There has been a deluge of Windows 8 related information over the past few hours
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What’s new ?
It appears that the source of all the leaked information was Win7,Vista, which published a huge stockpile of confidential documents. Of course, as you can imagine, Microsoft is not bemused. Francisco Martin’s blog, which was hosted on Microsoft Live Spaces, has already been pulled down (possibly by Microsoft). Worse still, in their eagerness to share the confidential documents, Win 8 might have exposed their source. One of the slides clearly identifies one Mr. Derek Goode from HP as the legitimate owner of the documents.

Anyway, the documents are still available for download from the aforementioned forum. If you are excited about Windows 8, then you should really check them out. In this post, I will highlight some of the stuff (other than that has already been mentioned) that caught my fancy.

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MediumTurquoise”]Optimized for Variety of Platforms
Microsoft will continue with its philosophy of using the same operating system on different form factors. Windows 8 will be optimized for tablet PCs, laptops and normal desktops.

I briefly discussed this earlier, but going through the slides I found a lot more information. With Windows 8, Microsoft is aiming for “Instant On”. The documents also suggest that Microsoft might be weighing Logoff + Hibernate as an alternative to conventional shutdown.

Improved Help and Support
Microsoft wants to broaden the Windows Help and Support by integrating more resources including custom resources provided by the OEMs.

As a part of its enhanced focus on simplified user authentication, Microsoft wishes to integrate facial recognition in Windows 8. Check our previous post for more on the Kinect-like features Microsoft is currently contemplating for Windows 8.