Windows 8 A touch screen computer on a desktop

Windows Metro

Features  Touch-centric, Tiles-based User Interface (UI) - The Windows 8 Start Menu is customizable through a mosaic of tiles, which differ from traditional desktop icons by letting you view live information from Windows 8 Metro style apps without actually accessing the apps.  Charms - In large part, "charms" is a new implementation of the traditional Windows start bar. Charms can also be used to quickly configure settings for individual apps.  Snap Multi-tasking - designed to make it easy to run two apps in Windows 8 side-by-side, to resize them, and to switch between them.  Better Support for Multiple Monitors  Native USB 3.0 Support  Two Touch Keyboards  Enhanced Copy Experience

Advantages  Faster startup.  A whole new world of apps. Windows 8 gives PC users a whole new world of full-screen, touch-friendly, Web-connected apps to explore  SkyDrive integration. Microsoft's cloud service has become way, way more than just online storage. Sure, it still lets you save and access files to an online space that's accessible from a Web browser or apps that run on not only Windows, but also Mac OS X, iOS, Android, and Windows Phone. But with Windows 8, SkyDrive is accessible to any app that wants to use it, just as though it were a local drive. It also backs up your PC's settings, letting you replicate your environment should you get a new PC.  Better Security, Less-intrusive updates.  First-class touch input, but still fine with keyboard and mouse. 

Disadvantages  Some programmes are not yet compatible with it, such as hardware drivers and some games  New layout may be a bit difficult for some people to get used to  Difficult to do some simple tasks such as turning the computer off

System Specs  Processor: 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster with support for PAE, NX, and SSE2  RAM: 1 gigabyte (GB) (32-bit) or 2 GB (64-bit)  Hard disk space: 16 GB (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit)  Graphics card: Microsoft DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM driver

Business expectations  The increase is the use of tablet computers has lead Microsoft to design Windows 8 to be able to interface with both touch screens and keyboard and mouses. There is therefore an expectation that moving forward more people will be using tablet computers.  They have tried to make the system simple and intuitive much like apple has done with they smart phones and tablets.

Issues  Making the interface for both a desktop and tablet computers means that it needs to be perfect for it to be a great interface for both types of computers, unfortunately it is not. Some of the new processes required to do simple processes have been made more complex, for instance shutting down the computer now requires 4 different steps and is not immediately obvious how to do it.

Summary  Visually Windows 8 is very appealing and being less resource hungry means it runs faster and more smoothly. I think there is still some interface issues to be sorted out as Microsoft has tried to make a tablet interface be able to be used on both a tablet and a desktop. Still early on in its release so a lot of the bugs have not been ironed out yet but as new updates are released.