Chapter 1: Windows 8.1 4 N00bs
In This Chapter
A newbie’s quick guide
Hardware is hard — and software is hard, too
Windows’s place in the grand scheme of things
Those computer words that all the grade schoolers understand
What, exactly, is the web?
Buying a Windows 8.1 computer
Don’t sweat it. Everyone started out as n00bs (or newbies).
All those high-falutin’ technical words you have to memorize, eh?
If you’ve never used an earlier version of Windows, you’re in luck — you don’t have to force your fingers to “forget” so much of what you’ve learned. Windows 8.1 is completely different from any Windows that has come before — aside from Windows 8, of course — and Windows 7 (or XP) users who try to apply their hard-gained knowledge frequently get very frustrated just trying to get to first base with Win8.1.
The easiest way to learn about the new tiled “immersive” interface formerly known as “Metro” is to forget everything you ever knew about Windows and be prepared to start again from scratch. Considering more than 1.4 billion people around the world have used Windows 7 and earlier, that’s a whole lot of forgettin’ goin’ on.
So you’re sitting in front of your computer, and this thing called Windows 8.1 is staring at you. Except the screen (see Figure 1-1), which Microsoft calls the lock screen, doesn’t say “Windows,” much less “Windows 8.1.” In fact, the screen doesn’t say much of anything except the current date and time, with maybe a tiny icon or two that shows you whether your Internet connection is working, how many unopened e-mails await, or whether you should just take the day off because your holdings in AAPL stock soared again.
Figure 1-1: The Windows 8.1 lock screen. Your picture may differ, but the function stays the same.
You may be tempted to just sit and admire the gorgeous picture, whatever it may be, but if you use your finger or mouse to swipe up from the bottom, or press any key on an attached keyboard, you see the log-on screen, possibly resembling the one in Figure 1-2. If more than one person is set up to use your computer, you see more than one name.
Figure 1-2: The Windows 8.1 logon screen.
That’s the logon screen, but it doesn’t say “Logon” or “Welcome to Win8.1 Land” or “Howdy” or even “Sit down and get to work, Bucko.” It has names and pictures only for people who can use the computer. Why do you have to click your name? What if your name isn’t there? And why in the %$#@! can’t you bypass all this garbage, log on, and get your e-mail?
Good for you. That’s the right attitude.
Windows 8.1 ranks as the most sophisticated computer program ever made. It cost more money to develop and took more people to build than any previous computer program — ever. So why is it so blasted hard to use? Why doesn’t it do what you want it to do the first time? For that matter, why do you need it at all?
Someday, I swear, you’ll be able to pull a PC out of the box and plug it into the wall, turn it on, and get your e-mail — bang, bang, bang, just like that, in ten seconds flat. In the meantime, those stuck in the early 21st century have to make do with PCs that grow obsolete before you can unpack them, software that’s so ornery you find yourself arguing with it, and Internet connections that surely involve turtles carrying bits on their backs.
If you aren’t comfortable working with Windows and you still worry that you may break something if you click the wrong button, welcome to the club! In this chapter, I present a concise, school-of-hard-knocks overview of how all this hangs together, and what to look for when buying a Windows PC. It may help you understand why and how Windows has limitations. It also may help you communicate with the geeky rescue team that tries to bail you out, whether you rely on the store that sold you the PC, the smelly guy in the apartment downstairs, or your 8-year-old daughter’s nerdy classmate.
Hardware and Software
At the most fundamental level, all computer stuff comes in one of two flavors: hardware or software. Hardware is anything you can touch — a computer screen, a mouse, a hard drive, a DVD (remember those coasters with shiny sides?). Software is everything else: e-mail messages, that letter to your Aunt Martha, digital pictures of your last vacation, programs like Microsoft Office. If you shoot a bunch of pictures, the pictures themselves are just bits — software. But they’re probably sitting on some sort of memory card inside your phone or camera. That card’s hardware. Get the difference?
Windows 8.1 is software. You can’t touch it. Your PC, on the other hand, is hardware. Kick the computer screen, and your toe hurts. Drop the big box on the floor, and it smashes into a gazillion pieces. That’s hardware.
Chances are very good that one of the major PC manufacturers — Lenovo, HP, Dell, Acer, ASUS, or Toshiba for example — or maybe even Microsoft, with its Surface line, made your hardware. Microsoft, and Microsoft alone, makes Windows 8.1.
When you bought your computer, you paid for a license to use one copy of Windows on the PC you bought. The PC manufacturer paid Microsoft a royalty so that it could sell you Windows along with your PC. You may think that you got Windows from, say, Dell — indeed, you may have to contact Dell for technical support on Windows questions — but, in fact, Windows came from Microsoft.
Most software these days, including Windows 8.1, asks you to agree to an End User License Agreement (EULA). When you first set up your PC, Windows asked you to click the I Accept button to accept a licensing agreement that’s long enough to wrap around the Empire State Building. If you’re curious about what agreement you accepted, a printed copy of the EULA may be in the box that your PC came in or in the CD packaging, if you bought Windows 8.1 separately from your computer.
Why Do PCs Have to Run Windows?
Here’s the short answer: You don’t have to run Windows on your PC.
The PC you have is a dumb box. (You needed me to tell you that, eh?) To get the dumb box to do anything worthwhile, you need a computer program that takes control of the PC and makes it do things, such as show web pages on the screen, respond to mouse clicks or taps, or print résumés. An operating system controls the dumb box and makes it do worthwhile things, in ways that mere humans can understand.
Without an operating system, the computer can sit in a corner and count to itself or put profound messages on the screen, such as Non-system disk or disk error or maybe Insert system disk and press any key when ready. If you want your computer to do more than that, though, you need an operating system.
Windows is not the only operating system in town. The other big contenders in the PC and PC-like operating system game are Mac OS and Linux:
Mac OS: Apple has made great strides running on Intel hardware, and if you don't already know how to use Windows or own a Windows computer, it makes a great deal of sense to consider buying an Apple computer and/or running Mac OS. Yes, you can build your own computer and run the Mac OS on it: Check out www.hackintosh.com. But, no, it isn't legal — the Mac OS End User License Agreement specifically forbids installation on a "non-Apple-branded computer" — and it's certainly not for the faint of heart.
That said, if you buy a Mac — say, a MacBook Air or Pro — it’s very easy to run Windows 8.1 on it. Some people feel that the highest quality Windows environment today comes from running Windows on a MacBook. All you need is a program called BootCamp, and that’s already installed, free, on the MacBook. See Switching to Mac For Dummies by Arnold Reinhold for details.
