The improvements in Windows 8 center on the ChkDsk utility, which inspects the hard disk and checks for a variety of errors and problems. Until now, running ChkDsk has often been inconvenient because end users have to stop using the machine while the utility runs, and the scan can take a long time to complete.

Microsoft also tweaked NTFS, the Windows OS file system. Until now, the NTFS "health model" conceived the machine's hard disk as a single unit that was either well or damaged, and which thus was taken completely offline and made unavailable to the end user while ChkDsk ran, sometimes for hours.

"Downtime was directly proportional to the number of files in the volume," reads Microsoft's late Wednesday authored by Kiran Bangalore , senior program manager of Windows Core Storage and File Systems.

In Windows 8, however, the NTFS scans for problems in the background while the system remains online, and an initial attempt to fix problems on-the-fly is done.

If the problem can't be fixed with the volume online, NTFS logs details of the issue and the fix that is needed so that the process to apply fixes while the volume is offline is much shorter. The improvements are also in Windows Server 8, which was recently rebaptized Windows Server 2012.