Windows 8 Consumer Preview

Anyone diddling with this? I guess it dropped yesterday when I was "out"

So this is what the new Xbox is going to look like then :)

downloaded the 64 bit version at work this morning. going to shove it one my emachine nettop at some point soonish- dual boot it with ubuntu. Maybe boxee will finally work on the machine ;)

Like how all your window 7 drivers will still work.

I had a peep but it wanted to updated my Windows 7, I wanted to duel boot them to avoid issues. Will wait for peoples thoughts to start appearing on the interweb.

First bunch of impressions. It'll work beautifully on portable devices.

The "no quit" thing is already bugging me, as is the hotspot start bar driven display. I can see me wanting to add a 'shutdown' and 'switch apps' button to the main start interface.

Reminds me a lot of Ubuntu :)

App store integration is slick, very apple-like. Installed Autodesk Sketchbook and it works beautifully with my Wacom (with pressure sensitivity enabled too) without me having to do anything extra. Definite double plus right there!

I've taken it off my home desktop machine, something I didn't even do with Vista, which I soldiered on to release with.

I hate to say, but I liked the old start menu. I've had one in various guises since 1995, and I've only used PCs since 93, so such a fundamental change really needed to be so well done to impress. It doesn't, sadly.

I'm sure with a tablet or a touch screen PC it must be awesome, but I don't want to have to spend my next few years at work teaching people keyboard shortcuts to get round the fact we can't afford touch LCDs for them.

User: I want to find Power off/restart?
Me: Of course, that'll be windows+c for the 'charms' bar, then settings, then power.
User: Really? charms? then another menu? what happened to click start, click shutdown?

I like metro on the xbox, and with kinect and voice control it makes sense, so design wise it's not awful, but on win 8 it comes at such a cost.

And don't get me started on the new task manager. *shudders*

I think this was the definite worry when you first see the interface, so not very encouraging to hear it confirmed. :-/

I take it I can dual boot with my Win7 install? If so I'll check it out when I get some time.

Which may be never these days.

Peej already knows my opinion of it but I'll repeat it here.

Metro will be great for tablets, having it be the focus of the operating system for desktop systems is a complete misstep and it'll blow up in Microsoft's face. Thank fuck support for Win7 officially won't end until 2020.

MS should rename it Window 8 (as Metro apps are full screen, you're only using one window) or just call it Windows Vista 2.

Agree with your opinions on it. We're already testing it for compatibility with the stuff we've only just got working with Windows 7 and it's already turning its nose up at a vast array of mission critical apps here (and with some of the companies we deal with, like SolidWorks etc, they're notoriously lazy about sorting out their shit for new OSes).

I thought my boss was a bit mental slowly moving everything over to Macs, but I think he might actually be quite sane!

In the meantime we'll be sticking with Windows 7. Hell yes.

I quite like it as a desktop OS.