Linux: The big up-and-coming operating system, which has been up and coming for a couple of decades now, is Linux, which is pronounced LIN-uchs. It's a viable contender for netbooks (covered in more depth at the end of this chapter). If you expect to use your PC only to get on the Internet — to surf the web and send e-mail from the likes of your Gmail or Hotmail account — Linux can handle all that, and can do it with few of the headaches that remain as the hallmark of Windows. By using free programs like Libre Office (www.libreoffice.org) and online programs like Google Apps and Google Drive (www.drive.google.com), you can even cover the basics in word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, contact managers, calendars, and more. Linux may not support the huge array of hardware that Windows offers — but more than a few wags will tell you, with a wink, that Windows doesn't support that huge of an array, either.
In the tablet sphere, iOS and Android rule, with iOS for iPhones and iPads — all from Apple — and Android for phones and tablets from a bewildering number of manufacturers. Windows 8.1 doesn’t exactly compete with any of them, although Microsoft’s trying to take on the iPad with Windows RT (see the nearby “Windows RT” sidebar).
ChromeOS and FirefoxOS aren’t quite ready for prime time, as I write this, but you can bet a lot of smart people are working hard to make them amazing. The basic idea’s simple: instead of running a web browser on top of Windows (or OS X or Linux), why not just run the browser? You lose a whole, hunking layer of slow, error-prone, infectable software. As long as everything you want to do is online anyway, why not cut out the middleman? ChromeOS and FirefoxOS need their own kind of hardware, and they’re designed to get you to put your data in the cloud — which may be an advantage or a disadvantage, depending on how you look at it — but they’re both (generally) much cheaper, faster, and safer than the Windows alternatives.
What do other people choose? It’s hard to measure the percentage of PCs running Windows versus Mac versus Linux. One company, Net Applications, specializes in inspecting the online records of big-name websites and tallying how many Windows computers hit those sites, compared to Apple and Linux. Although the numbers are changing quickly, worldwide, Windows accounts for about 92 percent of all hits on major websites, Mac runs about 7 percent, and Linux kinda picks up the crumbs. (That’s not counting mobile operating systems such as iOS and Android.) You can see the report for the second quarter of 2013 in Figure 1-3.
Source: Net Applications
Figure 1-3: Web access by desktop operating system, second quarter 2013, worldwide.
Yes, you read the graph correctly: as of 2Q 2013, there were more web hits, worldwide, from Windows Vista than Windows 8, and XP is still almost as popular as Windows 7. A big part of the reason: China, where pirate copies of XP run rampant. Starting in late 2011, there are more PCs sold in China than in the United States.
If you look at tablet and mobile devices, the numbers change completely. Worldwide, in 2Q 2013, iOS (iPad, iPhone, iPod) accounts for 59 percent of all tablet and mobile web hits, per Net Applications; Android picks up 25 percent and Java ME (mostly older phones) 10 percent. All the rest — BlackBerry, Windows, Symbian, Kindle — wallow in chump change.
A Terminology Survival Kit
Some terms pop up so frequently that you’ll find it worthwhile to memorize them, or at least understand where they come from. That way, you won’t be caught flat-footed when your first-grader comes home and asks whether he can download a program from the Internet.
If you want to drive your techie friends nuts the next time you have a problem with your computer, tell them that the hassles occur when you’re “running Microsoft.” They won’t have any idea whether you mean Windows, Word, Outlook, Hotmail, Messenger, Search, Defender, Media Center, or any of a gazillion other programs.
An app or a program is software (see the earlier “Hardware and Software” section in this chapter) that works on a computer. “App” is modern and cool; “program” is old and boring, “application” manages to hit both gongs, but they all mean the same thing.
Windows, the operating system (see the preceding section), is a program. So are computer games, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Word (the word processor part of Office), Internet Explorer (the web browser in Windows), Windows Media Player, those nasty viruses you’ve heard about, that screen saver with the oh-too-perfect fish bubbling and bumbling about, and others.
A special kind of program called a driver makes specific pieces of hardware work with the operating system. For example, your computer’s printer has a driver, your monitor has a driver, your mouse has a driver, and Tiger Woods has a driver (several, actually, and he makes a living with them). Would that everyone were so talented.
Many drivers ship with Windows, even though Microsoft doesn’t make them. The hardware manufacturer’s responsible for making its hardware work with your Windows PC, and that includes building and fixing the drivers. (Yes, if Microsoft makes your computer, Microsoft’s responsible for the drivers, too.) Sometimes you can get a driver from the manufacturer that works better than the one that ships with Windows.
When you stick an app or program on your computer — and set it up so that it works — you install the app or program (or driver).
When you crank up a program — that is, get it going on your computer — you can say you started it, launched it, ran it, or executed it. They all mean the same thing.
If the program quits the way it’s supposed to, you can say it stopped, finished, ended, exited, or terminated. Again, all these terms mean the same thing. If the program stops with some sort of weird error message, you can say it crashed, died, cratered, croaked, went belly up, jumped in the bit bucket, or GPFed (techspeak for “generated a General Protection Fault” — don’t ask), or employ any of a dozen colorful but unprintable epithets. If the program just sits there and you can’t get it to do anything, no matter how you click your mouse or poke the screen, you can say the program froze, hung, stopped responding, or went into a loop.
A bug is something that doesn’t work right. (A bug is not a virus! Viruses work as intended far too often.) U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Grace Hopper — the intellectual guiding force behind the COBOL programming language and one of the pioneers in the history of computing — often repeated the story of a moth being found in a relay of an ancient Mark II computer. The moth was taped into the technician’s logbook on September 9, 1947. (See Figure 1-4.)
Source: U.S. Navy, www.history.navy.mil/photos/pers-us/uspers-h/g-hoppr.htm
Figure 1-4: Admiral Grace Hopper’s log of the “first actual case of bug being found.”
The people who invented all this terminology think of the Internet as being some great blob in the sky — it’s up, as in “up in the sky.” So if you send something from your computer to the Internet, you’re uploading. If you take something off the Internet and put it on your computer, you’re downloading.
When you put computers together, you network them, and if your network doesn’t use wires, it’s commonly called a Wi-Fi network. At the heart of a network sits a box, commonly called a hub, or a router, that computers can plug in to. If the hub has rabbit ears on top for wireless connections, it’s usually called a Wi-Fi router. (Some Wi-Fi routers may not have antennae outside.) Yes, there are fine lines of distinction among all these terms. No, you don’t need to worry about them.
