Action Center Improvements

If you’re familiar with Action Center from Windows 7, you know that it’s an improved version of the Security Center that dates all the way back to Windows XP with Service Pack 2. In Windows 8, Action Center carries forward largely unchanged in that it still performs the same function of tracking security and troubleshooting items in the OS and popping up notifications when something goes wrong.

What’s changed is that Action Center now tracks far more items than it did in Windows 7. And while many of the items it tracks are, as you might expect, related to new features in Windows 8, some aren’t. It’s just fleshed out better.

In Windows 8, Action Center now tracks these additional items:

• Windows SmartScreen: This security feature, described earlier, debuted in Windows 8 and provides anti‑malware protection directly through the Windows filesystem.

• Windows activation: While activation is hardly new to Windows 8, Microsoft has created an Action Center experience in this release that tracks whether your copy of Windows is activated, and thus valid. You can see this interface in Figure 12‑19.

Figure 12‑19: Windows is activated

• Microsoft account: The ability to sign in to Windows 8 with a Microsoft account is obviously new to this version of the OS, but the underlying technology that Action Center is actually tracking here is whether your account is working properly and syncing settings from the PC to SkyDrive (and thus to other PCs) and vice versa.

• Automatic maintenance: Like previous Windows versions, Windows 8 will automatically run a scheduled maintenance routine at a set time, 3:00 a.m. What’s changed in Windows 8 is that this activity is now tracked by Action Center to ensure that it completes successfully. But you can use the Start maintenance link to run a manual check or Change maintenance settings to configure a new time.

• HomeGroup: Action Center now checks to see whether you’re part of a homegroup. This is important because signing in with a Microsoft account breaks the normal workgroup‑style home network sharing we used to use.