Microsoft has streamlined the Windows 8 upgrade installation process. The new installation will take just 11 clicks to load up on your computer and promises to improve user experience during installation.
Microsoft unveiled the developer preview of Windows 8 at their BUILD Conference this year and it has been really liked by many users. Unlike Windows 7, this version of Windows is very popular among the end-users. Having this in mind, and to improve the usability of the applications and also the overall installation process, Microsoft has streamlined the entire upgrade installation process.
Windows’s upgrade installation process used to take more than 60 windows and a lot of effort to get your files and applications upgraded to the next version of Windows. But this pain for the user is no more! Microsoft’s Steven Sinofsky has posted a detailed blogpost on how this actually works and how well their teams have worked together to streamline the install process.
Here’s the demo of the new installation process by Microsoft:
The blogpost is too lengthy to read. So I have done the difficult part for you. Here are some of the important excerpts from the blogpost by Steve Sinofsky, President, Windows Division:
What according to Microsoft is the setup process?
From this version of Windows, the Windows 8, Microsoft has taking even the Windows’ Installation process seriously. The Windows team has worked hard to streamline the setup process. This comes as a result of understanding the importance of the installation process and how users view the installation process. Here are some key pointers of how Microsoft has seen the installation process as:
Setup is something that gets a lot of attention from us in any Windows release. It needs to just work reliably across a huge number of variations of hardware and software.
For Windows 8, our goal was to continue to improve reliability while also improving the installation experience and raw performance. Not only did we want it to be rock solid, but also faster and easier to use.
Challenge is improving the Windows installation and upgrade process:
So, with that understanding, Microsoft decided to understand how difficult it would be to streamline the installation process. So they did a ground research on what difficulties would come in their way.
Support for these PCs running different Windows versions is a big challenge in terms of testing all possible upgrade paths, languages, service packs, architectures, and editions. When you think about it, it is a rather remarkable achievement that hardware designed for one OS can be supported on an OS that did not exist when the hardware was created, especially considering that connecting hardware to software is a fundamental role played by the OS.
There are also complexities in getting software to work seamlessly upon upgrade, particularly utilities that hook into the lowest levels of Windows such as anti-virus, disk format and defrag, or virtualization.
Streamlining the process:
After analyzing all these, the Windows team declared the difficulty level as high. And decide to put on a lot of effort in getting the Windows 8’s installation streamlined. The development team concentrated on two key customers. The non-technical and expert users.
- People who want an easy way to upgrade to the new release with an absolute bare minimum of hassle
- People who want to do a clean install, and want more control of setup options, disk layout, and partition configuration
In Windows 8, rather than having Upgrade Advisor, Setup, and Windows Easy Transfer as separate apps or features, we’ve folded them together into one fast and fluid experience in which we first determine if your PC, apps, and devices will work in the new OS, note which things you want to keep (apps, files and/or settings), and then install the new OS.
Looking for some more steps to upgrade procedure? You’ve got it wrong. That’s the end of installation! Yes! This would be the final step and the setup would do the rest for you! This is a super cool installation process for Windows we’ve ever seen.
Windows 8’s boot process has already gotten some good number of people’s interest lately, since the operating system boots in just 8 seconds. If you need some more information about the automated installation scripts and more information about the new XML structure, they have posted it on the company’s blog. You can read it here.