Microsoft details Windows 8's improved graphics performance

Microsoft has shared more details about the graphical improvements you can expect from Windows 8 this October, not least of which is DirectX 11.1 and better hardware acceleration. Previous versions of Windows focused on 3D gaming performance, but Microsoft says 2D performance is just as important, especially for Metro.

The result of Microsoft's tinkering is a 150% increase in framerate compared to Windows 7 when rendering paragraphs of text. Rendering small chunks of text like those often found on interface controls such as labels and menus has improved 131% and heading-sized text used for titles in Metro style apps has improved 336%.

Improvements have also been made to 2D geometry rendering, the core graphics technology used to render tables, charts, graphs, diagrams and other user interface elements using HTML5 and SVG technologies for Metro style apps. Framerate increases 184% for the rendering of lines right through to 438% for rectangles.

 

A new feature, Target Independent Rasterization (TIR), has been developed for DirectX 11.1 GPUs to render irregularly shaped objects, like geographical borders on a map. The advancements mean fewer CPU cycles are spent on tessellation, allowing it to pump drawing instructions to the GPU faster without influencing visual quality.

“As you can see, we've done a lot of work to enable a very fast and smoothly animated user experience in Windows 8. From new ways to measure our progress, to optimizations for mainstream uses of our graphics platform, and new hardware features, we've created the best Windows graphics platform yet," wrote Microsoft's Rob Copeland.

Loophole enables anyone to get a Windows 8 license for free

Copies of Windows 8 Pro are freely available from Microsoft’s website for anyone who wants to try out the operating system. Normally, the software would expire after 180 days, a period that is meant to allow Volume Licensing customers to automate and manage the activation process. But a loophole in the company’s Key Management System allows anyone to legitimately activate their copy of Windows 8 permanently, for free.
The goof centers around the Windows Media Center upgrade that’s being for free offered by Microsoft themselves until January 31 next year. Specifically, when entering the add-on key, Microsoft’s Key Management System will let you fully activate your copy of Windows 8 without running a validity check for the product key of the underlying system the Media Center add-on is being installed on.

To get a free Media Center key all users need to do is request it from Microsoft’s website using any email address. Once the code is in your inbox, do a search for “Add features to Windows 8” under Settings, click on it and enter the product key. Media Center will download and install, and after your system comes back from a reboot, you’ll be able to use the same upgrade product key to activate Windows.
With this your copy of Windows 8 will become fully active and 'legitimate', which you can verify in the activation window where it should read “Windows is activated” instead of “Windows is activated until…”.
The method has been confirmed to work by several news outlets. I tried it as well but upon requesting a Media Center key the site responded it will be emailed to me “within 24 hours” -- I can’t tell if the wait period is standard or if Microsoft is moving to patch the flaw by implementing a check for the underlying system.

windows 8 with new office 2013 suite

Excel, File Copy, Gaming

Comparing Windows 8 armed with the new Office 2013 suite we found that it was 10% faster when running our Excel MonteCarlo test against Windows 7 using Office 2010. Even when comparing apples to apples, with both operating systems running Excel 2010, Windows 8 is more efficient using the CPU cycles to its benefit on our MonteCarlo simulation.

The AS SSD Benchmark was used to measure the performance of the Kingston SSDNow V+ 200 256GB SSD. Here we see that Windows 8 and Windows 7 delivered virtually the same sequential read and write performance.

Despite delivering similar sequential read/write performance we found in the ISO benchmark that Windows 7 was 9% faster based on an average of three runs.

Windows 8 features a new Explorer interface for transferring files, which provides more accurate data on transfer speeds and estimated time of completion. It also stacks multiple transfer windows together. The UI is awesome, but on the performance side of things there is little difference when transferring multiple large files together or individually. Windows 8 and Windows 7 deliver similar performance in both situations.

When transferring thousands of smaller files we also found that Windows 7 and Windows 8 offer the same performance.



Finishing up we looked at gaming performance using Just Cause 2, Hard Reset and Battlefield 3. Similar to the previous 3DMark test, this relies on graphics drivers more than anything else. As you can see both operating systems provide similar performance with a very slight edge to Windows 7's advantage.

