Windows 8 brings significant advantages to those who are upgrading existing PCs or purchasing new ones, thanks to features that better take advantage of the new OS's capabilities. The operating system offers improvements in performance, existing capabilities, and is cheaper.

I should mention, however, that there are some cases in which you probably shouldn't make the move. The OS has a new look and requires some adjustment in the way you interact with your PC. If you don't like change or learning new ways of doing things—even if in the long run they turn out to be more efficient—you should probably stick with what you're using. Also, if your PC's specs are extremely outdated—less than 1GHz processor or less than 1GB RAM in particular—you won't be able to upgrade. And obviously, if your PC is for work use, your employer may not allow the upgrade. If these issue don't apply, read on.

                                 Windows 8 : New Start Background

"Tattoos" let you customize your Windows 8 Start screen with artistic backgrounds.

                                                    Windows 8 - SkyDrive

SkyDrive is your Windows cloud storage. Apps can be programmed to access the online storage with your permission.

 
1. Faster startup. On my testscomparing Windows 8 performancewith that of Windows 7 on the same computer, Windows 8 started up more than twice as fast as Windows 7. In a comparison with Mac OS X Mountain Lion, running in Boot Camp on a MacBook, Windows 8 even started up faster than Apple's latest desktop operating system. And it's not just startup time: Windows 8 ran several benchmark performance tests quicker than either Windows 7 or Mountain Lion. Microsoft has clearly put work into improving performance in Windows 8.

                                                            Windows 8 - Store

The Windows Store now features apps for purchase, with prices ranging from $1.49 to $999. Like the Mac App Store, it lets you reinstall apps you've bought on any of your PCs and oversees app updating.

2. 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. And these new apps can even display relevant information on their Windows Start screen tiles, something impossible in Windows 7 or just about any other operating system around, save Windows Phone. The new Windows Store—analogous to Apple's iTunes App Store—makes discovering and installing these new-style apps a breeze. The update process is simple, and you can install purchased apps on multiple Windows 8 devices without paying again, provided you're signed in. Finally, uninstalling the apps is streamlined by the Store, with no Registry complications as in past Windows versions' apps.

                                                  Windows 8 - SkyDrive

SkyDrive is your Windows cloud storage. Apps can be programmed to access the online storage with your permission.

3. 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.

4. Better Security, Less-intrusive updates.  PC Magazine networking and security analyst Fahmida Rashid considers Windows 8 "the most secureversion of Windows yet." This stems from a couple of things, starting with Secure Boot. ExtremeTech's Sebastian Anthony explains secure bootsuccinctly as follows: "Windows 8 stops a computer from loading an operating system that hasn’t been signed by the publisher (in this case, Microsoft or an OEM)." Another security gain is that all apps in the Windows Store are scrutinized for security issues.  Finally, Windows 8's default Web browser, Internet Explorer 10, was rated best in a recent test by NSS Labs, detecting and blocking over 99 percent of malicious downloads without any help from a third-party antivirus program. This compared with 70.4 percent for Google Chrome, which uses the same Safe Browsing API as Firefox. Opera and Safari only managed to block about 4 percent of the malicious downloads.

5. First-class touch input, but still fine with keyboard and mouse. In some ways, touch-screen input on Windows 8 is superior that of the Apple iPad. For example, you can do everything you need to by swiping with your thumbs, making a tablet easier to use by holding it by the sides. Also topping the iPad interface is Windows 8's ability to snap a sidebar to the side of the screen with a touch gesture, so that you can keep tabs on two apps at the same time.

But mouse and keyboard are hardly forgotten. The full complement of keyboard shortcuts still works, and navigating through the new interface with the mouse and mouse wheel is almost as intuitive as touch gesture input—though there are certainly some actions where touch is a better fit. Using the Windows Key becomes particularly important, as it summons the Start screen and offers key combinations that let you search, share, change settings, access devices, and more.

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Rockstar is the latest to cram their years of hard work onto a single disc in their very own Rockstar Games Collection: Edition 1. The bundle will have all of Rockstar’s biggest critical hits of the current console cycle: Red Dead Redemption, L.A Noire, Midnight Club: Los Angeles and two chapters from the Grand Theft Auto IV side stories, The Lost and the Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony. All four games will cost the typical retail price of $59.99.

Nothing is known about what could be included in a potential Edition 2, but this bundle will cover most of Rockstar’s essentials. What else is there? Would a bundle of The Bully, Max Payne 3, Table Tennis, and the remaining GTAIV content be worth your dollars?

