Windows 8 Screenshots Leak New Features

The leaked screenshots of the Windows 8 operating system so far did not reveal new features. Most showed build numbers, some minor user interface corrections.
New screenshots have been leaked today by the Chinese news site Win7China which for the first time displayed new elements and features of the upcoming operating system.
A total of three screenshots have been posted. Two show the taskbar and system tray, the remaining one part of the user profile directory. Lets take a closer look at each of the screenshots.

Please note that we tried our best to identify the features by carefully examining the screenshots and using machine translation of the news post on the Chinese website.

The first screenshot shows the Windows 8 system tray area. The core addition is the profile picture next to the system tray. According to the information on the Chinese site, these can be local or Windows Live ID accounts. It basically means that users can make use of their Windows Live ID to log into Windows 8. It is likely that additional features of the integration will be revealed at a later time. One possible scenario is to link backup or cloud based storage with a user’s Live ID.
The user account control shows that it will be possible in Windows 8 to use videos as user profile avatars.
The last screenshot shows the taskbar again, and more precisely that Windows 8 displays driver installation progress on the taskbar’s program icon. Windows 7 currently shows a similar progress bar when copying files in Windows Explorer.

Additional information have been posted on Winreview, a Russian news site. Windows 8 will include a hard reset option to reset the operating system to factory settings in two minutes. This feature alone is pretty interesting for users who want to start anew. A possible scenario is to reset Windows 8 every time it has been used to always start with default settings.
The installation time of Windows 8 has been reduced by a factor of 2.5 from 25 minutes to 8 minutes. Microsoft is using a fast system (24 Gigabytes RAM, 8-core cpu, 2 TB hard drive to measure the time).

What else? Windows 8 will feature an app store that is directly accessible from within the operating system.
Especially the improved installation time and the hard reset are features that many users will benefit from. The main concern is that Microsoft may deliver a thin client on disc to achieve the installation speed, and that additional programs and features need to be downloaded from the cloud on first use. This would be similar to how Windows Live applications are now handled in Windows 7.