Windows 8 vs. Windows 7 Performance

Unless you have been living under a rock, there is a good chance you have caught wind of Microsoft’s latest operating system. Those eager to see what the new OS is all about had their first chance to take a peek back in February when Microsoft released the Windows 8 Consumer Preview.
More than a million downloads took place within the first day of the preview's release, but users were in for a shock as major changes awaited them. By far the most controversial has been the replacement of the Start menu for the new Start screen, and inherently, Microsoft's decision of doing away with the Start button on desktop mode.
For the first time since Windows 95 the Start button is no longer a centerpiece of the operating system, in fact it's gone for good.
On the final version of Windows 8, clicking the bottom-left corner of the screen -- where the Start button would normally be located -- launches the Metro interface (or whatever it is they are calling it now). The new tile-based interface is radically different from anything used on a Windows desktop and resembles what we've successfully seen working on the latest iterations of Windows Phone.

However, many users seem to be struggling to get their head around it. Personally, in spite of using Windows 8 for several months, I'm still undecided if I like the new interface or not. It certainly takes some time getting used to and for that reason I'm not jumping to conclusions just yet.
My opinion aside, there are countless users that have already shunned the new interface and many of them made their thoughts heard in our recent editorial "Windows 8: Why the Start Menu's Absence is Irrelevant". Yet, while everyone loves to try and remind Microsoft about how much of a flop some previous operating systems such as ME and Vista were, and that Windows 8 will be no better, we believe the new operating system still has a lot to offer.
Microsoft's PR machine has been hard at work over the past few months, trying to explain the numerous improvements Windows 8 has received on the backend. The good news is that it shows.
Coming from the two previews and now the final release of Windows 8, the OS seems smoother than Windows 7. It has been well documented that Windows 8 starts up and shuts down faster, so that wasn’t much of a surprise. Maybe it's the inevitability of bloating an OS installation that is a couple of years old (in the case of Windows 7), but there's this sense of when you move from a hard drive to an SSD, things just appear slightly quicker. This was surprising as I had not expected to notice much of a difference for general usage.
Of course, this is merely an informal observation and we are here to back up those impressions with hard numbers (read: lots of benchmarks in the coming pages).
Back when Vista first arrived I remember comparing how it performed to XP and being extremely disappointed with the results. Vista was generally rough around the edges and that included drivers, so gaming and productivity applications were more often than not slower in the new OS.
For comparing Windows 7 and Windows 8 we will measure and test the performance of various aspects of the operating system including: boot up and shutdown times, file copying, encoding, browsing, gaming and some synthetic benchmarks. Without further ado...

Benchmarks: Boot Up, PCMark, Browser, Encoding

The following benchmarks were conducted using our high-end test system which features the Intel Core i7-3960X processor, 16GB of DDR3-1866 memory and a GeForce GTX 670 graphics card, all on the new Asrock X79 Extreme11 motherboard. The primary drive used was the Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB, while the Kingston SSDNow V+ 200 256GB SSD was used for the AS SSD Benchmark and Windows Explorer tests.

Using the Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB HDD we saw OS boot up times reduced by 33%. Going from 27 seconds with Windows 7 to just 18 seconds with Windows 8 is obviously a significant improvement and it means SSD users will be able to load Windows 8 in a matter of a few seconds.

A similar improvement is seen when measuring shutdown time. Windows 8 took 8 seconds versus the 12 seconds it took an identically configured Windows 7 system.

We tested wake-up from sleep times using a standard hard disk drive. Windows 8 shows a marked improvement here as well, however we still thought 10 seconds was too long. We then tested Windows 8 using our SSD and the exact same 10 second window was repeated. With <5 second wake up from sleep times being touted by today's Windows 7 laptops, we imagine the operating system detects when you are using a laptop and that there are special power saving features on a mobile system that make a difference.

3Dmark 11 is used primarily to measure 3D graphics performance, meaning graphics card drivers play a vital role here. Still the performance was very similar on both operating systems, though the more mature Windows 7 was slightly faster.