There are two basic ways to hook up to the Internet: wired and wireless. Wired is easy: You plug it into a wall. Wireless falls into two categories: Wi-Fi connections, as you’ll find in many homes, coffee shops, airports, and some exceptionally enlightened cities’ common areas; and cellular (mobile phone–style) wireless connections.
Cellular Wireless Internet connections are usually identified with one of the “G” levels: 2G, 3G, 4G, or maybe even 5G.
Truth be told, all the “G” nomenclature has turned into marketing malarkey. One vendor will call something 3G, whereas another calls it 4G. A vendor may call the same service 4G today and 3G tomorrow. Yes, they can get away with that. The general rule of thumb is that 4G should be faster than 3G, but in specific instances, that may not be true. When shopping for a wireless Internet service, look for reliability, speed, and price. Nothing else matters — in particular, 4G isn’t necessarily better than 3G.
This part gets a little tricky. If your phone can connect to a 3G or 4G network, it may be possible to set your phone up to behave like a Wi-Fi router: Your computer talks to the phone, the phone talks to the Internet over its 3G or 4G connection. That’s called tethering — your laptop is tethered to your phone. Not all phones can tether, and not all phone companies will allow it.
Special boxes called MyFi units work much the same way: The MyFi connects to the 3G or 4G connection, and your laptop gets tethered to the MyFi box.
If you plug your Internet connection into the wall, you have broadband, which may run via fiber (a cable that uses light waves), DSL or ADSL (which uses regular old phone lines), cable (as in cable TV), or satellite. The fiber, DSL, cable, or satellite box is commonly called a modem, although it’s really a router. Although fiber optic lines are inherently much faster than DSL or cable, individual results can be all over the lot. Ask your neighbors what they’re using and then pick the best. If you don’t like your current service, vote with your pocketbook.
Turning to the dark side of the force, Luke, the distinctions among viruses, worms, and Trojans grow blurrier every day. In general, they’re programs that replicate and can be harmful, and the worst ones blend different approaches. Spyware gathers information about you and then phones home with all the juicy details. Adware gets in your face, all too frequently installing itself on your computer without your knowledge or consent. I tend to lump the two together and call them scumware or crapware or something a bit more descriptive and less printable.
If a bad guy (and they’re almost always guys) manages to take over your computer without your knowledge, turning it into a zombie that spews spam by remote control, you’re in a botnet. (And yes, the term spam comes from the immortal Monty Python routine that’s set in a café serving Hormel’s SPAM luncheon meat, the chorus bellowing “lovely Spam, wonderful Spam.”) Check out Book IX for details about preventing scumware and the like from messing with you.
The most successful botnets employ rootkits — programs that run “underneath” Windows, evading detection because normal programs can’t see them. The number of Windows 8.1 computers running rootkits is probably two or three or four orders of magnitudes less than the number of zombified XP computers. But as long as Windows XP computers are out there, botnets will continue to be a major threat to everyone.
This section covers about 90 percent of the buzzwords you hear in common parlance. If you get stuck at a party where the bafflegab is flowing freely, don’t hesitate to invent your own words. Nobody will ever know the difference.
What, Exactly, Is the Web?
Five years from now (although it may take ten), the operating system you use will be largely irrelevant, as will be the speed of your computer, the amount of memory you have, and the number of terabytes of storage that hum in the background. Microsoft will keep milking its cash cow, but the industry will move on. Individuals and businesses will stop shelling out big bucks for Windows and the iron to run it. Instead, the major push will be online. Rather than spend money on PCs that become obsolete the week after you purchase them, folks will spend money on big data pipes: It’ll be less about me and more about us. Why? Because so much more is “out there” than “in here.” Count on it.
But what is the Internet? This section answers this burning question (if you’ve asked it). If you don’t necessarily wonder about the Internet’s place in space and time just yet, you will . . . you will.
You know those stories about computer jocks who come up with great ideas, develop the ideas in their basements (or garages or dorm rooms), release their products to the public, change the world, and make a gazillion bucks?
This isn’t one of them.
The Internet started in the mid-1960s as an academic exercise — primarily with the RAND Corporation, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the National Physical Laboratory in England — and rapidly evolved into a military project, under the U.S. Department of Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA), designed to connect research groups working on ARPA projects.
By the end of the 1960s, ARPA had four computers hooked together — at UCLA, SRI (Stanford), UC Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah — using systems developed by BBN Technologies (then named Bolt Beranek and Newman, Inc.). By 1971, it had 18. I started using ARPANET in 1975. According to the website www.internetworldstats.com, by the end of June 2012, the Internet had more than 2.4 billion users worldwide.
Today, so many computers are connected directly to the Internet that the Internet’s addressing system is running out of numbers, just as your local phone company is running out of telephone numbers. The current numbering system — named IPv4 — can handle about 4 billion addresses. The next version, named IPv6, can handle this number of addresses:
340,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
That should last for a while, don’tcha think?
Ever wonder why you rarely see hard statistics about the Internet? I’ve found two big reasons:
Defining terms related to the Internet is devilishly difficult these days. (What do you mean when you say “X number of computers are connected to the Internet”? Is that the number of computers up and running at any given moment? The number of different addresses that are active? The number that could be connected if everybody dialed up at the same time? The number of different computers that are connected in a typical day, or week, or month?)
The other reason is that the Internet is growing so fast that any number you publish today will be meaningless tomorrow.
Getting inside the Internet
Some observers claim that the Internet works so well because it was designed to survive a nuclear attack. Not so. The people who built the Internet insist that they weren’t nearly as concerned about nukes as they were about making communication among researchers reliable, even when a backhoe severed an underground phone line or one of the key computers ground to a halt.
As far as I’m concerned, the Internet works so well because the engineers who laid the groundwork were utter geniuses. Their original ideas from almost 50 years ago have been through the wringer a few times, but they’re still pretty much intact. Here’s what the engineers decided:
No single computer should be in charge. All the big computers connected directly to the Internet are equal (although, admittedly, some are more equal than others). By and large, computers on the Internet move data around like kids playing hot potato — catch it, figure out where you’re going to throw it, and let it fly quickly. They don’t need to check with some übercomputer before doing their work; they just catch, look, and throw.
