Since it's not clear from your post, the Surface (even the RT version) can do all of that.
Full storage encrypting is available, based on BitLocker as you might expect. It works seamlessly; my company mandates device encryption and enforces it when connecting to the Exchange server, and I didn't even realize the BitLocker encryption was actually in progress until I got a notification saying it was complete.
There's a built-in PDF viewing app; no more need for third-party software.
Editing LaTeX files on Windows RT is easy, if not necessarily a great experience (I don't think any of the current editors support syntax highlighting for it). There is not yet a LaTeX compiler available for RT, though. However, you've got Remote Desktop, so you can easily do your compiling (and editing, if you want) on a "real" PC, and copy the files back. Given the low resolution and cramped keyboard of most netbooks (unless you have one that's at least 10", the keyboard isn't full-sized), I suspect that the Surface is a better device for editing on.
Plugging in a projector works just fine, although you need a dongle for it; there's no roon on the Surface's edge for a full VGA port!
As for the cost... that is a concern. I can see how a netbook would be viewed as expendable, while a tablet wouldn't. On the other hand, sometimes more productivity makes it worthwhile. Doing real work on an almost-10"-super-cheap netbook with a 1024x600 screen resolution, 95% keyboard, and 5-hour battery life is crap compared to Surface (and yes, I have both).
Contrary to popular opinion, and for that matter to MS marketing, the walled garden on RT is a myth. Sideloading apps is fully possible (built into the OS and free to enable) so it's not really any more "walled" than Android in that respect.
Additionally, people have already figured out how to bypass the desktop app restriction, so you aren't even limited to just "Metro"-style apps from third parties either. That one *is* unofficial, so it's possible Microsoft may patch it out, but for now you can do pretty much anything you like with RT.
Also, as a side note, Minecraft is now available on the Xbox 360. I personally prefer PC input devices over any "traditional" console controller (I play a lot of Rock Band, though) so I don't personally want to play Minecraft on the console very much, but it's there and it works.
They had some great keyboards, too. The Touch Pro 2 (from the days of WinMo) had one of the best keyboards I'd even seen on a smartphone, if not *the* best. They produced a Windows Phone 7 model on the same basic chassis, and I think an Android phone too, but those were both some time back.
You would think that Apple, with its legions of design-ish type people, would know the difference between pixels and points. Are they just hoping that the judge doesn't?
Or maybe they're hoping that the judge looks at it using a 72DPI screen and therefore 14px looks like 14pt.
Actually, while I'm not going to suggest that you *should* do this, there's no reason you couldn't write a compiler or even IDE for Windows RT. Hell, WP7 even has a (Microsoft-written) scripting IDE called TouchDevelop. Something like that, but substantially more powerful (able to produce compiled code, even support the full runtime if they want), could be written if anybody would bother.
On the other hand, Windows RT already comes with Powershell, both as a very competent scripting environment and including the "Powershell ISE" (Integrated Scripting Environment). Although it lacks the speed advantage of compiling the code, you can already write arbitrary programs in that using the.NET framework. Of course, it's also a *very* keyboard-focused experience.
It's not exactly hugely encouraged for arbitrary apps - it's supposedly for dev/test and for organization-specific internal apps - but any Windows 8 or Windows RT device can sideload "Metro"-style apps just fine. They don't make it easy; you have to use the command line (Powershell, specifically) for both the "developer unlock" and for installing the apps (at least, that's the easiest way that I've found), but it doesn't cost anything.
I don't have any idea how this guy would respond to a suggestion that he post the.APPX somewhere we can download it for sideloading, but in theory, this could have been done.
Mind you, unlike on iOS, Microsoft permits app sideloading (even on ARM devices), with no extra costs or limits that I've seen yet.
Open Powershell as Admin Enter the command: Show-WindowsDeveloperLicenseRegistration Enter your Windows Live credentials Download and sideload apps to your heart's content.
I don't own a Mac, so I've never even tried to develop for the iOS store or OS X store. However, I did look into the WP7 store. There was a (brief) time, ending almost two years ago, when you were limited to five *free* app submissions per annual fee. Paid apps didn't have this restriction, because MS would get a cut of the purchase price. The limit was quickly lifted to something like 100 app - high enough that even somebody who wanted to flood the market with junk would have to work pretty hard to hit the limit.
