to the
Apps screen instead (although the small swipe
still works in apps like the Windows Store, at
least in this version).
To select a tile, press and hold on it. You can still
select multiple tiles and now you can do useful
things to all the tiles you have selected. You can
also select multiple tiles on the Apps screen and
pin them to Start as a group. As this is the only
place you get tiles for newly installed apps, it's a
useful option.
Sorting the Apps screen by how often you use
apps gives you a quick list of frequent apps you
haven't pinned yet. And once you've done all
that work, you can have your Start screen sync
across all your PCs so you don't have to do it
again.
Windows 8.1 interface changes
Two big new interface changes are the new
smart search and the way Windows 8.1 handles
multiple modern app windows on screen –
especially on large monitors. When you use the
Search charm – which Microsoft refers to by the
Windows-S keyboard shortcut more than the
charms bar – you get the same suggestions of
apps to launch, settings to open and other
searches you might be interested in.
But now, those all show up in the Search pane
itself, rather than in a distracting full-screen. And
both apps and settings show up in the same list
rather than separate lists that can fool you into
thinking Windows doesn't have any way to
change settings.
You can still see search results in a full-screen
view but that's not just a boring list of tiles and
titles. Bing combines results from your PC and
SkyDrive, from the content inside your apps and
from the Web. By the time Windows 8.1 launches
smart search it will include email messages,
though it doesn't yet. If you have documents
that match your search, they show up first. But
Bing will also try to find a person, place, band,
album or other entity that matches what you're
looking for and build an instant search 'hero'
that's like a mini app full of content.
Search
What you get depends on what you're searching
for; if it's a person, you get Wikipedia information
(other apps will be able to suggest content like
this but Wikipedia is the first) and photos; if it's
a place, you get directions and reviews and
opening hours and links to book on OpenTable or
call them with Skype. For a band or album you
get videos and music tracks – that you can play
from Xbox Music.
You can swipe through the search view to see
the full overview, pinch to get a semantic zoom
view that shows the categories of results or tap
to get more details (like a bigger map) without
launching a different app. This is useful when you
have a lot of information to look through as well
as an appealing presentation for more fun
information. And if you don't want a big-screen
experience to browse through, remember you can
get at individual results quickly from the search
pane.
New snap views
When you do open Windows Store apps, you're
no longer restricted to snapping them into one
large and one small window. On a small screen
like a 10" Surface RT or Surface Pro screen, you
can make a window a third, half or two thirds of
the screen or any other multiple of 50 pixels –
but we could still only get two apps on screen at
once.
Some windows pick their own size – opening an
attachment from the mail app uses two thirds of
the screen for an image or half the screen for a
web page. Open another app once you already
have two windows and the icon waits on screen
for you to drag it into the window you want it to
use. That means you don't get the new app
straightaway, but it also means it doesn't
replace something you were looking at without
giving you a choice.
How to download the Windows 8.1 Preview
free today
On a larger screen, you can have three apps open
side by side, or even four (and again you can
choose whether to have each window take up a
third of the screen or have two wide windows
and one skinny one or any other way of filling the
screen).
And if you have two screens, you can put
multiple Store apps on both of them, so with the
right screens you can have seven or eight apps
at once. Whether you see three or four apps on a
screen depends not just on the screen size and
the resolution but also the DPI and scaling ratio
of the screen. At that point you're getting into
complex calculations that are difficult to explain
and it looks like the only way to find out how
many apps you'll be able to have side by side on
a screen is to keep opening them until you can't
fit another app in.
The return of the Start button to the desktop is
the most obvious change in the Windows 8.1
desktop (and no, in this build you can't turn it
back off again). But there are other subtle
differences.
You can turn off the trigger in the top right
corner that shows the charms bar when you use
your mouse and the one in the top left corner
that shows a thumbnail of the next app running
in the background.
When you use the Search charm on the desktop
it opens the Search pane on top of what you're
doing, rather than throwing you out to the Start
screen.
Libraries no longer show up in Explorer
automatically, even though they're still the way
you put media into the Xbox Music and Video
apps and the first place Mail looks when you add
attachments. They're right there in the File Picker
when you use Windows Store apps.
When you right-click on folders in Explorer the
option to add them to a library is still on the
context menu, but if you want to find and work
with them in Explorer you have to turn them back
on in the navigation pane. Instead you see This
PC where you're used to seeing Computer, along
with SkyDrive which is installed as part of
Windows (in both 8.1 and RT 8.1) and syncs
some of your files automatically.
To avoid filling all the storage on a tablet with a
small drive, all you get by default is the
Documents and Pictures folders from your
SkyDrive. You can see your other folders and the
names of all the files in them, and when you click
on a file Windows 8.1 automatically pulls it down
from SkyDrive and caches it offline and syncs
changes to it.
Manual SkyDrive configuration
You can also select files in the modern SkyDrive
app to use offline, but there's no longer a
separate desktop interface for picking folders to
sync.
Also key is Internet Explorer 11. The first thing
you'll notice is how fast it is. Even with multiple
tabs set as your home page, on a Surface Pro the
browser opens and starts loading pages almost
faster than you can time. That feels a little faster
in the desktop version because you can see that
your tabs are loading, but the immersive full-
screen IE is equally speedy. It's also rather more
powerful than the full-screen IE in Windows 8.
