Future-Proofing: Windows 8

With the release of Windows 8, I thought I would step back from the day to day grind of botting and take a look at a long view of what we do.  Businesses and countries talk about five year plans; why can’t us botters have a five year plan?

For this part of the series, I thought I would look at Windows 8 and see how the latest release of the Microsoft operating system affects us.  For my study, I went to a Big Box store and looked at a couple of laptops which had Windows 8 installed.  So what are the takeaways?

As you may know, Windows 8 was designed for the tablet and phone markets.  Microsoft will say that Windows 8 was designed for touch screens.  The reality is that none of this is going to matter when it comes to botting.  Since the bot runs automated, there is no human interaction or touch needed.  So the main selling feature of Windows 8 is useless for us botters.

Windows 8 also has one interesting feature designed to save memory: if a task has been unattended for too long, Windows 8 will auto-close the application.  This feature is also enabled by default.  Even though this feature can be disabled, it is not something we would desire as botters.  Can you imagine our transaction logs if Windows 8 is shutting down Magic Online or the bot program?

So what is the bottom line?  While we may be forced to run the bot on Windows 8 in the future, we should avoid it as long as possible and when we do, remember to turn off the auto-termination of idle programs.