No, pretty sure *you* are the idiot here. If you'd actually RTFA, instead of whatever brief skim you took, you'd have seen that the guy ran WACK every time... and that it always ran clean on his system. He eventually got a failure out of it by running his VM's performance down to the Win8 mimum specs, but even after fixing that he continued getting unexplained errors from the certification process that didn't show up on his local system.
Also, WACK failed to catch a very simple and obvious thing - a piece of dev/test code that he'd left in a constructor, which will crash the app when run if installed from the store - that it clearly should have. That's exactly the kind of thing that static analysis should have found.
I'm rather shocked by Microsoft's failures, here. Usually, they're very good with dev tools and communication. Not this time, it seems. You'd think they'd have learned from the problems Apple had... it almost feels like they're trying to repeat Apple's mistakes too.
Care to explain any advantages that you can get with VMWare over Hyper-V at the same price point? Aside from the ability for the hypervisor manager to run on Linux, which doesn't seem terribly relevant here, I'm not seeing it. This is a true (type 1) hypervisor, like ESX(i), with admin tools included, for no extra charge.
I'm not sufficiently familiar with the feature lists for both sides to give a point / counterpoint comparison, but Hyper-V (the Server 2012 version or Client) offer some nice features. Since my job frequently requires installing and testing third-party software (and I don't want it messing up or otherwise interacting with my own software), it'd be tremendously helpful to have on my workstation.
I have almost no experience with multi-mon on OS X, although I've seen it used casually enough to know that it works fine in general. Of course, so do older versions of Windows. This isn't about whether it *works* but rather about how good the experience is.
Sure, but Win8 has a corner of the screen (right where the Start button has always been) that, if you hover on it, actually says "Start" as well as displaying a thumbnail to show that there's something there.
I agree that the decision to remove the permanently visible button is weird and un-needed, but the Start button is still in Win8, pretty much where it always was (the hitbox is a bit different, but then, that changed before too).
Then there's the Windows key on the keyboard, which is sometimes even labeled as the "Start" key. It also still works correctly, something that Linux seems to struggle with (it can either be used as a stand-alone key or as a meta key that modifies other keys, but I've never seen it correctly used as "both" the way Windows does. There may be desktop environments that can do that now, though.)
The ribbon collapses to take up the same amount of space as the menu bar (i.e. less than menu bar plus toolbars did on older UIs). This has been the case since the pre-release versions of Office 2007, but apparently a bunch of people never thought to double-click on the ribbon headers, so MS added a button on the right side of the ribbon bar to toggle the collapse state. When collapsed, a single click will display the ribbon tab clicked on, until you either click within the ribbon or click elsewhere in the app. The page layout will not be reflowed during this time, but you can still scroll the content underneath the ribbon. Only when the ribbon is fully restored (or collapsed) will the window layout change.
Most of the time, the ribbon actually uses less screen real estate than the old UIs.
Not every post favorable of Windows is Microsoft astroturfing, believe it or not (in case you're curious, I also have Linux installed on three of my four PCs, and it's the default OS on one of them).
The Ars Technica reviewer's complaint boils down to "even though MS has improved the ability to find the internal/shared corners of multiple monitors, it's still not perfect". Umm... that's a shame, I guess, but that doesn't mean that there isn't still a substantial improvement over Win7's multi-monitor handling. That review touches on almost none of the new stuff for multi-monitor directly; if I didn't already know what they were, I wouldn't have learned anything at all from that "review" except that MS has at least made some effort to let people find stuff on the corners of screens without the mouse wandering onto the next one over by accident. Even if it's not perfect, that would be an improvement on Win7 as well. Oh, and if you're going to link to a specific part of something to back up a claim, please actually link to the *correct* part. You wanted page 2, not page 5. Also, here's a bunch of info on the actual improvements: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/05/21/enhancing-windows-8-for-multiple-monitors.aspx
Somebody else posted a great link discussing the multi-mon improvements in Win8 above. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/05/21/enhancing-windows-8-for-multiple-monitors.aspx. Some video drivers try to implement these types of things themselves as additional user-space features, but it's really the kind of thing that should be handled by the OS (well, technically by the window manager and desktop environment).
