Windows 8 - Tools for Power Users
In our previous feature, we covered the top performance enhancements made to the Release Preview of Windows 8. This time round, we're following up with three key tools that have been thoroughly revamped and will be most essential for regular Windows users, as well as power users alike.
By Vijay Anand -
Active Apps Management, System Restore and Performance Assessment
In our previous feature, we covered the top performance enhancements made to the Release Preview of Windows 8. This time round, we’re following up with three key tools that have been thoroughly revamped and will be most essential for regular Windows users, as well as power users alike.
The Task Manager Re-imagined
Keeping with the natural user interface of the Windows 8 Metro UI, Microsoft has reworked the Task Manager to give it simplified and straightforward view. After all, if you look at how tablets and smartphones handle concurrent app management, most of us can live by just a list of active applications and that’s exactly what you get on Windows 8 too. If you haven’t heard yet, even the system boot experience and error messages are handled a lot friendlier.
Straightforward and simplified, the new task manager keeps in-line with the whole design revamp of Windows 8. This is especially important if the device in question is a tablet.
Power users can easily switch to an advanced view to get more details that are much better presented than in previous OS releases. In fact, information that used to be spread across several tabs, you now get a consolidated view of applications running, their status, and their usage of CPU, memory, storage and network resources at any instance. Plus, it’s presented with a ‘heat map’ effect style, which easily singles out areas needing attention.
The advanced view of task manager has everything you need to know at a glance; plus the heat map style of representation brings focus to applications using abnormally high percentage of resources. Click for a close-up view.
The App History tab gives you a broader overview on how much resources certain apps been consuming over time. Take for example the Network column - the amount of data transferred over time can be critical for you to understand which of the apps have been transferring more data than others. If perhaps you’re on the move and using a mobile data plan, this information is handy to changing your consumption patterns if possible or upgrading to a better plan.
A Note on Suspended State
Now if you noticed the status column, you would notice that the “suspended” state is something new to this OS. Further discussion with Chris Mayo, Senior Technical Evangelist at Microsoft, brought out that Windows 8 has clever memory management to bring out the best user experience possible. For example, when an application isn’t active and it’s not in the foreground, the OS kicks down its priority of service, saves state to memory and is given the “suspended” state. However, if you invoke it back to the foreground, it will resume usability as if it was in active usage.
When there are a lot of open applications and memory resources are low, Windows 8 will save the state of unused application(s) to disk and terminate them to free up memory. ‘Reviving’ it could take a tad longer, but that depends on your storage drive’s performance. This is a little different from borrowing virtual memory from the disk and treating it as part of active memory. Given the speed at which tech progresses, the large caches on the processor and the use of solid state memory for storage, we think the change in operation has no cause for concern and shouldn’t affect overall usage experience; in fact, it could be more efficient We can’t be sure of the impact on very old hardware, but if it’s five years or older, it’s probably time for a whole system refresh. Not that Windows 8 will have any issues with old hardware, but as with everything, there are boundaries of acceptability and you can’t expect state of the art performance or responsiveness from such old systems.
However, Chris highlighted that this new suspended state applies only for the Metro-styled applications in the new OS and does not extend to legacy applications.
The New System Restore - Refresh and Reset in a Jiffy
Restoring a Windows installation might probably send shivers down the spine of many because of the long wait times associated with the process. We certainly share your pain as well.
Thankfully, the restoration process on Windows 8 is a very speedy affair that could only take a matter of minutes as we found from a demonstration with Bill Karagounis, Microsoft’s Windows 8 Principle Group Program Manager. “Refresh” and “Reset” are the two new terms associated with system restoration in the new Windows.
- Refreshing the PC - This restores Windows 8 while retaining personal settings, personal data and apps from Windows store (Marketplace). Applications obtained or installed by other means will be removed (but you’ll be given a list).
- Resetting the PC - This is the equivalent of a traditional clean restoration; a factory-reset equivalent. Nothing is retained.
Using a Samsung Slate PC running on an SSD drive, a system refresh took just over two minutes, while a system reset took a little over three minutes! We don’t recall when was the last time a modern application installed faster than those timings, let alone a complete OS restore. Of course, timings will vary with a much older system and using a hard disk drive, but on the whole, the process should be speedier than before. The following are some snapshots of the Refresh/Reset process:-
The new restoration functions can be found within the general PC settings of the control panel. Scrolling down the right panel will reveal the required options as found in the next screenshot.
And here are the discussed options - Refreshing your PC and below that, Remove everything refers to resetting the system.
This is an overlay notice you’ll get once you choose to refresh your PC. After you press next...
...you’ll get this overlay and once you proceed, your PC will be refreshed in minutes (if it’s a fairly modern system).
If you opted for a system reset to bring things back to factory-default settings (the equivalent of a clean installation), this will be the overlay notice.
And this is the next prompt before the system is fully reset, just as though you installed Windows from scratch.
System Performance Assessment with Windows ADK
So we touched on managing applications and processes with the new task manager and using the new system refresh/reset function to restore your PC to a pristine state in a matter of minutes as opposed to hours.
The last tool is an add-on to the Windows OS that you can install and it’s called the Window Assessment and Deployment Kit (ADK). While the name implies it is more of a tool for IT professionals to assess system compatibility and deployment of new Windows operating system, it has a few gems of its own. Some of the new assessment tools can be quite useful for even power users without resorting to conventional benchmarking applications. We’ll show you a handful of screenshots to show you what we mean:-
The Windows ADK has a number of useful test suites to check and assess various performance aspects. Seen here are system boot/shutdown related sub-tests.
You can run multiple tests and save the outcome in a results log for comparison and tracking. In this particular example, the secondary battery test run resulted in big disparity as opposed to the initial run. The tool also noted many more issues that could be contributing to the reduced battery life.
Drilling down on the issues list, Windows ADK listed these possibilities.
Expanding the options, you get more details on why the tool flagged these issues out. In this example, the tool found a number of active processes sapping on the notebook’s battery and thus reducing overall battery life assessment tests seen earlier.
With these advancements, we reckon that the Windows Assessment and Deployment Kit would be a useful component for many power users along with more accustomed utilities. The edition compatible with the Windows 8 Release Preview can be found here and it was just recently updated.
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