REVIEW WINDOWS 8 PRO New Desktop Features File History

Click to EnlargeThough Microsoft appears to have focused more effort on the new Modern UI, it has added a handful of new features that only work in desktop mode. The most useful of these is File History, which creates a version of history of any files stored in your libraries or on your desktop, along with contacts and favorites and stores all those files on external drive.
To test File History, we went into Control Panel and configured a USB flash drive to hold our file history and set Windows to scan our files for changes every 10 minutes (1 hour is default). We then took a photo of a baby from our Pictures library and drew a goatee on it. After 15 minutes, we went back into the File History application in Control Panel and selected restore, where we were able to find and replace the original, unaltered version of the photo.
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A more detailed task manager, which shows a more colorful list of apps, combines all CPU usage into one chart rather than one for each core. We particularly appreciated the tab that lists startup apps and how much impact each has on boot time.. We particularly like the App history tab, which shows how much CPU time and bandwidth each of your apps has used during that session.
The file explorer has also been revamped a bit so that it now uses ribbon-style menus like those we've seen in Microsoft Office, Windows Paint and many other Microsoft programs.
If you have a second screen attached to your computer, you'll appreciate Windows 8's improved multimonitor support, which now places the taskbar on all of your screens. Strangely, the Modern UI only appears on one of your two screens, the primary one by default. The other screen always shows the desktop, even at startup