OOB experience

That was pretty good. All my devices worked pretty much with built-in drivers, I only installed newer video/audio drivers because I always do; they weren't needed to get functionality. Strangely, on Windows 7 I'd gotten a new version of IntelliType/Point with Metro UI, but Windows Update furnished me with the old version on 8.

The little movie showing to use the corners is nice, though since I always set up an Admin and a limited user, I got to see it twice within minutes, which is somewhat pointless.

For various interoperability reasons, it's very important that my user name is the same on all my machines, including several Linux clusters at work. When creating an account with a Microsoft Account, you get a user name that's a mangled version of the e-mail address, which is not good. This was solved by creating a local account with the desired name, and then converting it to a Microsoft Account. I'm kind of used to having to jump through hoops here, though, since even in Win7 I had to apply some tricks to get an account with a different display name than user name.

It's nice that all my settings (that I'd previously configured with the CP in a VM) were immediately there when I connected my Microsoft Account.

My network settings were extremely insecure by default (private network with home group even though I'm directly connected to the Internet with a public IP address). The way to change this to a more secure setting was removed from the network center and is extremely difficult to find now.

Performance

This is the big improvement. Windows startup is crazy fast, thanks to the partial hibernation thing. Windows 7 was never this fast, even on a clean install. It's literally about 15 seconds from the end of the BIOS POST to a functioning start screen. After boot, the system feels very responsive, all the animations are incredibly smooth. On my laptop, the animations are still equally smooth when running in "power saver" mode using the Intel graphics adapter. App startup is good, the whole OS just feels very snappy (not that 7 was slow on this PC, by no means, but the difference is still noticeable).

Compatibility

No complaints yet. Big things like Office and Visual Studio are fine, but even esoteric things like running an SSH server with Cygwin are all working fine. Mass Effect 3 runs perfectly too, and I can record gameplay with Fraps.

Reliability

A bit of a weak point, admittedly. My reliability graph looks terrible after one week, but it's mostly due to the fact that my system died, and some problem with video codec configuration (caused by a codec pack, not Win8) caused endless DllHost crashes.

Internet Explorer crashes frequently, but this appears to be a driver problem (and may or may not be Flash related as well, not sure yet). It always recovers the tabs, so that's working as intended.

Some metro apps are also a bit flaky, including the store itself.

Metro and the start screen

The best I can say about this is that it doesn't get in the way as much as I feared. The start screen itself is quite nice, though I still don't know why it has to be full screen. The live tiles are nice, though since I use Outlook I don't get the benefit of the Mail and Calendar tiles. Hopefully Outlook 2013 will get some form of tile to fix this.

I spend most of my time on the desktop, but those times when I need the start screen the transition isn't as jarring as it was in earlier builds because of how smooth the whole thing is now. I still hate that it's not self-organizing (no MRU list, tons of crap after every install that I need to remove), and I'm slowly getting used to using a pinned Explorer instance to replace the right-hand side of the old start menu.

There's still too much of a zigzag motion needed to access some things with the mouse.

The rationale for what settings are in the metro Settings app and what's in the old Control Panel completely eludes me. This could've been done better.

The right-click menu is neat, only complaint is there's no easy way to open an elevated instance of computer management if you're running as a limited user.

The only Metro apps I've really used are RDP and the weather app. I really like the RDP app, I run RDP full screen usually anyway to that works for me. Weather at least looks nice and does what it needs to. It's also nice that there's a PDF reader built-in, although I switched to Adobe Reader because I don't see any reason to read PDFs full screen. The photos app is nice and I like that it can access Facebook and SkyDrive, but I still prefer Photo Gallery. I disabled the Messaging app in favour of Messenger because again, I don't see a reason to have a full screen chat window.

It's nice that the People app shows recent status updates from Facebook on the Live Tile, but since it scrolls through them and doesn't give you notifications (or even a number of new notifications on the tile like the Facebook app for iPhone does), it's useless for quickly checking if there's something new.

OneNote MX looks very cool, would definitely use it on a tablet, but there's no use-case on a desktop since I also have the full desktop OneNote which again doesn't need to be full screen.

Kindle app looks neat too, but I have a Kindle so its uses are limited.

Very few other useful apps in the store for my region right now. We'll have to see how this develops.

The desktop

Lack of start button is weird. I thought the new window chrome was seriously ugly when I first saw it, but it doesn't bother me much during actual use. Still prefer glass though.

Hot-corners occasionally get in the way when trying to hit something else that's near a corner. I do appreciate that hot-corners "capture" the mouse in a multi-monitor situation, and work on every monitor.

I appreciate that the taskbar can now be shown on all monitors, though I personally don't use this. But it's nice that it's there.