Break the data into fixed-size packets. No matter how much data you’re moving — an e-mail message that just says “Hi” or a full-color, life-size photograph of the Andromeda galaxy — the data is broken into packets. Each packet is routed to the appropriate computer. The receiving computer assembles all the packets and notifies the sending computer that everything came through okay.
Deliver each packet quickly. If you want to send data from Computer A to Computer B, break the data into packets and route each packet to Computer B by using the fastest connection possible — even if that means some packets go through Bangor and others go through Bangkok.
Taken together, those three rules ensure that the Internet can take a lickin’ and keep on tickin’. If a chipmunk eats through a telephone line, any big computer that’s using the gnawed line can start rerouting packets over a different telephone line. If the Cumbersome Computer Company in Cupertino, California, loses power, computers that were sending packets through Cumbersome can switch to other connected computers. It usually works quickly and reliably, although the techniques used internally by the Internet computers get a bit hairy at times.
Big computers are hooked together by high-speed communication lines: the Internet backbone. If you want to use the Internet from your business or your house, you have to connect to one of the big computers first. Companies that own the big computers — Internet service providers (ISPs) — get to charge you for the privilege of getting on the Internet through their big computers. The ISPs, in turn, pay the companies that own the cables (and satellites) that comprise the Internet backbone for a slice of the backbone.
If all this sounds like a big-fish-eats-smaller-fish-eats-smaller-fish arrangement, that’s quite a good analogy.
It’s backbone-breaking work, but somebody’s gotta do it.
What is the World Wide Web?
People tend to confuse the World Wide Web with the Internet, which is a lot like confusing the dessert table with the buffet line. I’d be the first to admit that desserts are mighty darn important — life-critical, in fact, if the truth be told. But they aren’t the same as the buffet line.
To get to the dessert table, you have to stand in the buffet line. To get to the web, you have to be running on the Internet. Make sense?
The World Wide Web owes its existence to Tim Berners-Lee and a few co-conspirators at a research institute named CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. In 1990, Berners-Lee demonstrated a way to store and link information on the Internet so that all you had to do was click to jump from one place — one web page — to another. Nowadays, nobody in his right mind can give a definitive count of the number of pages available, but Google has indexed more than 50 billion of them.
Like the Internet itself, the World Wide Web owes much of its success to the brilliance of the people who brought it to life. The following list describes the ground rules:
Web pages, stored on the Internet, are identified by an address, such as www.dummies.com. The main part of the web page address — dummies.com, for example — is a domain name. With rare exceptions, you can open a web page by simply typing its domain name and pressing Enter. Spelling counts, and underscores (_) are treated differently from hyphens (-). Being close isn't good enough — there are just too many websites. As of this writing, DomainTools (www.domaintools.com) reports that about 140 million domain names end in .com, .net, .org, .info, .biz, or .us. That's just for the United States. Other countries have different naming conventions: .co.uk, for example, is the U.K. equivalent of .com.
Web pages are written in the funny language HyperText Markup Language (HTML). HTML is sort of a programming language, sort of a formatting language, and sort of a floor wax, all rolled into one. Many products claim to make it easy for novices to create powerful, efficient HTML. Some of those products are getting close.
To read a web page, you have to use a web browser. A web browser is a program that runs on your computer and is responsible for converting HTML into text that you can read and use. The majority of people who view web pages use Internet Explorer as their web browser, but more and more people (including me!) prefer Firefox (see www.mozilla.org) and/or Chrome, from Google (www.chrome.google.com). Unless you live under a rock in the Gobi Desert, you know that Internet Explorer is part of Windows 8.1. You may not know that Firefox and Chrome can run right alongside Internet Explorer, with absolutely no confusion between the two. Er, three. In fact, they don't even interact — Firefox and Chrome were designed to operate completely independently, and they do very well playing all by themselves.
One unwritten rule for the World Wide Web: All web acronyms must be completely, utterly inscrutable. For example, a web address is a Uniform Resource Locator, or URL. (The techies I know pronounce URL “earl.” Those who don’t wear white lab coats tend to say “you are ell.”) I describe the HTML acronym in the preceding list. On the web, a gorgeous, sunny, palm-lined beach with the scent of frangipani wafting through the air would no doubt be called SHS — Smelly Hot Sand. Sheeesh.
The best part of the web is how easily you can jump from one place to another — and how easily you can create web pages with hot links (also called hyperlinks or just links) that transport the viewer wherever the author intends. That’s the H in HTML and the original reason for creating the web so many years ago.
Who pays for all this stuff?
That’s the 64-billion-dollar question, isn’t it? The Internet is one of the true bargains of the 21st century. When you’re online — for which you probably have to pay EarthLink, Comcast, Verizon, NetZero, Juno, Netscape, Qwest, your cable company, or another ISP a monthly fee — the Internet itself is free.
Internet Explorer is free, sorta, because it comes with Windows 8.1, no matter which version you buy. Firefox is free as a breeze — in fact, it’s the poster child for open-source programs: Everything about the program, even the program code itself, is free. Google Chrome is free, too. Both Microsoft, with IE, and Google, with Chrome, keep tabs on where you go and what you do online — all the better to convince you to click an ad. Firefox, on the other hand, doesn’t play that game.
Most websites don’t charge a cent. They pay for themselves in any of these ways:
Reduce a company’s operating costs: Banks and brokerage firms, for example, have websites that routinely handle customer inquiries at a fraction of the cost of H2H (er, human-to-human) interactions.
Increase a company’s visibility: The website gives you a good excuse to buy more of the company’s products. That’s why architectural firms show you pictures of their buildings and food companies post recipes.
Draw in new business: Ask any real estate agent.
Contract advertising: Google has made a fortune. A thousand thousand fortunes.
Use bounty advertising: Smaller sites run ads, most commonly from Google but in some cases, selected from a pool of advertisers. The advertiser pays a bounty for each person who clicks the ad and views its website — a click-through.
Use affiliate programs: Smaller sites may also participate in a retailer’s affiliate program. If a customer clicks through and orders something, the website that originated the transaction receives a percentage of the amount ordered. Amazon is well known for its affiliate program, but many others exist.
Some websites have an entrance fee. For example, if you want to read more than a few articles on The New York Times website, you have to part with some substantial coin — about $15 per month for the most basic option, the last time I looked. Guess that beats schlepping around a whole lotta paper.
