Limegarden.net Personal site of Wouter Lindenhof

Test run Windows 8

Today at the office I download and installed the developer preview of WIndows 8 in VirtualBox. The first thing I noticed was that the installation was fast. It was a similar installer as Windows 7 so no big suprises there. After installing and starting it for the first time I was suprised to see a really green screen. The windows color for me has always been blue (which is recuring theme in almost every Windows version since Windows 95). After completing the create account procedure and logging in you notice that green is the new blue, almost everything is green and as you have noticed I'm not too big a fan of green. But enough about green, lets go to the part that is important.

After logging in you are presented with the new Metro GUI which is confusing if you are not familiar with it (and even more if you have no touch device). So a few hints:

1. If you move the mouse completly to the left bottom you will see a start menu. Clicking on start will always bring you to the metro page.
2. If you move the mouse to the rightside of the screen you will get to see a thumbnail of the application to switch to
   1. Left mouse click will switch to it
   2. Scrolling will display other running applications
   3. Right mouse click will give you the snap options
3. Alt-F4 closes applications
4. The windows key will switch between the metro interface and the application
5. In metro applications the right mouse button often shows menus at the top and bottom, but you will never see quit (which confused me a lot)
6. Windows-R gives you the run dialog and yes mspaint, wordpad, notepad, explorer are all available.
7. Seen enough and want to shutdown? Move to the left bottom and click on devices and you will get a toolbar on the right. The center bottom button there is a power off button.

After playing with it for a few hours there are a few things I like and a lot I don't. Keep in mind that this is a developer preview so I'm sure a lot will change before the initial release.

The things I liked where:

• Snapping works well and frankly I love it. This is done way better than I have seen before.
• The twitter app looks good, works good and when snapped to 1/3 of the screen it is just a killer app

The things I don't like are:

• It's confusing, it took me a while to get around
• No good replacement for touch if you only have a mouse
• I miss the old start menu (which is a first since I enjoyed each new version of the start menu so far)
• Scrollbars are ugly
• Metro interface is confusing

As a closing note I would say that Windows 8 is not suitable for coorporate enviroments (no good function for metro interface) and is more aimed at the tablets. If I would have to pick a tablet I would wait until Windows 8 for tablets is ready.