Love the new task manager and most of the changes to Explorer (particularly the file copy UI). I don't like that the details pane was changed to vertical, though, I preferred the horizontal one from Vista/7.

Miscellaneous

Built-in ISO mounting! Thank you, long overdue.

Language settings are cleaned up, and actually work right now (this was a horrible broken mess in the CP). I still need to override the default because just letting it use the order of the list is unreliable. Regional settings specified during setup don't seem to take if your language settings are different (it reverts back to determining it by system language).

New method of switching language with Winkey-space is nice, but it's hard to break the old shift-alt habit, which still works fortunately.

The Japanese IME is awesome. It works like a phone IME now, with autocompletion of commonly used phrases and words. 大好き！

Integrated spell check is very nice, though sometimes it's difficult to convince it of what language you're typing in. Also, why doesn't WordPad have the ability to use this spell check?

Conclusion

Overall the various little things do add up to quite a nice OS. It's very fast, extremely smooth, and most initial hick-ups are more from unfamiliarity than anything else.

I'm still not a huge fan of the start screen, but it's not as bad as I thought it'd be. Once you get past the initial period of having to organize and clean up after installers, it's okay. Maybe if we get some useful metro apps and live tiles in due time, I could learn to like it. It does at least look neat.

Would I recommend it to others? No. Unless the metro apps story really takes off, there's not enough here to justify upgrading for a user that's satisfied with Windows 7. Not even if it's just $40. If a user wants to upgrade because he/she is interested and doesn't mind getting used to some of the new stuff, then I will give them my blessing, as I have no reason to give a negative recommendation either. But if the question is "I'm happy with Windows 7, do I really need 8?" then the answer is quite simply no.

Reasons to upgrade for me would include: personal interest or a user who wants to be on the bleeding edge (that'd be me), interest in developing metro apps (would be me if it weren't for lack of time), or if you also have a Windows 8 tablet or (presumably) Windows Phone 8 getting the similar UIs on all of them could be a compelling reason to upgrade.

Beyond that, I guess it's up to us to get that killer Metro App out there so people really have a reason to upgrade.

Internet Explorer crashes frequently, but this appears to be a driver problem (and may or may not be Flash related as well, not sure yet). It always recovers the tabs, so that's working as intended.

It crashes for me every time I try to use a particular flash video player in both IE and Chrome (but not in FF). The faulting module is Flash32_xx_x_x.ocx.

3 minutes ago, MasterPie wrote

*snip*

It crashes for me every time I try to use a particular flash video player in both IE and Chrome (but not in FF). The faulting module is Flash32_xx_x_x.ocx.

For me the faulting module is ati3dxx32.dll, a component of ATI's support for DirectX, so it's definitely a driver issue. It seems to happen mostly on sites with Flash, but I'm not 100% sure if Flash is the only trigger.

20 minutes ago, Sven Groot wrote

*snip*

For me the faulting module is ati3dxx32.dll, a component of ATI's support for DirectX, so it's definitely a driver issue. It seems to happen mostly on sites with Flash, but I'm not 100% sure if Flash is the only trigger.

I did see ntixxx.dll being the faulting module sometimes, but my event viewer is mostly filled with Flash.

That said, there are a lot of discoverability issues, even for someone who's read quite a lot about Win8. For example, I had completely forgotten that per app settings were in the settings pane of the charms bar...I had thought the options for configuring each metro app were part of the app's options bar (like in Windows Phone). Then there's the shutting down functionality...I didn't even know you could do it while you were logged in until I saw Herbie complaining in that other thread. And then there's not really being able to use the share charm from within desktop (what if I want to send the file I am looking at to the person I'm talking to in Messaging?). But that last one isn't really discoverability - it's just strange.

I wonder if future updates will cover more usability and UI stuff than in the past, sort of like how WP Mango improved parts of the UI. I still think that the start screen needs to pop out the charms bar and task switcher so the user knows those exist.

It's also nice that there's a PDF reader built-in, although I switched to Adobe Reader because I don't see any reason to read PDFs full screen. The photos app is nice and I like that it can access Facebook and SkyDrive, but I still prefer Photo Gallery. I disabled the Messaging app in favour of Messenger because again, I don't see a reason to have a full screen chat window.

Don't forget that you can drag things to the side of the screen (as long as you are using a widescreen monitor).  This helps when you don't want to run an app like Music in full screen but still want to see the song list.  It should be very handy for messenger too.

5 minutes ago, JeremyJ wrote

*snip*

Don't forget that you can drag things to the side of the screen (as long as you are using a widescreen monitor).  This helps when you don't want to run an app like Music in full screen but still want to see the song list.  It should be very handy for messenger too.

