Leaks of upcoming versions of Microsoft's software are nothing new, but it's a little surprising when the source is Microsoft itself. The Spring update to Windows 8.1, known as Update 1, was briefly available from Windows Update earlier this week.

The update wasn't a free-for-all. To get Windows Update to install it, you had to create a special (undocumented, secret) registry key to indicate that you were in a particular testing group; only then were the updates displayed and downloadable.

After news of this spread, Microsoft removed the hefty—700MB—update from its servers, but not before it had spread across all manner of file-sharing sites.

Just because it was distributed by Windows Update doesn't mean that this is, necessarily, the final build, but it does present a good opportunity to see what Microsoft is actually planning to deliver.

There are two aspects to Update 1. First, there's an invisible side: with this update, Windows 8.1 is supposed to run reasonably well on systems with 1GB RAM and 16GB of mass storage. For the most part, Windows 8.1 tablets have minimum specs of 2GB and 32GB, because of the size of the operating system. The shrunk requirements are part of Microsoft's efforts to get Windows onto ever-cheaper tablet hardware.

Then there's a visible side: a bunch of user interface changes as Microsoft continues to try to win over desktop users (especially, one presumes, in the corporate world) and encourage them to use Windows 8.x, amid continued claims that the operating system isn't designed for desktop users.

The changes are all focused around mouse and keyboard users, to make certain features more accessible to the mouse. On the Start screen itself, there's now a button for power options (shut down, reboot, sleep) and search.

The former button replicates the button found inside the settings charm, and it is a bit of an oddity. The problem with the charm is that it's hard to find for some people. What's a bit strange is that people are even looking for it in the first place.

While early PCs had dumb power switches that unceremoniously cut the power to the machine, the use of electronic power buttons—buttons that can tell the operating system to perform an orderly system shutdown before killing the power—have been a feature since the introduction of the ATX specification in late 1995. Any system on the market today can be shut down by pressing the same button that you used to turn it on. On the face of it, at least, this should make the on-screen button fairly unimportant.

This goes doubly for laptop users, many of whom simply sleep their systems by shutting the lid and don't bother shutting down anyway.

The search button, again replicating a charm, is also a little surprising. Hitting the button brings up the normal Windows 8.1 search pane, with a text box to type into. The same effect can be achieved simply by typing the search term you're interested in, making the button superfluous. This is a mechanism that has existed in Windows since Vista: bring up the Start menu/screen (whether by hitting a hardware Windows key on a keyboard or tablet bezel, a hot corner, or the taskbar button), and type.

Perhaps this is speculation too far, but this pair of changes almost suggests that many Windows users haven't changed the way they use the operating system—or their computers—since the mid 1990s. The Windows Vista-era mechanism of "Start and then type," now seven-years-old, apparently hasn't caught on and quite plausibly isn't even known by many Windows users.

And likewise, they're still shutting down from software, perhaps unaware that the power switch will do the job, and are conditioned to do so after years of operating systems complaining when they weren't shut down properly. So maybe it's not just Windows 8 that Microsoft did a poor job of explaining to Windows users—maybe it's every version of Windows since 95.

The Start screen also has new right-click behavior. Right clicking in a Metro app normally brings up the application bar, a kind of toolbar along that bottom of the screen. The Start screen was previously no exception to this. In Update 1, however, it now shows a regular Windows context menu. If you right-click a tile, you'll get options to change its size, stop its live updates, and so on—all the things that used to be on the app bar—and if you click anywhere else you can rename the tile groups.

It's hard to see how this is progress. Visually, it's confusing. These new context menus look like regular context menus... which means they don't match, for example, the Metro-style menus used everywhere else in the Metro environment, including the Start screen itself. Moreover, every other Metro app still shows an app bar when you right-click, making the Start screen weirdly inconsistent.

As hard to discover as Windows 8's hot corners are, in Update 1 Microsoft appears to be doubling down on making the screen edges special. Put the mouse at the top of the screen in a Metro app and a title bar will appear with the app name and three buttons, the app icon on the left, and minimize on close on the right. The app icon's menu lets you resize the app, minimize, or close it.

None of these are new controls; the same could be achieved by grabbing the app from the top (by clicking at the top edge of the screen) and then moving it around. They are, however, a little more straightforward and conventional for mouse users.

The bottom edge of the screen hasn't been left out either. Run the mouse into the bottom edge, whether on the Start screen or in a Metro app, and the taskbar will appear.

The title bar change seems to work well. If nothing else, it provides a clear indication that the Metro app can be manipulated with the mouse. The old system for using the mouse to minimize/close/resize apps worked, but, as with so much else in Windows 8, there was no obvious indication that the mouse could be used in this way. The new system adds that accessibility.

The taskbar change, however, is very strange indeed. When the hot corners were first introduced, one of the criticisms they received is that they were hard to use, especially in conjunction with virtualization and remote desktop software, because of the small targets they forced users to hit. The new taskbar feature has that same problem in spades; it seems to be all but impossible to access in any kind of windowed VM environment.

Worse: Metro apps, including the Start screen, remain full-screen (even when used in side-by-side mode, they still fill the screen from top to bottom). This means that the taskbar can end up covering parts of the user interface. It all seems rather awkward to use.

The taskbar has one more trick up its sleeve: by default, it now shows icons for running Metro programs. Clicking the icons will present the usual full-screen Metro experience—they're not windowed or anything—but the taskbar can now be used to switch between them. Metro apps can also be pinned to the taskbar, and the Store app gets pinned by default.

A few other defaults are notable, too: on systems without touch, the option, introduced in 8.1, to boot directly to the desktop (rather than the Start screen) is enabled by default. Internet Explorer also defaults to showing the address bar and tabs by default. It seems that file opening defaults are also changed, so that photos and media will open in the Photo Viewer or Media Player, rather than the Metro apps.

Finally, SkyDrive has been rebranded as OneDrive, and there's a new "Disk Space" tracker in the Metro settings app.

I'm not really sure who Update 1 is for, or what problems it is supposed to solve. The big complaint about the Start screen—that it's full screen, and not the hierarchical mess that the Start menu became—is entirely ignored. I think that this could be counterproductive: while Microsoft is making changes that are, notionally at least, concessions to mouse and keyboard users, the company still isn't providing what many of these users say they want. This has been perceived as arrogance before; I suspect that will continue.

I don't happen to think that ignoring the cries for a Start menu is actually a bad thing; I think the Start menu is past its prime. It doesn't scale well, making search all but essential, and the Start screen is a better place for pinning commonly-used applications than the Start menu ever was.

But everyone who thinks that it's unusable, or only usable with touch—which isn't the case—will continue to make that complaint.

And while I think some parts are incremental improvements—the new titlebars, for example, don't detract from the Metro design, but do make things a little more obvious for mouse users, and the changed defaults seem harmless enough—other parts, such as the Start screen context menus and the awkward attempt to bring the taskbar into the Metro world, aren't improvements at all. The Windows 8 interface already has consistency issues, and Update 1 is making these worse.

Fiddling with defaults isn't going to win over anyone bemoaning the loss of the Start menu. Nor is adding a context menu instead of an app bar. Update 1 compromises aspects of the Windows 8 design vision, and I'm just not sure why. These aren't compromises that are going to make people flock to the new platform, and they don't really make it any better.