Windows 8.1 May Restore Boot-To-Desktop, Start Button

New submitter geekoid writes "According to media reports about leaked Windows 8.1 code, the next incarnation of Microsoft's flagship operating system will have an option to boot directly to the desktop. People have discovered 'references to a "CanSuppressStartScreen" option in early builds of the Windows 8.1 registry.' There is also speculation that Microsoft will be re-implementing the Start button, though the claims come from nebulous 'sources,' rather than the leaked code. In light of recent reporting about the general distaste and design flaws of Windows 8's user interface, will Microsoft's updates be dynamic enough to stop the current Windows exodus?"

Comments

Er...what exodus?

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> will Microsoft's updates be dynamic enough to stop the current Windows exodus?

Er...what exodus? Within the Windows community, people are just opting to stay with Windows 7 rather than go to Windows 8. Same thing happened with XP/Vista...

Re:Windows 7

[roc97007]

Dunno about you, but I'm in no hurry to update Office, so whether the latest version forces the new gui is not important.

Incidentally, I confirmed last weekend that Office 2000 works on Windows 8. I'm good.

Re:Too little too late

[Anonymous Coward]

The pedal orientation is not switched in RHD cars.

Re:Windows is not disappearing anytime soon

[linebackn]

An interesting "full circle" given the history of the PC that the main reason given now for keeping it around is that is corporate inertia.

Exactly, take a look at the software that made companies buy IBM PCs in the first place. These were spread sheets, word processors, databases, financial programs and such. Those needs may seem mundane today but they are not magically going away, and they are just as critical to businesses as they were then. And those are not the sort of things you can easily do on a toy phone or tablet.

Re:No

[Kjella]

If smart phones were built on x86 they would be the size of a football

Actually it would look like this...

Re:Too little too late

[Tarlus]

In fact, Windows 8 was a thing before Metro was. Even the early builds still had the start menu and Aero.

Re:No

[Kjella]

Uh...if sufficient you mean a PC from 2001, then I guess so.

My ultra-portable laptop from 2002 had a single-core 750 MHz Pentium III-M processor, 128MB RAM and 20GB HDD so you're off by at least a couple years if you want it to be as apples-to-apples as the comparison goes. The latest Samsung Galaxy S4 that launches in 10 days has a 1.9 GHz quad-core Krait 300 (GT-I9505 version), 2 GB LPDDR3 RAM and 64 GB of flash - it'd run a million circles around my old laptop.

Re:No

[Kjella]

It's still an Atom processor, not a true x86. If you don't understand the difference you may want to do some serious reading before you make yourself look even more foolish.

Sweet little troll, x86 is an instruction set and Atoms are as true as they come. In fact it supports x86-64 as well, not the oldest Atoms but even this little smart phone is a full 64 bit processor. It's not very fast but if you think that's anything to do with it you're the foolish one.

Re:Too little too late

[DarkOx]

Windows 3.x was certainly more than an 'application' running on top of DOS. Windows did its own disk I/O on i386 hardware, its own memory management, its own task scheduling, its own video etc. It did what an OS does and shared that hardware and furnished higher level SYS and API calls to applications. DOS was hardly more than a boot loader for Windows 3.x It just happens that windows preserved the environment and allowed you to return to it.

Its a bit of matter of semantics and what definitions of things you like to use; but Windows 3 was not just an 'Application' in the modern user of the term, nor was it quite an OS.

Re:Too little too late

[drsmithy]

Windows from version /386 has handled hardware drivers, process scheduling, memory management and user interface.

Pretty much any OS textbook will identify these as the things an operating system does.

Re:Too little too late

[mjwx]

The pedal orientation is not switched in RHD cars.

Also, most of Europe is LHD, only the UK is RHD.