It's not a "driver" thing, really, and I don't like this trend towards increasingly gigantic video drivers stuffed full of code that has nothing to do with the video driver's duties of interfacing between then OS and the video card, and controlling the behavior of the GPU. The "improved multi-monitor support" thing isn't a matter of supporting more monitors or anything like that; it's about making use of multiple monitors more productive and/or more pleasant.
You can choose which items are roamed on each computer. For things like bookmarks sync, it's useful pretty much everywhere. For some others, you might want it on some computers and not on others.
You can also log onto different PCs using different accounts (local or Live) just as you can today. If you use the Windows Store, though, the apps are tied to your Live account; they can be used on all PCs/tablets that you sign into with that account, but are in theory per-user (although the binaries are still installed in a system-wide location).
It *would* be a shame, but they didn't, so that's irrelevant. Aero Peek, Aero Snap, Aero Shake, live thumbnails in Windows Flip (Alt+Tab), and limited use of transparency (the taskbar and the desktop overlays are still slightly transparent) are still present. The only Aero features that are gone are window border transparency (which I do miss) and Flip3D (which I don't). The keyboard shortcut of Win+Tab now switches among "Metro" apps and the desktop (as a whole), while Alt+Tab still switches among all open windows, including "Metro" ones. Aero Peek on Alt+Tab, hovering on Taskbar previews, or on the whole desktop using the lower-right corner (which also still functions as a "Hide/Show Desktop" button) all still work.
Win8 Pro RTM (build 9200) x64, shitty Intel integrated "Mobile GMA X3100" graphics with WDDM 1.1 driver.
Win7 is faster on the same hardware than Vista, and Win8 is faster still, on the same hardware, than Win7. I'm typing this on a very "slow" convertible tablet (Core 2 Duo ultra-low voltage @ 1.2GHz, 80GB 1.8" 4200RPM HDD) from 2008 (it came with Vista) and have observed this progression first-hand. It also uses less RAM, although that's less of a concern since I upgraded the RAM (the only easily upgradable component, sadly) to 4GB almost immediately after buying it, which made the Vista performance... acceptable.
So, sorry but you're wrong. Not only does Win8 get better performance than Win7, it's not even the first time MS has managed such a speedup.
In fact, by some metrics, Windows XP was faster than 2000 on the same hardware too. That's not true overall, though, the way it is with Vista -> Win7 - > Win8.
Given that there quite literally is no such thing as "Windows 7 Tablet Edition" and the last time anything similarly named existed, it was XP, I find your credibility rather questionable.
All editions of Win other than Home Basic and Starter are capable of handling both touch and stylus input if the hwardware supports it. With that said, most tablets (even if they support a stylus at all) aren't designed with the digitizer resolution needed for professional artwork. The stylus is instead used as a somewhat more precise alternative to a finger, useful for things like tapping on small links or doing handwriting recognition, but nowhere near the grade of hardware required for artwork. Their typical resolution is on the order of 512x512 across the entire display.
Really? I thought Flip3D was a cool tech demo of the desktop compositor, but aside from that I never used it after the first month or so - Alt+Tab was faster. On Win7 and Win8, Alt+Tab also shows you the full window (not just the thumbnail) if you hover (holding Alt) on one of the options for a moment.
The Flip3D keyboard shortcut was remapped to now switch you immediately between "Metro" and the desktop, which is useful in its own way (although you can also Alt+Tab between "Metro" apps like normal).
The lack of a graphic in the corner of the screen for the Start button is all it takes for you to call it a downgrade? Dear $DEITY how are you intellectually capable of breathing and typing at the same time? The Start button is still there, if you just click the corner of the screen like people always have. Or you could use the Windows key, like people who actually want to get things done quickly usually do.
If you don't want a tablet OS, buy Win8 instead of Windows RT. Actually, you *can't* even buy Windows RT directly... probably a good thing, for the apparently frightfully easily confused types like yourself. Hint: Win8 still has the full desktop pretty much as you're used to... except with an improved Windows Explorer, Task Manager, Taskbar (especially for multi-monitor), and a ton of behind-the-scenes improvements and new features (mount CD/DVD ISOs, Client Hyper-V, etc.)
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Since it's not clear from your post, the Surface (even the RT version) can do all of that.
Full storage encrypting is available, based on BitLocker as you might expect. It works seamlessly; my company mandates device encryption and enforces it when connecting to the Exchange server, and I didn't even realize the BitLocker encryption was actually in progress until I got a notification saying it was complete.
