A Windows 8 wallpaper for testers – poking a little bit of fun.

Some screenshots of the most recent leak of Windows 8 are making the rounds, and as (yawn) interesting (yawn) as they might be, I’m more interested at this point in actual details about the company’s riskiest bet yet.

Honestly, whatever screenshots of the user interface we see during the time to a beta release aren’t going to resemble what we actually end up with. Chances are, in my opinion at least, that any really big UI changes will be locked out and available only in-house to employees.

Details, hard details at least, are more important as guidance to what we can expect from Windows 8, and along those lines GeekSmack has some interesting details, via Chinese Windows site Win7China, regarding improvements we can expect:

• A factory restore feature which will restore your machine to factory settings in under 2 minutes
• Windows 8 Milestone 3 can be installed in approximately 8 minutes, which is around 2.5 times faster than Windows 7 according to Win7China
• Windows Update has seen drastic speed improvement
• The time to wake up from sleep has been improved significantly
• The Windows App Store is real
• The progress of driver installation is now shown in the superbar
• Your Windows Live ID will be integrated in Windows, where you can log on with it.

The app store is real?

The restore feature and install time are nice to see.

So what do you think? Are you more interested in the UI changes that we won’t really see until the last minute or about the improvements coming in Windows 8?

[Cross-posted at Winextra]