MS Windows 8 Consumer Beta

[Tripitaka]

Perhaps they should have made a tablet and desktop version. Both tailored to the environment in question. I can see a lot of desktops sticking with 7.

[Digiman]

Market share will always be skewed from reality due to 80s and 90s people getting PCs despite it [Wintel) being the 5th worst home solution (after Acorn/Apple/Atari/Commodore solutions).

I believe it was last year when sales of Macs (to students) outstripped sales of Windows machines?

But hey now they have Kinect/360 profits due to Windows/DOS$'s now

[commodorejohn]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/03/andrew_does_windows8/

Nicely put. It's good to see someone publically calling this out as the forcible takeover of Windows by the self-styled "designers." Art students who think they know interface design are bad enough in web design, where they're absolute farkin' endemic, the last thing we need is for them to successfully worm themselves into the operating system itself.

But I can see switching to 800x600 with Windows 8 and it being very usable...

According to the Register article, though, it requires a minimum of 1366x768? Or does it simply require a device capable of that?

As far as 7 goes, personally I absolutely despise, loath, and abhor (not to mention just about any thesaurus word for "hate") the Vista interface.

I agree. The inability to switch back to even the standard XP behavior (let alone the nice, simple Classic look) is basically the only reason I haven't upgraded to 7 and don't plan to if I can avoid it.

Perhaps they should have made a tablet and desktop version. Both tailored to the environment in question. I can see a lot of desktops sticking with 7.

That would've made too much sense, I guess. Or rather, it wouldn't make the Metro team feel as validated as they will by forcing their design on everybody...

[SysAdmin]

Perhaps they should have made a tablet and desktop version. Both tailored to the environment in question. I can see a lot of desktops sticking with 7.

Why have a tablet or desktop when you can have a table?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlWCgWCoeOg

[persia]

Metro apps require 1024x768, they won't run on a lower resolution.  My tablet has 1024x600 so I do a neat little registry hack to fool the OS.

[Krischan76]

ITT: Guys who have grown old over using a windows-and-mouse centered GUI and thus having become too inflexible to adapt to something new, i.e. the inevitable future  - apps-n-tiles.

I like growing old, btw.

[commodorejohn]

Hardly "inevitable." The only reason this exists is because the tablet fad is in full swing. It's not as if this is some kind of logical evolution of the GUI that is the only possible future direction.

[LoadWB]

Been playing with it for a day or so, now.  On the TV unit (a Dell P4 2.66GHz with 2GB RAM, 512MB video with S-Video output, 160GB IDE hard drive,) it installed in right around 20 minutes.  It happily output at 800x600, which made everything easy to see, but not a single app would launch, giving me the error that my resolution was too low (including IE, which launched happily on the Desktop.)  I changed to 1024x768 to try a few things only to discover afterward that I cannot reduce back to 800x600.

Firefox 10 runs great, including with Flash.  I have been unable, however, to get Flash to work at all in IE.  Dell's OEM PowerDVD crashes when launched specifically, though its DVD decoder appears to work in Windows Media Center, which launches even when requesting the DVD be played with PowerDVD.  The requirement to use WMC may be due to PowerDVD crashing, though I am not convinced of that.  Windows Explorer sees my Sony Ericsson C905a connected to the network via wireless, and sees its music, video, and photo content just fine, though Windows Media Center refuses to play ACC-encoded M4A files.  Boot time is rather fast, bringing up the Start screen within 30 seconds from a cold boot.  As a whole the system is rather peppy and responsive, surprising given the age of the hardware.  Some videos which were jumpy on the same hardware under Windows 7 run very smoothly with no jitter.  I've attempted to add a few different network library sources (photos, music, videos) to see how the apps work with them, but I frankly lost interest in doing so as time has gone on.  I might dink around with those later.

I also installed the x64 edition under VirtualBox on a quad-core 2.66GHz machine with 8GB RAM hosted by Windows XP x64.  2GB allocated to RAM, 128MB given to the video with 3D acceleration turned on.  Again, performance is surprisingly satisfactory.  Boot up is fast, when it boots: I actually have not been able to get it started since the last shut-down as it attempts each time to perform a repair.  I suspect this might be a problem since I installed anti-virus in this guest, though it's worked fine numerous times since installation.

I suppose my fault in the media PC is that I don't have an HD TV.  I can see it working much better on such a setup.  Things would be readable, at least.  The interface looked very good at 800x600, and the requirement to run 1024x768 or better seems like an arbitrary requirement as the apps could easily be coded to render more friendly at the lower resolution.  But, I'm fighting against progress, here.  I'm surprised at the performance on such old hardware.  Windows 7 runs pretty well on the same machine, and I expected that the latest-and-greatest would put much more strain on it.  Microsoft definitely seems to have learned from the Vista fiasco.