Instead of just 10 tabs you can have up to 100
tabs open at once, and you can open a second
copy of the browser and have another 100 tabs
in there as well. Switching between different tabs
is extremely fast but it also didn't make our test
machine use a lot of CPU or memory to keep the
tabs open. Swiping back to a page you've
already looked at is far faster than in IE 10 – you
don't have to wait for it reload, it's just there
pretty much as soon as you swipe. Another thing
that speeds up performance, especially with the
Flip Ahead option from IE 10 that works out what
the next page in a multi-page story is going to
be, is the way IE can preload up to two pages so
they're already there when you swipe forwards.
Here's one change that might take some time to
get used to: When you press and hold on a link,
instead of a context menu over the web page you
get an app bar at the bottom giving you the
choice of seeing it in a new tab or a new window
– which is a quick way of opening a second
browser.
You can see and manage a lot more information
in the modern version of IE. What's more, you
can see the folders you've organised favourites
into, and you can move favourites into the right
folder there, as well. You can also see which
sites you've saved passwords for (which will
sync between all the PCs you use your Microsoft
account with) and remove them if you don't want
the password saved any more. If you don't
actually want full screen browsing in the full-
screen version of IE you can have the address
bar and small versions of the tab buttons on
screen all the time.
Ballmer: Prep for small Windows tablet take
over in the coming months
If you were looking at a site on a different PC you
can also go in and see the list of tabs there and
open the site you want. You even get the 'back
stack' so you can browse back through the
pages you were on before you clicked the link to
load the most recent page in that tab. If you
know you'll want to refer to a page later you can
share it to the new Reading List but this requires
less planning ahead.
And there are a couple of improvements that just
make life easier, especially on tablets with no
keyboard or trackpad. Web sites that have hover
menus and drag and drop work reliably with
touch instead of you having to press and tap and
fiddle to tap in exactly the right place – or have
the menu activate and send you to a link on the
hover menu when you only wanted to look at it.
And when you hit an email address field or a
phone number field in a web page that's been
coded for it, you'll get the special keyboard
layout for email or numbers.
That's the kind of convenience we're used to on
a smartphone. There are a lot of ways Microsoft
is trying to make small Windows tablets (7, 8 and
9" models, like the new Acer) feel like a very
powerful smartphone, from Bluetooth 4 LE
support to working with devices like the Sphero
ball that have only worked with smartphones
before. But even if you don't want your Windows
PC to feel like a phone, IE 11 is an excellent
update. Even if you don't use a single new
feature, you'll love the new performance.
Xbox Music is much improved, as is Mail
(although we've seen preview of later versions of
both with more features that we're eagerly
awaiting). There are some new great new apps.
New apps
We love the Reading List that lets you collect
interesting links from IE and Windows Store apps
to come back to later (perhaps on another PC as
they sync) and the Alarms app has a clean, fresh
look that's quirky and reminiscent of Windows
Phone at its most appealing.
The Camera app now has Photosynth panoramas
built in; tap the panorama button and start
moving your tablet around (this would be very
awkward on a notebook) to stitch together
images into a scene that can cover as much of
360 degrees as you have patience for. The
stitching is good – especially if you don't move
too fast – although not perfect. This will shine
on the smaller 8" Windows tablets we expect to
see coming to the market if Acer succeeds.
With many of the features from the Photos app
moved to the Lock screen, it's now a very basic
interface for viewing – but it also has far more
editing options. The vignettes and filters are the
kind of thing you find on smartphone apps but
the Colour Enhance options are impressive.
What's new in the Windows 8.1 Store?
Drag the marker onto a colour in the image and
move the slider around the circular control to
saturate or fade out that colour throughout the
image. Drag it to another colour and choose a
different level. You can use this to make an
image more vibrant or give it a muted effect. The
Photos app is also far faster. Microsoft is not
planning to release the old Photos app for
Windows 8.1, the new app replaces it.
But then there are apps that you have to wonder
about Microsoft spending time on. Health &
Fitness is a great dashboard for Microsoft's
Health Vault service, but that continues to have
few features outside the U.S. And Food & Drink is
a nice demo of waving your hand in front of a
webcam to scroll through pages when you have
cake batter on your hands, but it's hard to see it
competing with the dozens of other food apps on
the market.
Desktop background as start screen
Early verdict
Windows 8.1 isn't a whole new operating system:
it isn't the same leap as Windows 7 to 8. But it's
more than a service pack as well. Built-in
SkyDrive sync is very welcome – and transforms
Windows RT 8.1 into a far more powerful system.
Internet Explorer gets some significant
improvements, on the desktop and in the modern
version, too.
Performance feels generally faster, even for
simple things like zipping up files. The interface
changes won't please everyone, especially if you
liked the Windows 8 Start screen and don't feel
you need for yet another Windows key on screen
- or if you were hoping for the Windows 7 Start
menu back.
Potential Windows 8.1 Preview install fix
surfaces for UK users
Some things, like customising tiles on the Start
screen, feel a little more long-winded until you
get used to them. But generally the interface
feels more consistent and easier to learn. We
love the new on-screen keyboard where you can
swipe up on the top row of keys to type letters.
And the expanded PC Settings gives the mass of
control panel options a clean, simple interface
that Windows has needed for years.
If you use the Windows Store you aren't going to
be able to avoid the prompts and promotions to
try out the Windows 8.1 preview. We'll need to
run it for longer to see if it's stable enough to
recommend as your daily operating system (it's
been rock solid so far). We might have hoped for
more major new features, but in eight months
Microsoft has delivered a sensible and welcome
update to Windows 8.