These HD bundles are starting to get a little out of hand, but something about a $60 bundle containing four award winning games is just awesome.Could publishers have found a way to combat used games? The Rockstar Games Collection: Edition 1 will be released on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 this coming November 6th. Another great thing I love about these HD bundles is how quickly they are released after being announced.

Source:technobuffalo

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It's surprising when you consider that Apple has released two new versions of its operating system versions in the time since Microsoft let the world know that Windows 8 was baking. The Redmond software giant first announced plans for its upcoming desktop and tablet operating system in January 2011 at CES. Meanwhile, Apple released Lion, a major update, in July of that same year, and then Mountain Lion, a more incremental update, this past July.

In some ways, however, it's not so surprising: Windows 8 is a drastic re-imagining of the operating system, combining a touch-centric tablet OS with the traditional Windows desktop environment. Apple's strategy has been to more cautiously insert features from its mobile operating system, iOS, into the Mac's. It's also added multitouch gesture input support that assumes a touchpad for laptops or desktops. The result is ever-closer integration, with a minimum of dislocation to users—but no evolutionary leaps, either.

Microsoft has taken a far more drastic approach. It's designed Windows 8 to actually run on mobile tablets. Apple's wildly popular iPad by contrast runs its own version of iOS. While many old-timers have railed against the emphasis on touch input, it's easy to see why Microsoft took this approach: The company wants to leverage its massive 80 percent market share in desktop operating systems, while simultaneously familiarizing people with the new tile-based interface (formerly known as "Metro") first used in Windows Phone. But desktop users get benefits from Windows 8, too, including much faster startup and better boot security.

While Lion and Mountain Lion have been at large in the wild for months, we've also gotten a pretty good look at Windows 8, thanks to three pre-release publicly available versions: Developer Preview, Consumer Preview, and Release Preview. There's little mystery at this point about Windows 8's final shape when it's finally released on October 26, and developers and journalists have even already reviewed the RTM—release to manufacturing—version. So how do these two new operating systems' stack up? I'll take a look in some key areas. If there are important contrasts you'd like to point out, please do so in the comments; this list is by no means exhaustive!

Windows 8's Mobile-like User Interface

Windows 8's new interface shows more influence from Windows Phone than OS X Mountain Lion does from iOS. Window 8's large, touchable "live tiles" give quick access to and display info from your apps. Swiping gestures actually do a better job of letting you do everything using your thumbs than iOS does—which makes sense, since you mostly hold a tablet from both sides. The legacy "desktop interface," looks a lot like Windows 7, though gone is the eye candy of the latter's translucent Aero Glass effects. Also gone is the Start button, replaced by the tiled Start page.

Mountain Lion's Mobile-Inspired Elements

With a couple of important exceptions, most of Mountain Lion's inherited traits from iOS arrived with Lion or before. These include the App Store and Launchpad, which duplicates iOS's app icons, even letting you group them just as you would on an iPhone. Unfortunately, most of the Mac users I talk to never use Launchpad, preferring the traditional dock icons.

New for Mountain Lion is iMessage—iOS's messaging service that can take the place of SMS text messaging. It's pretty cool to be able to simulate an SMS text chat with one person on an iPhone and the other at her Mac desktop.

Another gift from iOS is Notification Center, which acts just like the mobile OS's notifications, which you see when you swipe down from the top of the screen. In Mountain Lion, you can swipe in from the left on a touchpad, and it shows an entry for each new email, message, software update, or calendar alert.

Mountain Lion's Cloud Service: iCloud

With Mountain Lion, iCloud becomes more important for Apple's desktop operating system. When you sign into your Apple account on a Mountain Lion Mac, all your mail settings, contacts, Safari bookmarks, messages, iTunes backups and other features will be synced via iCloud. And when you launch the App Store, all the apps you purchased earlier through the App Store are available for downloading and installation. Mountain Lion also builds cloud-based file storage into TextEdit, Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. Microsoft makes SkyDrive simply available to any app developer, and many Windows 8 apps already take advantage of this.

Windows 8's Cloud Service: SkyDrive

I covered Microsoft's SkyDrive service extensively in Windows 8 and the Cloud: SkyDrive. Like iCloud, SkyDrive can sync all your devices' settings; in fact, Microsoft likes referring to SkyDrive as a "device cloud." In addition to this function, the service can serve as simple online storage, and actually works with Macs and iOS devices as well as Windows, Android, and Windows Phone. Just as with iCloud, SkyDrive remembers which apps you've purchased and lets you download and install them on another machine you sign in to your Microsoft Account.

