In less than 24 hours, the near feature-complete Windows 8 Consumer Preview (aka Beta) will be made available for everyone outside Microsoft to download, install, touch and taste.

Windows 8 is undeniably, one of the biggest single updates to Windows since the introduction of Windows 95. Some argue that it’s the biggest shake-up to Windows since the launch of Windows 3.0 back in 1990.

I couldn’t agree more!

I’ve been using Windows 8 on a daily basis since the developer preview (DP) was released in September 2011. I have been running Windows 8 on a variety of devices – installed locally on a Samsung Slate and Sony Vail Z Series laptop, running in virtual machines and accessing both locally and via remote desktop using a MacBook Pro (primarily running Windows 7) coupled to a 29” Apple Thunderbolt display in order to see how Windows 8 looks and feels on a larger-format display.

Now the the Windows 8 story is stabilizing and with the imminent introduction of the Windows 8 Consumer Preview (CP), I’ll be increasing my posting volume considerably in the coming weeks and months. My goal is to offer you, dear reader, with a balanced, real-world view of Windows 8 – both the good, and the bad – without any of the over-the-top hyperbole and anti-Microsoft-at-all-cost fanaticism we see all too often on the web today.

I’ll be discussing Windows 8 from both the end-user perspective, as well from the perspective of a seasoned developer interested in exploring Microsoft’s exciting new app platform and examining strategies for porting existing Win32/.NET apps to run in the new MOSH environment.

I encourage you to add your comments, questions, thoughts and opinions, but please keep things reasonable and constructive. Unnecessary flames and abusive nonsense will be removed.

Following on from (and lending some more weight to) my recent speculative posts about Microsoft’s possible plans for virtualization within Windows 8 (“Will Microsoft make Windows 8 entirely virtual?” and “More evidence for Windows 8 being fully virtualized”) …

Microsoft published two virtualization related posts today: More...

 
Leaked Windows 8 M2 Wallpaper

A few months ago, I posted an article speculating that Microsoft may be building Windows 8 as an entirely virtualized OS.

Today, I read with some interest, a post on Windows8Center.com quoting a report on Win7China’s site that Windows 8 builds are currently installing in around 8 minutes and that restoring the OS to factory defaults can be done in less than 2 minutes!

A clean OS install in 8 minutes? Seriously? Wow!

A clean-installation of Windows 7 (on my crazy-fast Sony Vaio Z Series) takes just under 20 minutes. On machines with spinning disks, the fastest I’ve seen Win7 install (from USB stick) is 25-30 mins. Installing a major new OS in 8 minutes on spinning disks is staggeringly fast.

So, is this smoke and mirrors or is this possible and how might Microsoft make something like this happen? More...

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve noticed an odd thing about my primary laptop (Sony Vaio Z Series, Core i5 540M, 8GB RAM, Win7 x64)

1. It’s running hotter and the fan runs continuously
2. The performance isn’t what it should be
3. The battery life isn’t as good as it usually is.

Sound familiar? Perhaps your machines are also experiencing the following issue. I’ve posted a temporary workaround for this issue below, but here’s how I got there…

Hunting-down the issue

Here’s my Task Manager’s performance graph on my laptop while running no other client applications:

Switching to the Processes tab, hitting “Show processes for all users” and sorting by CPU usage shows that taskhost.exe is eating 25% of my CPU:

Interesting. But what is taskhost running? For this we need to open SysInternals’ Process Explorer (run elevated on Win7/Vista to get additional debug info). Scrolling through the list of running processes shows taskhost.exe eating 25% of the CPU:

Double-click taskhost.exe to see what threads are busy:

Hmmm … RacEngn is the culprit. So what is RacEngn? Hit the module button and hit the details tab on the DLL’s property page:

So, this is the Windows Reliability Analysis Calculation Engine.

Close the DLL’s properties page and, back in ProcExp, double-click the overworking thread. You’ll see something similar to this:

ntoskrnl.exe!SeAccessCheckWithHint+0xb4a
ntoskrnl.exe!KeAcquireSpinLockAtDpcLevel+0x7d2
ntoskrnl.exe!KeWaitForMutexObject+0x19f
ntoskrnl.exe!PsIsSystemProcess+0x94
ntoskrnl.exe!KeStackAttachProcess+0x11c1
ntoskrnl.exe!ObReferenceObjectByPointerWithTag+0x233
RacEngn.dll+0x12230
RacEngn.dll+0x1217d
RacEngn.dll+0x120dd
RacEngn.dll+0x19052
RacEngn.dll+0x19e1b
RacEngn.dll+0x191da
RacEngn.dll+0x1cafb
RacEngn.dll+0x118bc
RacEngn.dll+0x117d3
RacEngn.dll!RacSysprepSpecialize+0x42a52
kernel32.dll!BaseThreadInitThunk+0xd
ntdll.dll!RtlUserThreadStart+0x21

The RAC Engine appears to be stuck after calling RacSysprepSpecialize.

Note that the top of the stack indicates that the function is stuck in the kernel’s SeAccessCheckWithHint function, but this is a red-herring as this kernel function is the mechanism through which Process Explorer reads the thread’s stack.

Now, I know that the RAC Engine is running under taskhost.exe which is a Scheduled Task. Opening the Scheduled Tasks app and navigating to "Task Scheduler Library/Microsoft/Windows/RAC” I can see that the RAC Engine is running:

Right click this task and hit “End” and suddenly my machine’s CPU quietens, the fan turns off, and things return to normal:

Temporary Workaround

For now, I’ve disabled the RAC engine’s task (right-click task and hit “Disable") until we can get to the bottom of this issue.

I posted some of these findings to the forum discussion where several others are also seeing this problem. I also sent this issue through to a Microsoft contact and will update this post with subsequent findings if and when I get some details/answers.

[Update 4/5/2011]

Apologies for not posting an update to this issue before now!

Microsoft looked into the problem described above and concluded that it was caused by a corrupt RACEngine data file and that I should delete the contents of %programdata%\Microsoft\RAC\StateData\. Since doing so, the problem has disappeared. Hope this helps someone.

I stumbled across the W7AppList.com site today while trying to find the current number of apps available for Windows Phone.

I am not entirely sure how they gather their stats, but their numbers appear to be pretty legitimate.

The site is very well put together and reveals some quite interesting stats and charts showing the rapid growth in the number of apps available for Microsoft’s new Windows Phone platform along with charts illustrating how many apps are free vs. paid-for, number of apps by category, etc.

The site indicates that there are now more than 4300 apps available for Windows Phone 7. That’s 4300 apps in little over 2 months or an average of 2200 new apps per month.

By comparison, Android started out with 167 apps in its marketplace one week after launch (October 2008) and announced it had 5000 apps in July 2009 – some 9 months later. That means Android had an average new app rate of 555 apps per month for it’s first 9 months.

By this measure, if Windows Phone’s Marketplace continues to grow at its current velocity, we’ll see it reach 5000 apps before the end of December 2010 – just 3 months after launch!

Combining these numbers with the impending release of Windows Phone 7.1 which adds copy & paste along with several fixes and improvements, along with the Mid 2011 Windows Phone release codenamed “Mango”: I think it clear to see that Windows Phone has a very bright future. I will not be at all surprised if, in just a couple of years, the three primary mobile handset platforms are Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android and Microsoft’s Windows Phone.