Windows 8: some first, very discreet pictures

A Chinese site has published the first pictures of Windows 8, although they leave you looking for more. The secret seems to be well guarded by Microsoft.

Chinese site Win7China has published the first screen captures of a preliminary version of Windows 8. The authenticity of these pictures is difficult to gauge though as Microsoft has, of course, not confirmed them, but sites with a certain amount of experience in this field believe they are real.

The pictures are extracts of a copy of Windows 8 in development phase. They are in a way also disappointing as they don’t provide you with a lot of information about Windows 8 or its user interface.

We find the Windows 7 taskbar with it being possible to visually see the progress of driver installations. For the picture of the Windows account, it is possible to select a video. Two darker Microsoft backgrounds can be seen, although we have to wonder what has been blocked out which we aren’t allowed to see…

 

We understand the company is closely guarding their secrets, and we are still a long way off seeing the new Windows 8 user interface, so it’s not today that we are going to be finding out more about this subject. Windows 8 will be present on numerous devices though, including official support of the ARM architecture, so it is likely that the user interface will vary depending on the targeted hardware.

Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, announced that Windows 8 will be the company’s riskiest bet yet as it will embrace Cloud Computing. Win7China has brought with it additional information, stating that the OS will integrate an App Store which will be accessible via Windows Live ID.

According to Win7China, Windows 8 will also have a restore function allowing you to restore the computer to factory defaults in less than 2 minutes, without having to insert a disk and taking up a minimal amount of hard drive space.

The installation time for Windows 8 will also be a lot faster than Windows 7. It has to be confirmed whether Win7China’s statement that they installed a preliminary version Windows 8 in 8 minutes (compared to 23 to 25 minutes for Windows 7 on the same hardware), the machine used is a real top of the line model with an 8 core process and 24 GB of RAM. No SSD though, but instead a 2 TB hard drive.