A big difference between SkyDrive and iCloud is that it offers Web access to any files you've stored on it. But SkyDrive becomes more than just a service for Microsoft products: Any Windows 8 third-party apps can make use of it as well, storing files to the cloud and retrieving them back. Another cool capability of SkyDrive is Fetch, which lets you grab a file from a PC running the SkyDrive software even if the desired file hasn't been uploaded to the online storage.

The Mac App Store

Apple's mobile OS showed the value to a platform maker of offering an app store: The store owner can control which apps are offered, and more importantly, collect a premium from the software maker. But the user gets something out of this setup, too: You can install purchased apps on any of your other Macs, and updates are handled uniformly, with notifications when they're available. The Mac App Store launched with about a thousand apps, but some estimate there are now about 10,000.

Windows 8's App Store: The Windows Store

Microsoft finally got hip to the app store concept and decided to build it into its hybrid tablet/desktop OS. In many respects, the Windows Store works nearly identically to Apple's: It lets you install apps you've purchased on multiple machines you sign into, and handles updating in a unified manner. The terms for developers get to letting them keep a bit more of the proceeds. Store isn't as rich in browsing options as Mac App Store, since you have to page through the categories. The Windows Store is estimated to launch with about a thousand apps, and there are millions of legacy Windows apps that will still run on Intel-based Windows 8 machines.

Windows 8's Browser: Internet Explorer 10

IE10 comes in two flavors—new and desktop. The new (formerly known as "Metro") IE10 is full screen and touch-friendly, while the desktop IE10 uses an interface identical to its IE9 predecessor. Both guises use the same underlying webpage rendering engine, which is faster and more compliant with new standards than IE9. Internet Explorer 10 not only takes hardware acceleration using a PC's graphics processor up a notch, but implements far more HTML5. These are important factors, since many new Windows 8 apps will use IE as their own rendering engine. Like Apple's Safari, IE10 under Windows 8 will allow syncing of favorites and history.

Mountain Lion's Browser: Safari 6

One of the major new pieces of Mountain Lion was Safari 6. Notably, the Windows version of Safari hasn't come along for this update, so Apple's browser is starting to look like the Mac and iOS exclusive that IE is on Windows and Windows Phone. With version 6, Safari has joined most new browsers' design choice of using a single box for address entry and search. Safari’s Cloud Tab feature shows you the tabs that are open on your other devices, so you can resume browsing after moving from one device to another. The updated browser also has a new tab view that lets you swipe through large thumbnails.

Sharing from Mountain Lion

Apps in Mountain Lion get a new Sharing arrow button that lets them post whatever current item you're on by posting directly to email, iMessage, Twitter, Flickr, or Vimeo. Coming in the Fall will be the one place we all really want to share digital stuff to—Facebook. This sharing tool will not only let you post photos and links, but you'll be able to add comments and location info.

Sharing from Windows 8

Windows 8 has a built in Sharing button that's always available from the "charms" toolbar. You can call this up at any time by moving the mouse to the upper or lower-right corner of the screen or by swiping in from the right on a touchscreen. The Share charm taps in to email, SkyDrive, and any social network you've connected to the built-in Windows 8 People app.

Extra Goodies in Windows 8

Microsoft has built several useful and fun new-style apps that ship with Windows 8, including Mail, Photos, People, Messaging, Weather, Finance, Calendar, Maps, News, Sports, Music, and Video. Many of these display live updated info on their Start page tiles—something not possible on the Mac OS X desktop or even in iOS. Windows 8's Metro Snap feature lets you get a peek at a second app while running your primary app in full screen. A final new pair of goodies in Windows 8 will be the ability to "Refresh" or "Reset" the system. With the first, you keep all your apps but clean out all the operating system gunk files, and with the second, you get a completely new Windows installation—perfect for gifting an older machine to a relative.

And speaking of older machines, perhaps the biggest "extra" for Windows 8 is that its desktop mode can run every Windows legacy app. Not only has it been updated with a more-modern, flat window border look, but Windows Explorer and Task Manger have been updated with new looks and capabilities. Drastically faster startup than previous versions of Windows could also be considered an extra, though it's also become an essential for any platform with mobile aspirations, given the iPad's fast startup.

