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.<\/p>\n
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…)<\/p>\n
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! \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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…<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Well, let my ‘play’ some more…<\/p>\n
So far so good Windows 8 team \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n
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Update:<\/strong> 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’<\/p>\n Another Update<\/strong>: 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)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 …<\/p>\n