Buying a Windows 8.1 Computer
Here’s how it usually goes: You figure that you need to buy a new PC, so you spend a couple weeks brushing up on the details — bits and bytes and kilobytes and megabytes and gigabytes — and comparison shopping. You end up at your local Computers Are Us shop, and the guy behind the counter convinces you that the absolutely best bargain you’ll ever see is sitting right here, right now, and you’d better take it quick before somebody else nabs it.
Your eyes glaze over as you look at yet another spec sheet and try to figure out one last time whether a RAM is a ROM, how fast hard drive platters spin, and whether you need a SATA 3 Gbps, SATA 6 Gbps, or eSATA. In the end, you figure that the guy behind the counter must know what he’s doing, so you plunk down your plastic and pray you got a good deal.
The next Sunday morning, you look in the paper and discover you could’ve bought twice as much machine for half as much money. The only thing you know for sure is that your PC is hopelessly out of date, and the next time you’ll be smarter about the whole process.
If that describes your experiences, relax. It happens to everybody. Take solace in the fact that you bought twice as much machine for the same amount of money as the poor schmuck who went through the same process last month.
Here’s everything you need to know about buying a Windows 8.1 PC:
Decide if you’re going to use a touch screen.
If you know that you won’t be using the tiled “Metro” side of Windows very much, a touch screen won’t hurt, but it probably isn’t worth the additional expense. Experienced, mouse-savvy Windows users often find that using a mouse and a touch screen at the same time is an ergonomic pain in the ar . . . m.
Until Microsoft gets its Office act together, I strongly advise against using Office with a touch screen. Unless you have fingertips the size of pinheads — or you always use a stylus — Microsoft Office on a touch screen is an excruciating experience.
If you’re going to use the old-fashioned, Windows 7–style desktop, get a high-quality monitor, a solid keyboard, and a mouse that feels comfortable.
Corollary: Don’t buy a computer online unless you know for a fact that your fingers will like the keyboard, your wrist will tolerate the mouse, and your eyes will fall in love with the monitor.
If you’re going to use the tiled Metro side of Windows 8.1, get a screen that’s at least 1366×768 pixels — the minimum size to support all of Metro’s features. Although a touch-sensitive screen isn’t a prerequisite for using the Metro side of Windows 8.1, believe me, you’ll find it much, much easier to use Metro apps with your fingers than with your mouse. Microsoft allows hardware manufacturers to sell small tablets with 1024×768 screens and call them “Made for Windows.” Unfortunately, the under-pixeled screens can’t use Metro Snap (see Book III, Chapter 1); they’re stuck with running just one Metro app at a time.
There’s no substitute for physically trying the hardware on a touch-sensitive Windows 8.1 computer. Hands come in all shapes and sizes, and fingers, too. What works for size XXL hands with ten thumbs (present company included) may not cut the mustard for svelte hands and fingers experienced at taking cotton swabs out of medicine bottles.
See the following section, “Inside a touch-sensitive tablet.”
Go overboard with hard drives.
In the best of all possible worlds, get a computer with a Solid State Drive (SSD) for the system drive (the C: drive) plus a large hard drive for storage. For the low-down on SSDs, hard drives, backups, and putting them all together, see the upcoming section, "Managing disks and drives."
How much hard drive space do you need? How long is a string? Unless you have an enormous collection of videos, movies, or songs, 1TB (= 1,024GB = 1,048,576MB = 1,073,741,824KB = 1,099,511,627,776 bytes, or characters of storage) should suffice. That’s big enough to handle about 1,000 broadcast-quality movies. Consider that the printed collection of the U.S. Library of Congress runs about 10TB.
If you’re getting a laptop or Ultrabook with an SSD drive, consider buying an external 1TB or larger drive at the same time. You’ll use it.
Everything else they try to sell ya pales in comparison.
If you want to spend more money, go for a faster Internet connection and a better chair. You need both items much more than you need a marginally faster, or bigger, computer.
Inside the big box
In this section, I give you just enough information about the inner workings of a desktop or laptop PC that you can figure out what you have to do with Windows. In the next section, I talk about touch-enabled tablets, the PCs that respond to touch. Details can change from week to week, but these are the basics.
The big box that your desktop computer lives in is sometimes called a CPU, or central processing unit (see Figure 1-5). Right off the bat, you’re bound to get confused, unless somebody clues you in on one important detail: The main computer chip inside that big box is also called a CPU. I prefer to call the big box “the PC” because of the naming ambiguity, but you’ve probably thought of a few better names.
The big box contains many parts and pieces (and no small amount of dust and dirt), but the crucial, central element inside every PC is the motherboard. (You can see a picture of a motherboard here: www.gigabyte.us/fileupload/product/2/4139/5627_big.jpg).
Courtesy of Dell Inc.
Figure 1-5: The enduring, traditional big box.
You find the following items attached to the motherboard:
The processor, or CPU: This gizmo does the main computing. It's probably from Intel or AMD. Different manufacturers rate their CPUs in different ways, and it's impossible to compare performance by just looking at the part number. Yes, i7 CPUs usually run faster than i5's, and i3's are the slowest, but there are many nuances. Unless you tackle very intensive video games, or recalculate spreadsheets with the national debt, the CPU doesn't really count for much. If in doubt, check out the reviews at www.tomshardware.com.
Memory chips and places to put them: Memory is measured in megabytes (1MB = 1,024KB = 1,048,576 characters) and gigabytes (1GB = 1,024MB). Although Windows 8.1 can run on a machine with 512MB (I’ve done it), Microsoft recommends a minimum of 1GB. Unless you have an exciting cornfield to watch grow while Windows 8.1 saunters along, aim for 2GB or more. Most computers allow you to add more memory to them, and boosting your computer’s memory to 2GB from 1GB makes the machine much snappier, especially if you run memory hogs such as Office, InDesign, or Photoshop. If you leave Outlook open and work with it all day and run almost any other major program at the same time, 4GB isn’t overkill.
Video chipset: Most motherboards include remarkably good built-in video. If you want more video oomph, you have to buy a video card and put it in a card slot. Advanced motherboards have multiple PCI card slots, to allow you to strap together two video cards and speed up video even more. For more information, see the “Screening” section in this chapter.