There's a built-in PDF viewing app; no more need for third-party software.
Editing LaTeX files on Windows RT is easy, if not necessarily a great experience (I don't think any of the current editors support syntax highlighting for it). There is not yet a LaTeX compiler available for RT, though. However, you've got Remote Desktop, so you can easily do your compiling (and editing, if you want) on a "real" PC, and copy the files back. Given the low resolution and cramped keyboard of most netbooks (unless you have one that's at least 10", the keyboard isn't full-sized), I suspect that the Surface is a better device for editing on.
Plugging in a projector works just fine, although you need a dongle for it; there's no roon on the Surface's edge for a full VGA port!
As for the cost... that is a concern. I can see how a netbook would be viewed as expendable, while a tablet wouldn't. On the other hand, sometimes more productivity makes it worthwhile. Doing real work on an almost-10"-super-cheap netbook with a 1024x600 screen resolution, 95% keyboard, and 5-hour battery life is crap compared to Surface (and yes, I have both).
Contrary to popular opinion, and for that matter to MS marketing, the walled garden on RT is a myth. Sideloading apps is fully possible (built into the OS and free to enable) so it's not really any more "walled" than Android in that respect.
Additionally, people have already figured out how to bypass the desktop app restriction, so you aren't even limited to just "Metro"-style apps from third parties either. That one *is* unofficial, so it's possible Microsoft may patch it out, but for now you can do pretty much anything you like with RT.
Also, as a side note, Minecraft is now available on the Xbox 360. I personally prefer PC input devices over any "traditional" console controller (I play a lot of Rock Band, though) so I don't personally want to play Minecraft on the console very much, but it's there and it works.
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I live in Seattle, you insensitive clod!
They had some great keyboards, too. The Touch Pro 2 (from the days of WinMo) had one of the best keyboards I'd even seen on a smartphone, if not *the* best. They produced a Windows Phone 7 model on the same basic chassis, and I think an Android phone too, but those were both some time back.
You would think that Apple, with its legions of design-ish type people, would know the difference between pixels and points. Are they just hoping that the judge doesn't?
Or maybe they're hoping that the judge looks at it using a 72DPI screen and therefore 14px looks like 14pt.
Actually, while I'm not going to suggest that you *should* do this, there's no reason you couldn't write a compiler or even IDE for Windows RT. Hell, WP7 even has a (Microsoft-written) scripting IDE called TouchDevelop. Something like that, but substantially more powerful (able to produce compiled code, even support the full runtime if they want), could be written if anybody would bother.
On the other hand, Windows RT already comes with Powershell, both as a very competent scripting environment and including the "Powershell ISE" (Integrated Scripting Environment). Although it lacks the speed advantage of compiling the code, you can already write arbitrary programs in that using the .NET framework. Of course, it's also a *very* keyboard-focused experience.
For those who prefer metric, that's about 195.6 cm. He's well above 99th percentile for height. Big, too. Kind of an imposing-looking guy, in fact.
It's not exactly hugely encouraged for arbitrary apps - it's supposedly for dev/test and for organization-specific internal apps - but any Windows 8 or Windows RT device can sideload "Metro"-style apps just fine. They don't make it easy; you have to use the command line (Powershell, specifically) for both the "developer unlock" and for installing the apps (at least, that's the easiest way that I've found), but it doesn't cost anything.
I don't have any idea how this guy would respond to a suggestion that he post the .APPX somewhere we can download it for sideloading, but in theory, this could have been done.
Mind you, unlike on iOS, Microsoft permits app sideloading (even on ARM devices), with no extra costs or limits that I've seen yet.
Open Powershell as Admin
Enter the command: Show-WindowsDeveloperLicenseRegistration
Enter your Windows Live credentials
Download and sideload apps to your heart's content.
I don't own a Mac, so I've never even tried to develop for the iOS store or OS X store. However, I did look into the WP7 store. There was a (brief) time, ending almost two years ago, when you were limited to five *free* app submissions per annual fee. Paid apps didn't have this restriction, because MS would get a cut of the purchase price. The limit was quickly lifted to something like 100 app - high enough that even somebody who wanted to flood the market with junk would have to work pretty hard to hit the limit.