Extra Goodies in Mountain Lion

Mac OS X's AirDrop feature stands out among its extra goodies: It lets you transfer files to any nearby Mac without disks, USB keys, or even a WiFi connection. Other nifty capabilities outlined are Auto Save and Versions, which mean you never have to worry about losing a document because you forgot to hit Save. The problem is: Software vendors aside from Apple itself have been slow to implement support for Lion's built-in Versions and AutoSave. Find My Mac does for your laptop what's been possible on the iPhone for years. Longtime goodies for Mac users include Preview and QuickTime, which let you view most of the media and document file types you're likely to download.

New for Mountain Lion is Dictation, which lets you talk whenever you'd normally have to type. This is something that's been in iOS 5.1, and I find it incredibly useful. New, too, is Game Center—also with iOS roots—which lets you manage all your gaming apps and activities. It also connects you to a gaming network, with leaderboards, achievements, in-game chat, and notifications. Speaking of notifications, don't forget the goodies coming from iOS mentioned earlier, including the Notification Center and iMessage.

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Microsoft's cloud storage service, SkyDrive, has been around for just over 5 years—since way before Apple came out with iCloud or Google with Gdrive. But only with Windows 8 does SkyDrive become an integral part of Microsoft's operating system strategy. Not only will the built-in modern-style Windows 8 apps like Mail and Photos be able to use your SkyDrive, but third-party apps, too, will be able to save items to your SkyDrive cloud storage folders. And since Microsoft has taken to using the term "device cloud" to describe SkyDrive, you can bet there's going to be an important mobile component to the service.

Windows 8's cloud services go beyond just SkyDrive storage. Signing into a Microsoft account on different machines lets you "roam," or sync, all your PC settings, such as the lock screen image, user photo, start screen "tattoos," browser favorites and history, spell check dictionaries, Explorer settings, mouse settings, and accessibility settings. Not only can you sync these settings, but you'll also be able to see in the Windows Store any apps you've installed on other PCs.

And in some cases you'll get the benefit of "single sign-in"—some other apps and sites will be able to use your Microsoft account credentials, saving you from repeatedly entering a username and password. Third-party apps can also use SkyDrive to roam their settings and state. This is all handled with privacy and security in mind though; you have to okay the services you want to access this identity check. The Windows 8 team has detailed the privacy/security precautions as follows:

First, we will require a strong password (and you can't leave password blank). Next, we'll collect a secondary proof of your identity. This will allow us to establish "trust" with specific PCs that you use frequently or own. This in turn will also enable more secure syncing of private data like passwords.

You're also asked to grant your consent for the program to access your SkyDrive data by the app or site wanting to use it. Note the two-factor authentication required—something that came up recently when an Apple-Gmail-Amazon-using journalist was hacked to the hilt.

Your SkyDrive Account
Everyone gets a SkyDrive account. Well, everyone who's created a Microsoft account, which includes everyone who's signed up for a Hotmail or Outlook.com account. What do you get with that account? All users get 7GB free, and, if you're a longtime SkyDrive account holder, you get 25GB free. This compares with 5GB free for iCloud and Google Drive, and 2GB for Dropbox. You can add 20GB for $10 a year, and 100GB for $50, this compares with $60 for 100GB on Google Drive, and $100 for just 50GB on iCloud.

You also get access to your online storage via more devices than any of those alternatives: SkyDrive includes apps for not only Windows 7 and 8, but for Mac OS X, iOS, Android, and Web access. The last is particularly important, and one thing that's long disappointed me about Apple's iCloud—why can't I access photos in my iCloud Photo Stream from a Web browser, if the stuff is actually in the "cloud."

Syncing 
It's important to note that, like those other services, SkyDrive is not just online storage, but also file and folder syncing. In the past, Microsoft had separated its syncing service with names like Live Mesh and Live Sync, and (way back) FolderShare. The clients available for SkyDrive allow you to place a photo, document, or other item in your cloud storage and have it magically available to any of your other SkyDrive clients on any of your other devices or computers. I for one, find this joining of online storage and syncing a refreshing simplification of a previously somewhat confusing set of systems.