Multimedia performance is said to be another of the strengths of Windows 8, and as you can see when testing with PCmark 7, it was 9% faster than its predecessor.

Using the Mozilla Kraken benchmark we compared the performance of Windows 7 using IE9 and Windows 8 with IE10. As you can see the desktop version of the IE10 browsers on Windows 8 delivered virtually the same performance as IE9 on Windows 7. The Metro version of IE10 was 3% faster, reducing the completion time to just 3926ms.
Update: We've added benchmarks for the latest versions of Firefox and Chrome on both operating systems. Besides beating IE to the punch on these synthetic benchmarks, the take away here is that both browsers tend to perform slightly better under Windows 8.

Google V8 is another browser test we used. In this case it gives a score, so the larger the number the better. Again we see that the desktop version of the IE10 browser in Windows 8 is very similar to IE9 from Windows 7. Though this time the Metro version is actually much slower, lagging behind by a 21% margin.
Chrome and Firefox take a huge lead compared to IE, and on both counts the browsers behave better running on Windows 8.

PCmark7 showed us that Windows 8 was faster than Windows 7 in multimedia type tests and this has been confirmed by the x264 HD Benchmark 5.0 which favored Microsoft’s latest operating system by a 6% margin in the first pass test.

Although the margin was very small when testing with HandBrake, we still found Windows 8 to be 1.5% faster than Windows 7.

Enable Windows 7's Hidden "God Mode"

As indicated by enthusiasts around the Web, there is a simple way to access a hidden "God Mode" in Windows 7 and Vista. With a name like that, your expectations might be a little high -- and no, Windows is not secretly invincible -- but the trick is awesome nevertheless.
"God Mode" simply provides users with a centralized Control Panel for all of Windows' settings, from changing your desktop background to setting up a VPN or partitioning your hard drive. In all, there are nearly 50 categories and most have several entries.It's almost comical how simple it is to access it:

1. Create a new folder. Anywhere is fine, I created one on my desktop.
   
   
2. Rename the folder to: God Mode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C} *Note: The "God Mode" chunk can be called anything you want.
   
   
3. The default folder icon will change to a Control Panel icon, and you can open it to view all of the settings.

User reports suggest that it may crash Windows Vista 64-bit, so proceed with caution. For what it's worth, I've successfully used the "feature" on Windows 7 Home Premium and Ultimate 64-bit. As an additional note, having the undocumented feature disclosed all over the Web, Microsoft has decided to be more open about it admitting similar commands have been available even before Vista. They have also revealed other text strings that create similar "God Mode" folders

A List of Common Default Router IP Addresses

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By Matthew DeCarlo on June 9, 2010

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Here's the scenario: you are trying to fix a relative's network issues and you need to access their router's browser interface. We've all been there, fruitlessly pecking in combinations of 192.168.x.x. Unless you have every default router address tattooed on your forearm, you'll eventually encounter one that stumps you. When that happens, you can typically find the information with a simple command on Windows. Open the command prompt (Start > Run/Search for cmd) and then enter ipconfig. The address you need should be next to Default Gateway under your Local Area Connection, and it will often begin with 192.168. If for any reason you can't retrieve the router's IP address using that method, we've compiled a brief list of popular router brands and their common default addresses. Feel free to recommend additional addresses in the comments and we'll add the information here as a handy reference resource for TechSpot members. If you're looking for an equally handy default username and password list, this PDF has tons of information for just about every router manufacturer out there. Common default usernames include variations of admin (Admin, administrator, etc.), and the password is often admin, password, or simply left blank -- needless to say, it's good practice to change these upon setup.

