Win 8 Consumer Preview – first impressions

I couldn’t help myself when it came to the consumer preview of Win 8. I had decided to leave it alone and keep using Win 7 and wait. I am writing this on Win 8 CP (64 Bit) and using IE 10. I partitioned the hard drive on my laptop creating a 100GB drive and installed Win 8 there, all default settings.  The installation was a breeze, the first windows install that I  did was from a pile of floppy disks about 16 as I recall. This time it all done from a USB stick.

Now I have a dual booting system Win7 and 8 both 64bit versions. Win7 is the default system but its was enough to access Win8. There are already several how to guides on the net. I found the on Latopmag’s blog really helpful.

The operating system is harder to assess after only a few hours of use, no crashes. Office 2007 has installed happily, Google Chrome is humming along nicely. Haven’t found where I can set Google as the default search yet in IE10. I didn’t like the absence of a start/shutdown key, but those trusty people in the interwebs already have a work around for that and now I have a shortcut on the desktop and the start page.

This is a nice place to mention the Start page part of the new Metro interface. I am not really sure that I like it or dislike for that matter. It does like many things seem like a good idea but it is different. IT is not unlike the home page in an iPad or the launch pad on OSX Lion, but not exactly the same. I have started deleting tiles that I wouldn’t use. Office 2007 installed a range of tiles including a VBA certificate!

The gestures aren’t really that good as my laptop has a relatively small track pad. I do like pointing to the corners for stuff, top left to switch between apps and top left to access “charms”. The charms allow access to settings, search and start page quickly and easily.

The opinion so far.  Vista was awful, Win7 was great, Win 8 not sure. So far I haven’t been overwhelmed, but not disappointed either, only time will tell.

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