Card slots (also known as expansion slots): Laptops have very limited (if any) expansion slots on the motherboard. Desktops generally contain several expansion slots. Modern slots come in two flavors: PCI and PCI-Express (also known as PCIe or PCI-E). Most expansion cards use PCI, but very fast cards — including, notably, video cards — require PCIe. Of course, PCI cards don’t fit in PCIe slots, and vice versa. To make things more confusing, PCIe comes in four sizes — literally, the size of the bracket and the number of bumps on the bottoms of the cards are different. The PCIe 1x is smallest, the relatively uncommon PCIe 4x is considerably larger, and PCIe 8x is a bit bigger still. PCIe 16x is just a little bit bigger than an old-fashioned PCI slot. Most video cards these days require a PCIe 16x slot. Or two.
If you’re buying a monitor separately from the rest of the system, make sure the monitor takes video input in a form that your PC can produce. See the upcoming section, “Screening,” for details.
USB (Universal Serial Bus) cable: This cable has a flat connector that plugs in to your slots. USB 3 is considerably faster than USB 2, and any kind of USB device can plug in to a USB 3 slot. Make sure you get plenty of USB slots — at least two, preferably four, or more. More details are in the section “Managing disks and drives,” later in this chapter.
Lots of other stuff: You never have to play with this other stuff, unless you’re very unlucky.
Here are a few upgrade dos and don’ts:
Don’t let a salesperson talk you into eviscerating your PC and upgrading the CPU: i7 isn’t that much faster than i5; a 3.0-GHz PC doesn’t run a whole lot faster than a 2.4-GHz PC, and a dual-quad-core ChipDuoTrioQuattroQuinto stuck in an old motherboard doesn’t run much faster than your original slowpoke.
When you hit 2GB in main memory, don’t expect big performance improvements by adding more memory.
On the other hand, if you have an older video card, do consider upgrading it to a faster card, or to one with 512MB or more of on-board memory. They’re cheap. Windows 8.1 takes good advantage of it.
Rather than nickel-and-dime yourself to death on little upgrades, do wait until you can afford a new PC, and give away your old one.
If you decide to add memory, have the company that sells you the memory install it. The process is simple, quick, and easy — if you know what you’re doing. Having the dealer install the memory also puts the monkey on his back if a memory chip doesn’t work or a bracket snaps.
Inside a touch-sensitive tablet
Although touch-sensitive tablets have been on the market for more than a decade, they didn’t really take off until Apple introduced the iPad in 2010. Since the iPad went ballistic, every Windows hardware manufacturer has been clamoring to join the game. Even Microsoft has entered the computer-manufacturing fray with its line of innovative tablets known as Surface.
The old Windows tablets generally required a stylus (a special kind of pen), and they had very little software that took advantage of touch input. The iPad changed all that.
The result is a real hodge-podge of, basically, first- (or occasionally second-) generation Windows tablets. It really isn’t fair comparing a full-featured Windows 8.1 tablet to an iPad: They’re built for different situations, aimed at different markets. The Win8.1 tablet can do much more than an iPad, but at quite a price: The iPad wins hands-down in terms of weight, heat, battery life, and price. The screen on an iPad runs rings around most Windows tablets; the camera’s better; and on and on. But you can’t run Windows applications on an iPad — at least, not without connecting to a Windows computer.
That may be a plus or a minus, depending on where you sit.
To further complicate matters, Microsoft offers different versions of Windows for traditional Intel/AMD processors, and for the far-more-svelte ARM processors. See the sidebar “Windows RT” earlier in this chapter.
As this book went to press, hardware manufacturers were stumbling all over each other trying to get fast, cool, light Windows 8.1 tablets to market. The new “Haswell” chips from Intel have done a remarkable job of extending battery life. Video chips are so fast it’s scary. But if an iPad or Android tablet will do everything you need to do, there’s no reason to plunk down a lot of money for a Windows 8.1 tablet. None at all.
If you’re thinking about buying a Windows 8.1 tablet, keep these points in mind:
Make sure you understand the differences between an Intel/AMD tablet and an ARM tablet. If you want to use the Windows 8.1 desktop — the one that looks like the Windows 7 desktop — you have to stick with Intel/AMD models (frequently called x86/x64 or 32-bit/64-bit tablets).
This book specifically covers Intel/AMD tablets, but not ARM tablets.
Focus on weight, heat, and battery life. Touch-sensitive tablets are meant to be carried, not lugged around like a suitcase, and the last thing you need is a box so hot it burns a hole in your pants, or a fan so noisy you can’t carry on a conversation.
Make sure you get multi-touch. Some manufacturers like to skimp and make tablets that only respond to one or two touch points. You need at least four, just to run Windows 8.1, and ten wouldn’t hurt. Throw in some toes and ask for 20, if you want to be ornery about it.
The screen has to run at 1366×768 pixels or better. The tiled Metro interface doesn’t work well at all on a smaller screen.
Get a Solid State Drive if you can afford it. In addition to making the machine much, much faster, SSDs also save on weight and heat. Don’t be overly concerned about the amount of storage on a tablet. Many people with Win8.1 tablets end up putting all their data in the cloud with, for example, SkyDrive, or Google Drive. See Book IV, Chapter 4.
Try before you buy. The screen has to be sensitive to your big fingers, and look good, too. Not an easy combination.
Make sure you can return it. If you have experience with a “real” keyboard and a mouse, you may find that you hate using a tablet to replicate the kinds of things you used to do with a laptop or desktop PC.
As the hardware market matures, you can expect to see many variations on the tablet theme. It ain’t all cut and dried.
Screening
The computer monitor or screen — and LED, LCD, and plasma TVs — use technology that’s quite different from old-fashioned television circuitry from your childhood. A traditional TV scans lines across the screen from left to right, with hundreds of them stacked on top of each other. Colors on each individual line vary all over the place. The almost infinitely variable color on an old-fashioned TV combined with a comparatively small number of lines makes for pleasant, but fuzzy, pictures.
By contrast (pun absolutely intended, of course), computer monitors, touch-sensitive tablet screens, and plasma, LED, and LCD TVs work with dots of light called pixels. Each pixel can have a different color, created by tiny, colored gizmos sitting next to each other. As a result, the picture displayed on computer monitors (and plasma and LCD TVs) is much sharper than on conventional TV tubes.
The more pixels you can cram on a screen — that is, the higher the screen resolution — the more information you can pack on the screen. That’s important if you commonly have more than one word-processing document open at a time, for example. At a resolution of 800×600, two open Word documents placed side by side look big but fuzzy, like caterpillars viewed through a dirty magnifying glass. At 1280×1024, those same two documents look sharp, but the text may be so small that you have to squint to read it. If you move up to wide-screen territory — 1680×1050, 1920×1200, or even 2560×1440 — with a good monitor, two documents side-by-side look stunning.
