Microsoft Windows 8.1 review

If you’ve been trying out the Windows 8.1 Preview, released in June, you’ll find the interface and features effectively identical in this final release. The only surprise is that, contrary to earlier announcements, you can upgrade directly from the Preview to the final code – although you’ll need a Windows 8 product key to activate the installation.

For those who’ve stuck with Windows 8 thus far, the update brings significant changes. The first one you’ll notice is an updated Start screen, which now shares your desktop wallpaper. It also supports smaller tiles, to let you arrange more apps onto your Start screen – and larger ones, which can convey twice as much live information as before. On smaller screens, you can also activate a “show more tiles” option that shrinks the grid so you can see more tiles at once.

All of this gives you more scope than before to set up your Start screen however you like it, and since apps are no longer installed here by default, it stays organised. To access the all-encompassing Apps menu, simply swipe upwards or click the down-arrow icon. If you prefer, you can also set Windows 8.1 to take you automatically to the Apps screen when you hit the Windows key: in this case you simply swipe down to get to the main Start view.

Windows 8.1 comes with an updated selection of tablet apps – see below – and multitasking works better, too. In Windows 8, split-screen mode supported only an off-kilter 80:20 layout, but you can now drag the divider to achieve a 50:50 balance, or anything between the two. On larger displays it’s possible to divide the display into three or four segments.

A final bonus is the revamped Search interface. Rather than taking over the full screen, Search now occupies a much less intrusive panel at the right-hand side. If you invoke it via the Search charm menu, it slides in as an overlay on top of your active view, rather than sending you back to the Start screen. Even better, when you type, you now get results from “everywhere” – no more pedantic switching back and forth between Apps, Settings and Files. By default, online search content from Bing is filtered in too, below local results; and if you click on the Search icon you’re taken to an encyclopedia-style results page that automatically brings together relevant text, graphics and links from around the web.

Updated apps in Windows 8.1

Windows 8.1 comes with several new apps, including Internet Explorer 11. The updated browser features a reorganised layout in tablet mode, with navigation and tabs now grouped together at the bottom of the page, and the maximum number of tabs you can have open has been raised from ten to 100. A new complementary Reading List app lets you save web articles for later browsing, and you can optionally sync your tabs, saved passwords, bookmarks and other settings across multiple devices.

Another app that’s seen a major update is Mail; this now lets you select multiple messages using tickboxes, and drag and drop messages into folders. The interface has been redesigned to resemble Microsoft’s Outlook.com webmail service, and the app has gained Outlook.com’s ability to categorise social updates and newsletters, as well as its “sweep” feature that moves all messages from a specific sender into a folder.

Another welcome improvement is a more sensible approach to links received in email messages. When you tap on a calendar event or a web link, Windows no longer jumps into a full-screen view of Calendar or Internet Explorer: in Windows 8.1 the relevant app intelligently opens alongside the message in a convenient split-screen view.

Other updated apps include Photos, which now offers an extended suite of touch-up tools but loses its built-in integration with Facebook and Flickr. The Messaging app is gone, replaced by an integrated Skype app; Facebook chat is now handled by the official Facebook app, a free download from the Windows Store.

There are also two new “lifestyle”-orientated apps – Food & Drink and Health & Fitness – and while Xbox Music isn’t new, it’s been overhauled with a new navigation panel that makes it easier than before to find and manage your music.

As well as updating your day-to-day apps, Microsoft has revamped the Windows Store app in Windows 8.1. Where once the various categories of app were all splurged on the main page, you can now swipe down from the top or right-click to choose directly from 20 categories. Within each channel you get “New & Rising” apps, plus a selection of top paid and free apps and a search box for discovering more. Scroll to the far right and click “See all” to delve into a scrollable, searchable list that can be filtered by genre and price. Some categories, such as Finance, offer only a few hundred apps, but across games, music, video and entertainment apps you’ll now find more than 25,000 apps available to download. No doubt about it, the Store is starting to feel like a credible marketplace.

Changes for desktop users

Microsoft’s decision to remove the Start button from the Windows 8 desktop was controversial to say the least. In Windows 8.1, it’s back, in a minimalist monochrome form. However, clicking it doesn’t bring back the old Windows 7-style menu – it merely opens the “Modern” search interface.

This is a less clunky experience than it was in the original Windows 8, partly because the shared wallpaper makes the switch between interfaces less jarring. Even if you use the new Windows+S shortcut to invoke the Search sidebar, however, the juxtaposition of desktop and Modern interfaces feels discordant. We’re sure many users will still choose to install Start menu replacement tools such as Start8 and Classic Shell.

Elsewhere, there’s better news for desktop users. At last it’s possible to boot straight to the desktop, and you can choose to list desktop applications first in the Apps menu for easy access. You can even disable the charms if you want to get as close as possible to the pre-Windows 8 experience.

One subtle change is that Libraries are now hidden by default in Explorer windows. You can bring them back easily enough with a right-click, if you so wish. By default, their place is taken by a new SkyDrive dropdown, containing folders for Documents, Pictures and Public. As of Windows 8.1, Microsoft is encouraging users to keep their data in the cloud.

That makes sense, because Windows 8 is designed to be used with space-limited mobile hardware. Accordingly, files in the cloud aren’t automatically beamed down to your PC or tablet: when you browse your SkyDrive folder you’ll see both local and remote files, the latter being downloaded only when you access them.

Edits are automatically synced back up to SkyDrive: if you want to keep a file permanently available on your hard disk, you can do so with a right-click. You can also wipe local copies to free up space while keeping them safely in the cloud.

It’s a clever system, but it can become confused if you have files already synced with SkyDrive when you upgrade. We found our folders were marked as only available online, even though in reality they were full of local files. Manually setting the folder to “available offline” resolved the problem.

Windows 8.1 for business

With its emphasis on interface updates, you might expect that Windows 8.1 would have little to offer the enterprise. In fact, it introduces some useful “under the bonnet” technologies, including support for Wi-Fi Direct and NFC printing. The idea is to make it easy for individuals to connect their Windows 8 devices to company printers – although we haven’t yet had the chance to put this to the test.

The big news is a pair of new features called Workplace Join and Work Folders, aimed at fostering a Bring Your Own Device culture around Windows 8. Businesses running Windows Server 2012 R2 can use Workplace Join to allow personal Windows 8 devices to connect to specified network resources, without giving them full access to the company LAN. Work Folders lets users sync their documents with a specified file server, subject to customisable security policies. It’s even possible for IT administrators to remotely wipe Work Folders, leaving the user’s personal data intact.

A worthwhile upgrade?

The Windows 8.1 update won’t silence every criticism of Windows 8. Although the Modern interface is growing more flexible, features and options can still be difficult to discover, which we feel makes Windows a less accessible tablet OS than Android or iOS. Desktop users will be irritated by the way Microsoft has fudged the return of the Start button. And, although the OS’ two distinct interface paradigms jog along together more comfortably than in the original release of Windows 8, they still don’t form anything like a cohesive whole.

Considering Windows 8.1 is a free update, though, it’s hard to complain. You may not agree with Microsoft’s overall vision for its tablet-cum-PC OS, but there’s no denying that Windows 8.1 evolves it into a much more fluid tablet experience, and brings an overall positive selection of tweaks and enhancements to the desktop. Unequivocally, it’s a step forward for every Windows 8 user and administrator.

Details
Software subcategory	Operating system
Requirements
Processor requirement	1GHz with support for PAE, NX, and SSE2
Operating system support
Other operating system support	N/A