No, pretty sure *you* are the idiot here. If you'd actually RTFA, instead of whatever brief skim you took, you'd have seen that the guy ran WACK every time... and that it always ran clean on his system. He eventually got a failure out of it by running his VM's performance down to the Win8 mimum specs, but even after fixing that he continued getting unexplained errors from the certification process that didn't show up on his local system.
Also, WACK failed to catch a very simple and obvious thing - a piece of dev/test code that he'd left in a constructor, which will crash the app when run if installed from the store - that it clearly should have. That's exactly the kind of thing that static analysis should have found.
I'm rather shocked by Microsoft's failures, here. Usually, they're very good with dev tools and communication. Not this time, it seems. You'd think they'd have learned from the problems Apple had... it almost feels like they're trying to repeat Apple's mistakes too.
Care to explain any advantages that you can get with VMWare over Hyper-V at the same price point? Aside from the ability for the hypervisor manager to run on Linux, which doesn't seem terribly relevant here, I'm not seeing it. This is a true (type 1) hypervisor, like ESX(i), with admin tools included, for no extra charge.
I'm not sufficiently familiar with the feature lists for both sides to give a point / counterpoint comparison, but Hyper-V (the Server 2012 version or Client) offer some nice features. Since my job frequently requires installing and testing third-party software (and I don't want it messing up or otherwise interacting with my own software), it'd be tremendously helpful to have on my workstation.
I have almost no experience with multi-mon on OS X, although I've seen it used casually enough to know that it works fine in general. Of course, so do older versions of Windows. This isn't about whether it *works* but rather about how good the experience is.
I could list off the new stuff, but it's easier to just link to the source: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/05/21/enhancing-windows-8-for-multiple-monitors.aspx
Sure, but Win8 has a corner of the screen (right where the Start button has always been) that, if you hover on it, actually says "Start" as well as displaying a thumbnail to show that there's something there.
I agree that the decision to remove the permanently visible button is weird and un-needed, but the Start button is still in Win8, pretty much where it always was (the hitbox is a bit different, but then, that changed before too).
Then there's the Windows key on the keyboard, which is sometimes even labeled as the "Start" key. It also still works correctly, something that Linux seems to struggle with (it can either be used as a stand-alone key or as a meta key that modifies other keys, but I've never seen it correctly used as "both" the way Windows does. There may be desktop environments that can do that now, though.)
The ribbon collapses to take up the same amount of space as the menu bar (i.e. less than menu bar plus toolbars did on older UIs). This has been the case since the pre-release versions of Office 2007, but apparently a bunch of people never thought to double-click on the ribbon headers, so MS added a button on the right side of the ribbon bar to toggle the collapse state. When collapsed, a single click will display the ribbon tab clicked on, until you either click within the ribbon or click elsewhere in the app. The page layout will not be reflowed during this time, but you can still scroll the content underneath the ribbon. Only when the ribbon is fully restored (or collapsed) will the window layout change.
Most of the time, the ribbon actually uses less screen real estate than the old UIs.
Not every post favorable of Windows is Microsoft astroturfing, believe it or not (in case you're curious, I also have Linux installed on three of my four PCs, and it's the default OS on one of them).
The Ars Technica reviewer's complaint boils down to "even though MS has improved the ability to find the internal/shared corners of multiple monitors, it's still not perfect". Umm... that's a shame, I guess, but that doesn't mean that there isn't still a substantial improvement over Win7's multi-monitor handling. That review touches on almost none of the new stuff for multi-monitor directly; if I didn't already know what they were, I wouldn't have learned anything at all from that "review" except that MS has at least made some effort to let people find stuff on the corners of screens without the mouse wandering onto the next one over by accident. Even if it's not perfect, that would be an improvement on Win7 as well. Oh, and if you're going to link to a specific part of something to back up a claim, please actually link to the *correct* part. You wanted page 2, not page 5. Also, here's a bunch of info on the actual improvements: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/05/21/enhancing-windows-8-for-multiple-monitors.aspx
Somebody else posted a great link discussing the multi-mon improvements in Win8 above. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/05/21/enhancing-windows-8-for-multiple-monitors.aspx. Some video drivers try to implement these types of things themselves as additional user-space features, but it's really the kind of thing that should be handled by the OS (well, technically by the window manager and desktop environment).