While working with the troublesome x64 virtualized installation I've had the chance to work with some of the troubleshooting options on the installation media (similar to Windows 7.)  Very clean, concise, and easy to navigate.  While it offers simple options for some advanced fixes, I would like to see wording which is a little more description of what each option does, or at least a pop-up which does so.  You can restore from a previous image, refresh the installation, and so on.  The repair also offers advanced options for the advanced used, including a command prompt with the standard set of troubleshooting and configuration commands.  Alas, as I write this I have been unsuccessful in salvaging this installation.  I will play a little with disabling the anti-virus drivers to see if that helps as so far even restoring back to a previous point at which Windows booted properly has failed.

That's all I have for now.  In short, pleasantly surprised at performance, and while I do not particularly care for the interface for productivity purposes on a desktop, I can see where as a media or portable PC it has its place.

[psxphill]

I changed to 1024x768 to try a few things only to discover afterward that I cannot reduce back to 800x600.

That is annoying, I have the same on my netbook with 1024x600 LCD that can do fake 1024x768. I'm currently using quickres2 to allow me to switch back to 1024x600.
 
http://oette.wordpress.com/quickres2/
 
The missing start menu is a little weird at first, if you get too lost then you can add a toolbar to the "C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu" directory to the taskbar.
 
The "charms" menu is a bit annoying to pop up with a trackpad, but I've been using the keyboard shortcuts.
 
http://www.overclock.net/t/1224031/itw-windows-8-consumer-preview-keyboard-shortcuts
 
Until I found about those and the "charms", I was a bit lost as to find anything like computer management etc. Windows I is the new Ctrl Escape.
 
I'm not entirely convinced about Windows 8 yet, but I've only got it my netbook so far. I noticed one program that I launch effortlessly with years of muscle memory on Windows 7 & earlier is now quicker using the new app menu. So I think there is definately promise & we are way off release, this is not even an alpha release in terms of final functionality.

[goldfish]

Windows 8 is going to be another windows that nobody like just like Windows Vista. I wait for Windows 9 hopefully by then AMiga OS5 might be out. I hate the tile idea on a desktop os. If you wont that look why not just make a theme/App that you can install not change the whole dam OS.

[persia]

Microsoft's Metro folks are trying to engineer a paradigm change that hasn't happened in Windows since 95.  It's the same one that's driving OS X and Linux Unity.

[commodorejohn]

Yes, and they're wrong there, too.

[LoadWB]

I dunno... I can clearly see the lowest denominator lapping it all up.  My problem is that while the user interfaces are being dumbed-down to match a massive untapped user base, technically-savvy users are being shat on and told they have to dumb-down.  Suddenly, the technically inept look like uber-users and the rest are made out to be dinosaurs and luddite hold-outs, and made to feel like elitist snobs that don't want anyone else in their playpen.

Kinda like how the term "geek" has been co-opted by gamers.

[commodorejohn]

I'm not so certain on that. Doubtless Microsoft are hoping that the non-techies will eat this up, but there's two factors that I think they either haven't considered or have brushed aside.

One is that there are still a hell of a lot of desktops and laptops in use in home environments. I can't dispute that tablets are selling well these days, but I don't believe there's more than a few people who have only a tablet. Even "average users" are still users, and I don't think any initial infatuation Win8 does manage will last too long in the face of millions of people trying to use an interface designed for tablets and phones on desktops and laptops.

(And that's assuming that this doesn't turn into something like Vista, where word-of-mouth spreads so quickly that even ordinary non-techies start avoiding it.)

The other, of course, is that I still don't see how they can possibly hope to reconcile this toy shell with the needs of business customers. By what I've read they keep saying "oh, yeah, we've got that covered, don't worry about it," but they haven't revealed any kind of plan, and if the insistence that Metro is The Official Way Forward has any basis in reality, it suggests that they're just ignoring the issue and hoping it'll go away - good luck with that, MS.

We'll see how it all works out, but given their apparent blithe disregard for any issues of practicality, I don't see this going anything like how they apparently hope it will.

[persia]

@LoadWB  Yeah, when are they going to put the switches back on the front of computers so we can enter programs like real programmers.  Keyboards and mice are for wimps.

[commodorejohn]

Hey, we can all have a good laugh at the days of front-panel switches, but at least with the Altair there wasn't a third party controlling every software installation...