Yeah, but that reduces the size of the desktop, which is not really ideal either.

1 hour ago, Sven Groot wrote

*snip*

Metro and the start screen

The best I can say about this is that it doesn't get in the way as much as I feared. The start screen itself is quite nice, though I still don't know why it has to be full screen.

*snip*

At first you hate it, but you will soon be institutionalized.

@Sven Groot:

Great assessment Sven. I'd have to agree with most of what you wrote.

On my tablet W8 really shines. The gestures, full screen everything, even the start menu makes sense. I still find the Microsoft provided apps frustrating at times (like the People app -- gives you bits of FB and twitter but no way to post anything.)

While I like the touch improvements Office 2012 brings it's not quite enough when working with your fingers with device in hand. I find myself going back to the metro mail & calendar apps when the tablet's in my hands (and missing the richness of Outlook badly all the while.)

That said, W8 held in your hands is an entirely different animal than "big phone OS" on a desktop PC. I stress "desktop PC' as opposed "PC with touch" as I'm still not sold that a desktop PC equipped with touch will make people more inclined to use touch as opposed to mouse & keyboard. When my tablet is docked I rarely use the touch screen as it's easier (abet more frustrating at times with the "no compromise" support for mouse & keyboard) to use the mouse & keyboard since moving the mouse a an inch or two is much easier that lifting my arm to the screen. It reminds me of the big push to use voice to drive the PC that never really took off -- too much effort and not enough payback.

So I come to the same conclusion; W8 is ok but not worth recommending to W7 desktop PC users to upgrade. Now if you're in the market for a tablet or laptop (with touch, preferably a convertible) then W8 is certainly a an option worth looking into.

10 hours ago, Sven Groot wrote

I'm still not a huge fan of the start screen, but it's not as bad as I thought it'd be.

Yes, that was pretty much our assessment.

For a new tablet - it absolutely makes sense. 

For an existing desktop-based installation... not so much.

Until there is some compelling killer app we can't do without, we are simply not going to put ourselves through the pain, having just bedded down Win7 as a reliable standard environment.

Furthermore, we intend to downgrade any new desktop/laptop hardware with Win8 pre-loaded, but will mix that with Win8 based hand-held devices.

9 hours ago, JohnAskew wrote

Anyone tried to 'disable graphics hardware acceleration' to keep IE from crashing?

I haven't had any issues with IE. It's Chrome that keeps crashing. I suspect that it's a Flash plugin issue.

The biggest WTF has to be the term Metro. It's nearly impossible to talk about Windows 8 without using that term several times.

 -Josh

5 minutes ago, JoshRoss wrote

I think $40 is a bargain price for better performance and security. Although, I haven't used a metro app that isn't a pile of steaming crap, that's ok. It might take some time for some metro style killer apps to be released.

*snip*

I've used a handful of apps, mostly games, and they're pretty fun. I guess I'm easily amused.

My biggest complaint is that for apps like Wikipedia, they went out of their way to make it conform to Metro/Modern UI standards at the cost of convenience. The developers wanted Wikipedia to be a search provider for Windows 8, but searching with the search charm is the ONLY way to search in the Wikipedia. They couldn't be bothered with putting a textbox and search button anywhere in the interface.

Having the search charm work with the app is great, but who says that you can't include an additional search method as well?

8 minutes ago, cbae wrote

I think Windows 8 could be improved considerably for mouse users if  they made the mousewheel scroll inertially. I have a mouse that physically spins inertially, which helps, but it would be nice if a quick rotation of the mousewheel behaved analogously to kinetic scrolling with a flick gesture with your finger. The issue then would be how to make the scrolling stop. I think a left mouse click, which is analagous to a simple finger touch to stop kinetic scrolling, would make sense as the action to stop an inertial scroll with a mousewheel.

There has to be some software patent holder preventing them from doing this. When using the mouse, the metro environment feels like anything but fluid. And then there is the issue of orientation. Mouse wheels are orientated vertically, while everything in metro is horizontal.

After that, you have the dead space. The white space areas of your app. You should be able to drag that space around with the mouse as you can with touch. I don't know the design reasons behind this, but I would think it has to do more with legal than engineering issues.

-Josh

1 minute ago, cbae wrote

*snip*

I've used a handful of apps, mostly games, and they're pretty fun. I guess I'm easily amused.

The solitary collection isn't terrible, it's just the environment. In Windows 7, I might fire-up a game of solitary while I am waiting for a job to finish. I'll keep both windows visible, because I don't want to keep flipping from screen-to-screen seeing if I can continue my task.