When Apple introduced its Retina displays, at 2048×1536 pixels on a 9.7-inch diagonal display, they simply blew away any screens we had ever seen for the PC. Now, PC manufacturers are slowly catching up — and Android hardware manufacturers, including Samsung, are out-Retina-ing the iPad. Take a look at an iPad or MacBook Retina display, or one of the Samsung super high-density displays. If you can see an eye-popping difference (most people can), you may want to seriously re-consider buying a less-than-Retina PC.
A special-purpose computer called a graphics processor (GPU), stuck on your video card, or possibly integrated into the CPU, creates everything that’s shown on your computer’s screen. The GPU has to juggle all the pixels and all the colors, so if you’re a gaming fan, the speed of the GPU’s chip (and, to a lesser extent, the speed of the monitor) can make the difference between a zapped alien and a lost energy shield. If you want to experience Windows 8.1 in all its glory, you need a fast GPU with at least 512MB (and preferably 1GB or more) of its own memory.
Computer monitors and tablets are sold by size, measured diagonally, like TV sets. Just like with TV sets, the only way to pick a good computer screen over a run-of-the-mill one is to compare them side by side or to follow the recommendation of someone who has.
Managing disks and drives
Your PC’s memory chips hold information only temporarily: Turn off the electricity, and the contents of main memory go bye-bye. If you want to reuse your work, keeping it around after the plug has been pulled, you have to save it, typically on a disk, or possibly in the cloud (which means you copy it to a location on the Internet).
The following list describes the most common types of disks and drives:
Floppy disk: The 1.44MB floppy disk drives that were ubiquitous on PCs for many years have bitten the dust. You’ll have a hard time even finding one these days.
SD/xD/CF card memory: Many smaller computers, and some tablets, have built-in SD card readers. (In general, Apple and Google tablets don’t have SD — the companies would rather sell you their cloud storage plans!) You probably know Secure Digital (SD) cards best as the kind of memory used in digital cameras, or possibly phones (see Figure 1-6). Micro SD cards slip in to hollowed-out cards that are shaped like, and function as, SD cards.
Even now, long after the demise of floppy disks, many desktop computer cases have drive bays built for them. Why not use the open spot for a multifunction card reader? That way, you can slip a memory card out of your digital camera (or your Dick Tracy wristwatch, for that matter) and transfer files at will. SD card, xD card, CompactFlash, memory stick — whatever you have — the multifunction readers cost a pittance and read almost everything, including minds.
Compliments of SanDisk.
Figure 1-6: A 128GB SD card. MicroSD cards slip in to holders shaped like an SD card.
Hard drive: The technology's changing rapidly, with traditional hard disk drives (HDDs) now being augmented by Solid State Drives (SSDs) with no moving parts, and hybrid drives that bolt together a regular rotating drive with an SSD. Each technology has benefits and drawbacks. Yes, you can run a regular HDD drive as your C: drive, and it'll work fine. But SSD-goosed systems, on tablets, laptops, or desktops, run like greased lightning. For tips on installing an SSD and moving your files around, see Book VIII, Chapter 5.
The SSD wins as speed king. After you use an SSD as your main "system" (C:) drive, you'll never go back to a spinning platter, I guarantee. SSDs are great for the main drive, but they're awfully expensive for storing pictures, movies, and photos. They may someday supplant the old whirling dervish drive, but price and technical considerations (see the sidebar, "Solid State Drives have problems, too") assure that hard drives will be around for a long time. SSDs feature low power consumption and give off less heat. They have no moving parts, so they don't wear out like hard drives. And, if you drop a hard drive and a Solid State Drive off the Leaning Tower of Pisa, one of them may survive. Or maybe not.
Hybrid drives combine the benefits and problems of both HDDs and SSDs. Although HDDs have long had caches — chunks of memory that hold data before being written to the drive, and after it’s read from the drive — hybrid drives have a full SSD to act as a buffer.
If you can stretch the budget, start with an SSD for the system drive, a big hard drive for storing photos, movies, and music, and get another drive (which can be inside your PC, outside attached with a USB cable, or even on a different PC on your network) to run File History (see Book VIII, Chapter 1).
If you want full on-the-fly protection against dying hard drives, you can get three hard drives — one SSD, and two hard drives, either inside the box or outside attached with USB or eSATA cables — and run Storage Spaces (see Book VII, Chapter 4).
Ultimately, though, the industry is headed to a three-tier system, with SSDs storing data you need all the time, intermediate backup in the cloud, and multi-terabyte data repositories hanging off your PC. Privacy concerns (and the, uh, intervention of various governments) have people worried about cloud storage. Rightfully so.
CD, DVD, or Blu-ray drive: Of course, these types of drives work with CDs, DVDs, and the Sony Blu-ray discs, which can be filled with data or contain music or movies. CDs hold about 700MB of data; DVDs hold 4GB, or six times as much as a CD. Dual-layer DVDs (which use two separate layers on top of the disc) hold about 8GB, and Blu-ray discs hold 50GB, or six times as much as a dual-layer DVD.
Unless you want to stick a high-definition movie on a single disc or play Blu-ray discs that you buy or rent in your local video store, 50GB of data on a single disc is overkill. Most Windows 8.1 users will do quite well with a dual-layer DVD-RW drive, for the princely sum of $30 or so. You can always use a dual-layer drive to record regular (single-layer) DVDs or CDs. If you’re nervous about installing a new drive, add an external USB version: Windows 8.1 loves external DVD drives, and it tolerates external Blu-ray drives.
USB drive or key drive: Treat it like it’s a lollipop. Half the size of a pack of gum and able to hold an entire PowerPoint presentation or two or six, plus a half dozen full-length movies, flash memory (also known as a jump drive, thumb drive, or memory stick) should be your first choice for external storage space or for copying files between computers. (See Figure 1-7.) You can even use USB drives on some DVD players and TV set-top boxes.
Compliments of SanDisk.
Figure 1-7: A USB drive.
Pop one of these guys in a USB slot, and suddenly Windows 8.1 knows it has another drive — except that this one’s fast, portable, and incredibly easy to use. Go for the cheapest flash drives you can find: Most of the “features” on fancy key drives are just, uh, Windows dressing.
What about USB 3? If you have a hard drive that sits outside of your computer — an external drive — or a USB key drive, it’ll run faster if it’s tethered with a USB 3 cable. For most other outside devices, USB 3 is overkill, and USB 2 works just as well.