Some have complained that the new use of SkyDrive as the OS's syncing component doesn't offer the peer-to-peer syncing available in the previous service, but the end result of synced files and folders is identical. SkyDrive syncing on computers also differs from Mesh in that you can't designate any old folder you want to be synced, only those under the SkyDrive main folder. But Microsoft has made it possible for these synced folders to look less sequestered in the SkyDrive world, by using Windows' Libraries. A relevant blog post reads"If you'd like your SkyDrive folders to feel less like separate folders, you can add your SkyDrive Documents and Pictures folders to your Documents and Pictures Libraries in Windows 8 and Windows 7."

The Windows 8 SkyDrive App
Windows 8 ships with a SkyDrive app that you can recognize by the cloud on its blue Start page tile. Clicking on this takes you into another grid of tiles, each representing a folder or file you've stored on the service. Folders containing image files with sport an image on their tile above the folder name, and with a right-click (or swipe in from the top or bottom edge on a touch screen) you can choose to view Details, which adds the item's date and size, or stick with the thumbnail view.

The same applies if you're inside a folder. For example, if you're in an image folder, you'll by default just see large thumbnails of the images. Hovering the cursor over a tile/thumbnail displays the filename, date last modified, file size, and who it's shared with. When you invoke the app bar from the main screen (by right-clicking or swiping up from the bottom of a touchscreen), you'll see just five buttons—Refresh, New Folder, Upload, Details, and Select all. This changes when you right click on a file tile, adding four new buttons on the left—Clear selection, Download, Delete, and Open with.

Even more cloudy is the ability to view Office documents stored on your SkyDrive storage in Office Web apps. In fact, there's a strong tie-in between Office Web apps and SkyDrive, since the latter is the default place your Web Office documents reside. I had not problem viewing not only Microsoft file formats like Word Documents, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations using the online Office apps, but I could also view PDFs and Windows 8 knew to open a ZIP file on the desktop, showing the archive's contents in a folder.

One SkyDrive disappointment for me was that I didn't see any evidence of it in the Windows 8 desktop. I expected to see a SkyDrive choice in Windows Explorer, just as I did after installing the SkyDrive utility in Windows 7. I did see a HomeGroup section in Explorer that sported my user picture, but that's a different story from my SkyDrive cloud storage. It turns out that you have to install the same desktop client in Windows 8 desktop that you would in Windows 7, which we'll cover next. Since it's identical whether you run it in Windows Vista, 7, or 8 desktop, one section will suffice. Me, I think it's a little odd that you'd have to install this in Windows 8, since the functionality is already on the machine in the Metro (sorry) mode and you've already signed into your account.

SkyDrive on Windows 7
Yes, this article is supposed to be about Windows 8, but the Windows 7 SkyDrive software you run in that incumbent Windows OS is the same as what you need to run in Windows 8's desktop mode, if you want to see SkyDrive integration there. This app is what makes the folder and file syncing possible, taking the place of Windows Live Mesh, but of course it also serves as simple online storage. Note that it only works on Windows Vista and later—no XP users need apply.

To get started, you download and run the tiny 5MB SkyDrive client from Microsoft[http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/skydrive/download-skydrive]. After an introductory message box on which you click Get Started, you simply sign into your Microsoft account. The setup wizard for this lets you create an account, too, if you don't already have one, and then shows how your SkyDrive folder will appear in Windows Explorer, with its little blue cloud icon instead of the traditional yellow folder icon. You can change its location from the default top level under your user folder.

After you've accepted a SkyDrive folder location, the wizard informs you about the incredibly important, cool, and potentially tail-saving Fetch feature. This lets you access files from the PC even if you didn't put them in the SkyDrive folder. A checkbox here lets you turn off this feature if you're afraid of unauthorized access to all files on your PC.

And that's it! You'll next see a tooltip at the system tray showing you the newly installed cloud icon, and your actual SkyDrive Explorer folder will open. For a quick test, I went over to my Windows 8 PC, and created a new folder it the SkyDrive app, which appeared seconds later in the Windows 7 machine's SkyDrive folder. Including SkyDrive in Windows Explorer is incredibly helpful—it means you can save work from any application to your cloud storage directly, without having to go to a website.

Next I shared some of the screenshots used for this article to my SkyDrive account. (One disappointment for me in this process was that I couldn't create a new folder through the Picture app's Share feature. I could only do so in the SkyDrive app itself.) I chose a target folder, and clicked Upload. I was impressed with how quickly all the images appeared on the Windows 7 PC—no more emailing screenshots to myself!