-Josh

27 seconds ago, JoshRoss wrote

@cbae: There has to be some software patent holder preventing them from doing this. When using the mouse, the metro environment feels like anything but fluid. And then there is the issue of orientation. Mouse wheels are orientated vertically, while everything in metro is horizontal.

*snip*

Yup, it took a little while to get it ingrained in my head that the horizontally scrolling live tile screen can be scrolled with a vertically spinning mousewheel. I think that in any Metro/Modern UI app, the developer should allowed to specify that certain controls allow kinetic scrolling using the mouse like in Bing or Google maps. The live tile screen should be one such place where it makes sense since scrolling accuracy isn't all that important on this screen.

11 hours ago, cbae wrote

*snip*

I've used a handful of apps, mostly games, and they're pretty fun. I guess I'm easily amused.

My biggest complaint is that for apps like Wikipedia, they went out of their way to make it conform to Metro/Modern UI standards at the cost of convenience. The developers wanted Wikipedia to be a search provider for Windows 8, but searching with the search charm is the ONLY way to search in the Wikipedia. They couldn't be bothered with putting a textbox and search button anywhere in the interface.

Having the search charm work with the app is great, but who says that you can't include an additional search method as well?

That's funny coming from you. Haven't you heard it's all about the content? Or IOW "No Chrome Even If it Hurts". There are plenty of places in W8's UI where a little more chrome would help but noooo not in Sinofsky's W8 where "No Compromise" rules the day.

Besides how hard is it to invoke the charms bar really?  

12 hours ago, cbae wrote

*snip*

Having the search charm work with the app is great, but who says that you can't include an additional search method as well?

I'm pretty sure the design guidelines actually call that out specifically as something you shouldn't do. Having a consistent way to handle search in all apps is one of those things that will almost certainly pay off in the long run, even if it takes a little getting used to in the beginning.

My experience so far has been hampered somewhat by video driver crashes making startup a bit of a hit and miss scenario, which all too often ends with Windows doing a self recovery. In fairness, using any ATi driver update other than the one which originally shipped with the laptop turned Windows 7 into a blue screen-fest too, so hopefully once I've downloaded that one I can get it installed and things running a bit more stably.

4 minutes ago, AndyC wrote

*snip*

I'm pretty sure the design guidelines actually call that out specifically as something you shouldn't do. Having a consistent way to handle search in all apps is one of those things that will almost certainly pay off in the long run, even if it takes a little getting used to in the beginning.

So, why does the Bing app have a search bar in the app rather than relying on the charms bar? You'd think that if this was really a guideline that at least the built-in apps should follow it.

3 minutes ago, Sven Groot wrote

So, why does the Bing app have a search bar in the app rather than relying on the charms bar? You'd think that if this was really a guideline that at least the built-in apps should follow it.

Probably because the Bing app was written by the Microsoft team responsible for Bing, rather than the Microsoft team responsible for coming up with the guidelines.

It's hard to be consistent with guidelines that are in flux for a feature that's being developed by another team sitting in a different part of the city when you have your own timelines to complete the work.

For the record - this isn't an excuse, just a reason.

The guideline page I was thinking of is http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh465233.aspx under the "Appropriate use of search" section.

Of course, not that I can check how well the Wikipedia app works, because naturally it isn't available in my region.

This is ridiculously inconsistent.

21 hours ago, JoshRoss wrote

 Mouse wheels are orientated vertically, while everything in metro is horizontal.

And this is slowly making me crazy.

I think the main reason the Windows team generally discourages apps from including search boxes though is because they're afraid users won't learn to use the Search charm otherwise - i.e. if some apps start including search boxes, that will become the standard method of searching and all apps will "have to" include them, meaning a little more clutter for everyone. OTOH if all apps "hold the line" and rely on the Search charm instead, everyone will get accustomed to the Search charm method and every app's canvas / app bar gets a little more space and a little less clutter, plus a little more consistency. That's the idea anyway. I personally think it would've been awesome if the Bing app shipped showing just the background with no visible UI at all, and relied on type-to-search, but guess it wasn't to be

For me the horizontal/vertical mousewheel thing felt weird for about fifteen seconds and now I'm not consciously aware of it at all, I just scroll. shrug

8 hours ago, contextfree` wrote

I think the main reason the Windows team generally discourages apps from including search boxes though is because they're afraid users won't learn to use the Search charm otherwise - i.e. if some apps start including search boxes, that will become the standard method of searching and all apps will "have to" include them, meaning a little more clutter for everyone. OTOH if all apps "hold the line" and rely on the Search charm instead, everyone will get accustomed to the Search charm method and every app's canvas / app bar gets a little more space and a little less clutter, plus a little more consistency. That's the idea anyway.  