This list is by no means definitive: New storage options come out every day.
Making PC connections
Your PC connects to the outside world by using a bewildering variety of cables and connectors. I describe the most common in this list:
USB (Universal Serial Bus) cable: This cable has a flat connector that plugs in to your PC, known as USB A (see Figure 1-7). The other end is sometimes shaped like a D (called USB B), but smaller devices have tiny terminators (usually called USB mini and USB micro, each of which have two different shapes).
USB 2 connectors will work with any device, but hardware — such as a hard drive — that uses USB 3 will run much faster if you use a USB 3 cable and plug it into the back of your computer in a USB 3 port. USB 2 works with USB 3 devices, but you won’t get the speed. Note that not all PCs have USB 3 ports!
USB is the connector of choice for just about any kind of hardware — printer, scanner, phone, camera, portable hard drive, and even the mouse. Apple iPhones and iPads use a USB connector on one side — to plug in to your computers — but the other side is Apple-only, and doesn’t look or act like any other connector.
If you run out of USB connections on the back of your PC, get a USB hub with a separate power supply and plug away.
LAN cable: Also known as a CAT-5, CAT-6, or RJ-45 cable, it’s the most common kind of network connector. It looks like an overweight telephone plug (see Figure 1-8). One end plugs in to your PC, typically into a network interface card (or NIC, pronounced “nick”), a network connector on the motherboard. The other end plugs in to your network’s hub (see Figure 1-9) or switch or into a cable modem, DSL box, router, or other Internet connection-sharing device.
Courtesy of CablesToGo.com
Figure 1-8: LAN connectors.
Courtesy of CablesToGo.com
Figure 1-9: A network hub.
Keyboard and mouse cable: More and more mice and keyboards (even cordless mice and keyboards) come with USB connectors.
DVI-D and HDMI connectors: Although older monitors still use legacy, 15-pin, HD15 VGA connectors, most monitors and video cards now use the DVI-D digital cable (see Figure 1-10). Given a choice, go with DVI-D: It’s faster and capable of delivering a much better picture. Some video cards, monitors, and many TVs also support the small HDMI connector (see Figure 1-11), which transmits both audio and video over one cable.
If you hope to hook up your new TV to your PC, make sure your PC can connect to the TV with the right kind of cable.
Old-fashioned serial (9-pin) and parallel (25-pin) cables and Centronics printer cables are growing as scarce as hen’s teeth. Hey, the hen doesn’t need them, either.
Courtesy of CablesToGo.com
Figure 1-10: DVI-D has largely supplanted the old VGA video adapter.
Courtesy of CablesToGo.com
Figure 1-11: HDMI carries both audio and video signals.
Futzing with video, sound, and multitudinous media
Unless you’re using a tablet, chances are pretty good that you’re running Windows 8.1 on a PC with at least a little oomph in the audio department. In the simplest case, you have to be concerned about four specific sound jacks (or groups of sound jacks) because each one does something different. Your machine may not have all four (are you feeling inadequate yet?), or it may look like a patch board at a Whitesnake concert, but the basics are still the same.
Here’s how the four key jacks are usually marked, although sometimes you have to root around in the documentation to find the details:
Line In: This stereo input jack is usually blue. It feeds a stereo audio signal — generally from an amplified source — into the PC. Use this jack to receive audio output into your computer from an iPad, cable box, TV set, radio, CD player, electric guitar, or other audio-generating box.
Mic In: This jack is usually pink. It’s for unamplified sources, like most microphones or some electric guitars. If you use a cheap microphone for Skype or another VoIP service that lets you talk long distance for free, and the mic doesn’t have a USB connector, plug in the microphone here. In a pinch, you can plug any of the Line In devices into the Mic In jack — but you may hear only mono sound, not stereo, and you may have to turn the volume way down to avoid some ugly distortion when the amplifier inside your PC increases the strength of an already-amplified signal.
Line Out: A stereo output jack, usually lime green, which in many cases can be used for headphones or patched into powered speakers. If you don’t have fancy output jacks (like the Sony-Philips SPDIF), this is the source for the highest-quality sound your computer can produce.
Rear Surround Out: Usually black, this jack isn’t used often. It’s intended to be used if you have independent, powered rear speakers. Most people with rear speakers use the Line Out connector and plug it into their home theater systems, which then drives the rear speakers; or they use the HDMI cable (see the preceding section) to hook up to their TVs. If your computer can produce full surround sound output, you’ll get much better results using the black jack.
Laptops typically have just two jacks, pink for Mic In and lime for Line Out. If you have a headphone with a mic, that’s the right combination. It’s also common to plug powered external speakers into the lime jack.
Tablets may or may not have a Line Out jack. If you see a jack — particularly a lime green jack — chances are good you can plug headphones or earbuds into the jack and get decent quality sound.
Fancy sound cards can have full Dolby DTS or THX 5.1 output (that’s left front, center front, right front, left surround, right surround, and a subwoofer). The 7.1 configuration uses two back surround speakers. Front panel output — where your sound card connects to jacks on the front of your PC, possibly a panel in a hard drive bay — makes connections easy. With a sufficiently bottomless budget, you can make your living room sound precisely like the 08R runway at Honolulu International.
PC manufacturers love to extol the virtues of their advanced sound systems, but the simple fact is that you can hook up a rather plain-vanilla PC to a home stereo and get great sound. Just connect the Line Out jack on the back of your PC to the Aux In jack on your home stereo or entertainment center. Voilà!
Netbooks and Ultrabooks
I really fell in love with an ASUS netbook while working with Windows 7. But then along came the iPad, and at least 80 percent of the reason for using a netbook disappeared. Sales of netbooks — small, light, inexpensive laptops — have not fared well, and I don’t see a comeback any time soon. Tablets just blow the doors off netbooks.
Ultrabooks are a slightly different story. Intel coined the term Ultrabook — actually, trademarked it — and set the specs. In order for a manufacturer to call its piece of iron an Ultrabook, it has to be less than 21mm thick, run for five hours on a battery charge, and resume from hibernation in seven seconds or less. In other words, they need to work a lot like an iPad.
Intel threw a $300 million marketing budget at Ultrabooks, but to date, they haven’t sold well. Times change, though, and with the advent of Windows 8.1 on Ultrabooks, you may see a turnaround.
At least, that’s what Intel hopes.