As a visual cue, when files and folders are up-to-date, their Explorer entries show a green check mark, but while updating, this is replaced by circular refresh arrows. Finally, I was amazed how easy it is to uninstall the SkyDrive client, in case you don't want its cloud folders and syncing. Just head to the Control Panel's Programs and Features page to remove it.

SkyDrive on the Web
Web access to all your cloud data is one thing you don't get in Apple's iCloud. Microsoft has been putting a lot of efforts into updating the Web client for SkyDrive. Just in mid-August, the company released a new online version of SkyDrive. The interface bears a striking resemblance to that of the SkyDrive Windows 8 new-style app, except the folder tiles are all the same size. The Web app is linked with other Microsoft online services through a top switcher menu that includes Mail (either Outlook.com or Hotmail), People (the social network-aggregator app), and Calendar. It's a very fast and clean interface, with a left panel of menu choices including Files, Recent docs, Shared, Groups, and PCs.

This last may be the most interesting: For PCs you've authorized, you can pull any files using Fetch, even if the files aren't in the SkyDrive folder. When I chose the PCs option from the Web interface's left rail, I was greeted by a message saying "Security check! To connect to this PC we need you to enter a security code. This extra step only takes a minute and will help protect your computer from unauthorized access." When I clicked the "Sign in with security code" link, I was told to sign in on a computer that's connected to my account. Of course, for this to work, the PC your fetching files from has to be on and running the SkyDrive client.

Once I jumped all the security hurdles, I could browse the entire disk of the target PC. I could download any files found there, or upload them to SkyDrive (which feels a little odd, since it seemed like I was browsing SkyDrive). I could also view all the files pertinent properties in a right-side panel—type, size, and dates created and modified.

The Fetch feature is a great idea, though it seems to be only available in a very limited set of circumstances. You're probably better off just saving files you think you may need remote access to your SkyDrive cloud folders.

Using SkyDrive From Other Windows 8 Modern Apps
What really makes SkyDrive an integral part of the Windows 8 ecosystem is the fact that any Windows 8 modern-style app can take advantage of its cloud storage. Microsoft has made it really simple for developers to do this, as a Building Windows 8 blog post described. It's early on in the Windows 8 app store, but I managed to find a few that already use SkyDrive. The FotoEditor app, a sort of Instagram without the social networking let me save my distorted image to SkyDrive. It also let me open photos for editing from my cloud folders. We'll definitely see more extensive use of SkyDrive in third-party apps as the Window Store fills out, particularly those that will use app state and settings syncing.

Not Just for Windows 8 PCs
Just this week, a SkyDrive for Android app appeared, joining already existing apps for Windows 8, Mac OS X, iPhones, iPads, and Windows Phone. The mobile apps let you not only view anything stored up in your SkyDrive, but upload photos and share anything stored via the cloud.

I tried out mobile access to SkyDrive on my iPhone, using the iOS app. The SkyDrive iPhone app is nicely designed, clearly showing my cloud folders, and even letting me view photos and documents (even spreadsheets and PDFs) within the app. It also let me share anything in the folders via an email link (with view only or edit permissions), or to copy items to the phone's cut-and-paste clipboard.

A couple of things I couldn't do in the iPhone app: I could not use the fetch feature to find any files on the PC signed into the same SkyDrive account, as I could through the Web client. Also, I couldn't stream video. One cool thing that I could do was upload photos from the iPhone's camera roll or other galleries, but I couldn't designate any of the galleries for inclusion as a whole on SkyDrive. I could mark multiple folders for upload, but new photos in the gallery couldn't automatically be uploaded. In Windows Phone, you can do exactly that, using the "Automatically upload to SkyDrive" option.

Remote Access
One thing that has been removed from SkyDrive is remote access. This is something offered by iCloud but not by Google Drive or DropBox. Of course, third-party options like the excellent TeamViewer also offer remote PC control, so it's not like the OS vendor's solution is your only option.

Your Drive in the Sky
Microsoft's cloud solution is coming together, and its design goals make tremendous sense. I particularly like that syncing has now been combined with the online storage. Letting third-party windows app developers build cloud storage right into their apps will also be a boon, though this is something iCloud, too offers. Cross platform support for Macs, iOS devices, and even Android devices is a smart move on Microsoft's part, as well. And while the Fetch feature that lets you pull any file off a connected Windows PC is a great idea, its implementation is too limited at this point, and remote PC control was a no show in my testing. Microsoft is anything but a latecomer to the cloud, and SkyDrive in Windows 8 shows this, and shows movement in the right direction.

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