Nothing much has been released regarding what will or won’t be included in Windows 8, but its clear that the field of computing is still evolving. I really hope Microsoft can pull off something remarkable with Windows 8. These are the features I hope will be included. Enjoy the read, and leave comments!
- Windows 7 already has some support for SSD drives. Windows 8 should be optimized to run from an SSD, because I believe they will become De facto pretty soon, once the price drops.
- I know that theming and skinning is a cosmetic issue, but is there a reason why ALL windows users need to have desktops that look exactly the same? Sure there are some options out there like Window Blinds, but I’m not overly impressed with the quality of skins or the variety. How about a fully customizable UI, with a creative portal, where artists can upload their themes. I’m talking about way more advanced stuff than just changing the color or opacity of the windows.
- Ability to install programs without restarting would be nice.
- Only running services that are needed. How is it possible that power users still manage to find long lists of services which can be disabled in Windows 7? While they might not slow down your average user, for some users any bloat is annoying, how about tidying up the bloat services that are running in the background?
- Built in support for cloud storage, possibly extending the usability of Sky Drive. Right now MS offer a free 25GB of storage, but mostly the service stinks due to the 50MB file size limit. Charge people $5 dollars a year to remove this limitation, and have a way to mount it without the need for Gladinet as a drive in explorer, in otherwords web dav it.
- Network the chess game. Chess Titans is a pretty good little chess game, but chess is best played with a real person. Lots of chess players have friends who play the odd game of chess, but its honestly such a mission to get people to install software on both sides and configure that it makes the odd casual game of chess unlikely. Find a way to make Chess Titans easy to play for us windows users. I think one great way to accomplish this is by using Windows Live Messenger as the delivery, this way you can completely avoid having firewall, routing issues, and also adds yet another incentive for people to use Live Messenger. Skype does this in exactly the same way.
- Fix the virus issue. Linux users don’t need anti virus, surely they’re doing something right? Why should us windows users have to worry so much about security?
- Give us a decent screen / presentation recorder. Yes we all love Camtasia, but how many of us can really afford it. Throw us a bone, this would be a really nice value add.
- Expose an app configuration model, and allow us to save our app configurations (encrypted) to a cloud. This way when we reinstall applications that support this model, after formatting our computers, we don’t have to reconfigure the app. For example FTP clients (sites), browsers (plugins, their settings). Soon developers will catch on.
- Remove the backup that is currently offered, and give us incremental ghosting. This would mean we can really back up our systems completely, and quickly.
Michael's Techbox 