Router Manufacturers	Default IP Addresses
3Com	192.168.1.1
Apple	10.0.1.1
Asus	192.168.1.1, 192.168.1.220
Belkin	192.168.2.1, 10.1.1.1
Buffalo	192.168.11.1
Dell	192.168.1.1
D-Link	192.168.0.1, 0.30, 0.50, 1.1, 10.1.1.1
Linksys	192.168.0.1, 1.1
Microsoft	192.168.2.1
Motorola	192.168.10.1, 20.1, 30.1, 62.1, 100.1, 102.1, 1.254
MSI	192.168.1.254
Netgear	192.168.0.1, 0.227
Senao	192.168.0.1
SpeedTouch	10.0.0.138, 192.168.1.254
Trendnet	192.168.0.1, 1.1, 2.1, 10.1,
U.S. Robotics	192.168.1.1, 2.1, 123.254
Zyxel	192.168.1.1, 2.1, 4.1, 10.1, 1.254, 10.0.0.2, 0.138

Check If Someone Is Using Your Wi-Fi

There are many reasons why you'd want to check if an unauthorized party is using your wireless network. It may be that you're experiencing a slower than normal Internet connection or you simply don't want anyone getting a free ride while you pay the bill. Of course, there are also security implications if this person can somehow access files on your network, and even legal implications if he uses your connection for piracy or other illicit activities.
Whatever the case it's better to stay on the safe side. Many of you may have already taken some basic precautions when setting up your wireless network and know your way around troubleshooting these issues. This brief guide is aimed mostly at novice users in need a hand to find out if, indeed, their Wi-Fi is being stolen.

Check the devices associated with your router
The first thing you need to do is login to your router's administrative console by typing its IP address directly into the browser address bar -- typically 192.168.0.1 or 192.168.1.1 depending on which router you have. If you don't know your router's default address check out this guide or simply go to the command prompt (Start > Run/Search for cmd) and enter ipconfig. The address you need should be next to Default Gateway under your Local Area Connection.
Alternatively, if you are on a Mac, you can find the default address by going to Network under System Preferences. It should be listed right next to "Router:" if you are using Ethernet, or by clicking on "Advanced…" and heading to the "TCP/IP" tab if you are using Wi-Fi. Next, point your browser to that address and enter your login details -- if you haven't changed the default settings it should be a combination of "admin" and "password" or blank fields. Here's a default username and password list (PDF) you might find useful, but we recommend you change this afterwards.
Once inside your router's administrative console look for a section related to connected devices or wireless status. In my old DIR-655 from D-Link it's available under Status > Wireless but you'll find it as "Attached Devices" in Netgear routers, under DHCP Clients Table on Linksys routers, "Device List" if you are using the Tomato firmware, and so on.


DHCP client list examples on D-Link and Linksys routers.
This should provide a table with the IP, MAC address and other details of every device currently connected to the router. Check that list against your gear to find any intruders. You can find out the MAC/IP address of your computers by going to the Command Prompt again and entering 'ipconfig /all'. The MAC address will be shown as the physical address. I'll let you figure it out for mobile devices like smartphones and media players since I can't possibly list all options.

Taking action
The best and simplest solution is to set up a strong password using WPA2 or WPA -- WEP is very easy to crack so avoid that if possible. There are some other methods you can use to beef up security, like switching off the SSID broadcast (which prevents it from advertising the name of your network to nearby Wi-Fi devices) or setup a filter for allowed or blocked devices by MAC address. It won't stop the most determined intruder but it will slow him down.
That should be more than enough for most users but if you need to actually track down who's been breaking into your network it's possible to pinpoint his physical location using a tool called MoocherHunter. You'll need to burn a Live CD to boot your laptop with and walk around to track down unauthorized wireless clients. According to the program's description, it detects traffic sent across the network and can find the source within 2 meters accuracy.
Needless to say, we're not suggesting you take matters into your own hands, but it might come in handy if someone is getting you in trouble with authorities using your network for illegal purposes -- or simply to have a cool story to tell.

Bonus: Profit by setting up a paid Wi-Fi hotspot
If it doesn't bother you to have someone piggybacking on your connection you might as well get something in return, right? Chillifire is a good third-party firmware alternative if you want to run a public hotspot, as it allows you to offer for-pay or free Internet access points from your consumer router. Alternatively, you can get a Fonera router, which gives you free roaming at Fon Spots worldwide in return for sharing a little bit of your WiFi at home.