It's not a "driver" thing, really, and I don't like this trend towards increasingly gigantic video drivers stuffed full of code that has nothing to do with the video driver's duties of interfacing between then OS and the video card, and controlling the behavior of the GPU. The "improved multi-monitor support" thing isn't a matter of supporting more monitors or anything like that; it's about making use of multiple monitors more productive and/or more pleasant.
You can choose which items are roamed on each computer. For things like bookmarks sync, it's useful pretty much everywhere. For some others, you might want it on some computers and not on others.
You can also log onto different PCs using different accounts (local or Live) just as you can today. If you use the Windows Store, though, the apps are tied to your Live account; they can be used on all PCs/tablets that you sign into with that account, but are in theory per-user (although the binaries are still installed in a system-wide location).
It *would* be a shame, but they didn't, so that's irrelevant. Aero Peek, Aero Snap, Aero Shake, live thumbnails in Windows Flip (Alt+Tab), and limited use of transparency (the taskbar and the desktop overlays are still slightly transparent) are still present. The only Aero features that are gone are window border transparency (which I do miss) and Flip3D (which I don't). The keyboard shortcut of Win+Tab now switches among "Metro" apps and the desktop (as a whole), while Alt+Tab still switches among all open windows, including "Metro" ones. Aero Peek on Alt+Tab, hovering on Taskbar previews, or on the whole desktop using the lower-right corner (which also still functions as a "Hide/Show Desktop" button) all still work.
Win8 Pro RTM (build 9200) x64, shitty Intel integrated "Mobile GMA X3100" graphics with WDDM 1.1 driver.
Win7 is faster on the same hardware than Vista, and Win8 is faster still, on the same hardware, than Win7. I'm typing this on a very "slow" convertible tablet (Core 2 Duo ultra-low voltage @ 1.2GHz, 80GB 1.8" 4200RPM HDD) from 2008 (it came with Vista) and have observed this progression first-hand. It also uses less RAM, although that's less of a concern since I upgraded the RAM (the only easily upgradable component, sadly) to 4GB almost immediately after buying it, which made the Vista performance... acceptable.
So, sorry but you're wrong. Not only does Win8 get better performance than Win7, it's not even the first time MS has managed such a speedup.
In fact, by some metrics, Windows XP was faster than 2000 on the same hardware too. That's not true overall, though, the way it is with Vista -> Win7 - > Win8.
Given that there quite literally is no such thing as "Windows 7 Tablet Edition" and the last time anything similarly named existed, it was XP, I find your credibility rather questionable.
All editions of Win other than Home Basic and Starter are capable of handling both touch and stylus input if the hwardware supports it. With that said, most tablets (even if they support a stylus at all) aren't designed with the digitizer resolution needed for professional artwork. The stylus is instead used as a somewhat more precise alternative to a finger, useful for things like tapping on small links or doing handwriting recognition, but nowhere near the grade of hardware required for artwork. Their typical resolution is on the order of 512x512 across the entire display.
Really? I thought Flip3D was a cool tech demo of the desktop compositor, but aside from that I never used it after the first month or so - Alt+Tab was faster. On Win7 and Win8, Alt+Tab also shows you the full window (not just the thumbnail) if you hover (holding Alt) on one of the options for a moment.
The Flip3D keyboard shortcut was remapped to now switch you immediately between "Metro" and the desktop, which is useful in its own way (although you can also Alt+Tab between "Metro" apps like normal).
There's a maximum length on the subject line. If you submit too quickly it's easy to miss it.
The lack of a graphic in the corner of the screen for the Start button is all it takes for you to call it a downgrade? Dear $DEITY how are you intellectually capable of breathing and typing at the same time? The Start button is still there, if you just click the corner of the screen like people always have. Or you could use the Windows key, like people who actually want to get things done quickly usually do.
If you don't want a tablet OS, buy Win8 instead of Windows RT. Actually, you *can't* even buy Windows RT directly... probably a good thing, for the apparently frightfully easily confused types like yourself. Hint: Win8 still has the full desktop pretty much as you're used to... except with an improved Windows Explorer, Task Manager, Taskbar (especially for multi-monitor), and a ton of behind-the-scenes improvements and new features (mount CD/DVD ISOs, Client Hyper-V, etc.)