Windows 8 Secrets: RTM Setup Animations Revealed

This week, an employee of a Microsoft partner attended a local event and documented the new Windows 8 Setup animations aimed at helping users understand key new Metro-style interfaces. Microsoft forced this employee to take down the photos of this process. But we know you’re curious what this will look like. So in this this new co-post, your intrepid “Windows 8 Secrets” co-authors show you help animations that appear in the RTM version of Windows 8 Setup.

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Because Windows 8 is such a major change from previous Windows versions, Microsoft struggled to determine how much in-box training they needed to provide. The spectrum was fairly broad, of course, ranging from no training at all to “heavy” tutorials that would step the user through every possible new feature.

What Microsoft found, however, was that the sweet spot involved not overwhelming the user, but rather just providing them with the basics for finding some of the core new Metro UIs, like the Charms. And the way that Microsoft decided to implement these pointers is via a set of two animations that appear at the end of the so-called Out of Box Experience (OOBE), which is the part of Setup where the user enters basic user account information and picks a color scheme.

The animation(s) you see will be based on the capabilities of your PC. If you have a touch-based device, like a tablet, you will be shown the animation oriented towards touch followed by the version for mouse usage. Otherwise, you will only see the version aimed at mouse users.

Other sites have simply reposted the still shots of the animations. But we know you want to see the real thing. Here are those animations, back to back.

Have you seen any Windows 8 leaks you’d like to know more about? Drop us a line and let us know!

–Paul Thurrott and Rafael Rivera