Well, I managed to get the Windows 8 Developer Preview installed (in a VM, see previews post) and my initial feeling is…. {drumroll} well, I like it mostly. There may be one or two little things that is ‘different’ or weird or feels wrong but mostly it looks good and works good.
Unless you have some kind of touch-screen (which I don’t) I doubt I’ll use the ‘Metro’ menu screen much. It may make sense on a phone device or tablet where you can use touch but with the mouse and keyboard – I don’t think so. I’ll fall back to the more traditional start-menu with task bar as soon as I can (when I can figure out how…)
The Windows Task manager has been changed quite a bit. There are lots more information available and the way it has been laid out looks better – What took them so long! 🙂
Unfortunately virtually none of the example apps on the Metro menu work – probably since I don’t have a network connection set up for the VM. Ok, so I figured out that some apps simply fail to start because the screen resolution was too low. A warning message might have been useful.
The Ribbon control in Windows Explorer is actually nice (at least I seem to like it after getting use to ribbons using Office etc). Only pain is the lack of the ‘fine-zoom’ for the View-Layout like we use to have in Windows 7. That was sometime useful because I could resize image thumbnails to something between one of the preset sizes. That is not possible anymore.
Something I had some trouble with initially was how to get a plain command prompt window from Metro. Launching apps from the metro interface that’s not there already is at first not an obvious thing. Then I discovered that just by starting typing in the keyboard the search functionality kicks in and you should find what you’re looking for. I just wonder how good it would be for things that are not in any paths included by the search engine…
Another thing I could not initially figure out is how to get the machine to do a shutdown… Weird I know but apparently it is only available after you logged off or go to the ‘Settings’ screen and click on the ‘Power’ button. Perhaps in the tablet/phone world you might want to use different ways to put the machine to ‘bed’ but for a PC where you don’t want it running all the time this is a pain.
Well, let my ‘play’ some more…
So far so good Windows 8 team 🙂
Update: One thing I forgot to mention – which is more a VM/VirtualBox issue, is that hardware virtualization must be enabled in the BIOS otherwise things don’t work so lekker… switching off hw-virtualization is possible but then things would be real slooooowwww’
Another Update: If you like to disable the Metro interface and return to the more ‘classical’ Windows 7 look try this (at your own risk): rename C:\Windows\system32\shsxs.dll to something like shsxs.old (but don’t delete it in case you have to restore it)
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