Perhaps they're trying to avoid this:

My thoughts so far on RTM:

Signing in with a Microsoft ID is nice and simple and it was neat to see some of the personalization I'd done in previous build auto-magically get carried across. What's not so hot about that is the amount of time I still seem to spend having to click on Microsoft Account login things on websites like C9, MSDN blogs as well as when running stuff like Microsoft Flight or Zune. Isn't the entire point of a single sign-on system like this so that I don't have to keep doing this? It's a tad annoying given that the Windows Live-ID sign in assistant on Windows 7 seemed to do a better job of making this more seamless than it does here.

A lot of the in-box apps are still lacking a bit of polish, hopefully these will be subject to continuous improvement and maybe even get an update or two prior to the "real" release of Windows 8.

• The people hub lacks some obvious functionality. I don't, for example, seem to have any way of assigning pictures to contacts that don't have them (and quite why some of them don't, when those same contacts do on WP7 is another issue).
• The music app seems to have decided that albums and bands whose name starts with 'The' belong alphabetically under 'T', something I don't think I've seen a music app do since the early 2000s. Given that the whole 'metro' thing originated with Zune, it's seems odd that this is one of the weaker apps at the moment.
• The presence of Album art in music also seems a bit hit and miss, which is odd given that many of the apps missing it came from the Zune store and the artwork is all present and correct there. Worse still there are a few albums which point blank fail to play at all there, though are fine in the desktop app.
• No RSS reader and the crippling of the Windows RSS platform that began in IE9 with the hiding of the orange feed icon gets worse with IE apparently defaulting to not updating your feeds and recommending you don't turn it on. I'm hoping a solution pops up in the store soon (or I guess I know what my first Metro-style app will be!), especially given how many RSS readers there seemed to be used as samples in pre-release builds. The few I've found so far are decidedly lacking.

In fact one of the most striking things is that the Zune app run full screen is a better example of what the Music app should be like than the app we actually get. I guess the temptation is to push first-party services first and foremost, which I can sort-of understand, but it doesn't help sell the 'concept' as it should. My content should be #1, not a bunch of new-fangled pop artists whose album is flavour of the week (I already paid for the Zune Pass dammit, if I want to buy more music I'll do it without having it shoved in my face).

The Bing app is another offender here. I really don't see the point in an app which doesn't really do anything other than launch IE. Just make searching in IE work smoothly and ditch the standalone app, it's just not needed. Unpinning/uninstalling it isn't hard, of course, but again it distracts from what really shines and has that distinct odour of crapware about it. Apple wouldn't ship that.

Speedwise, it's ludicrously fast. I'm partially assigning some responsibility for that to the fact I replaced the old disk with an SSD, but I'm pretty sure that's not entirely responsible for the improvements across the board. Will certainly be interesting to see how much it's impacted once I've got some Hyper-V VMs set up to run alongside the main install.

IE10 is nice, even in "Metro mode", which I wasn't expecting (I'm even using it now!). However the lack of Flash support here just seems counter-productive. I know the aim is to push a HTML5 only web, but I still don't see that happening any time soon and having to switch to the desktop every now and then for the sake of a webpage feels clunky (doubly so due to the bizarre decision to seemingly not share saved credentials and so on between views).

And one last thing, if you do find yourself in the most unfortunate position of trying to diagnose a machine that repeatedly likes to crash at startup, the insistence that it's going to try an 'automatic repair' that will fail every time before you can get into a state where you can try something like a low-res/safe mode boot is deeply aggravating and rather wasteful of time. I'm sure it's great for a one-off bad driver issue that'll help out most folk, but there *really* needs to be an "I know what I'm doing, stop trying to be clever and just give me the advanced options" keypress here.

This is why I return to C9. Thanks again!!

1 day ago, AndyC wrote

Signing in with a Microsoft ID is nice and simple and it was neat to see some of the personalization I'd done in previous build auto-magically get carried across. What's not so hot about that is the amount of time I still seem to spend having to click on Microsoft Account login things on websites like C9, MSDN blogs as well as when running stuff like Microsoft Flight or Zune. Isn't the entire point of a single sign-on system like this so that I don't have to keep doing this? It's a tad annoying given that the Windows Live-ID sign in assistant on Windows 7 seemed to do a better job of making this more seamless than it does here.

This gets me too. MSDN forums, C9, Connect.. everywhere I have to click "sign in" to get signed in. I don't have to provide credentials, but why can't Windows/IE just sign me in automatically?

LastPass would possibly be a solution on the desktop (though somewhat of a sledgehammer to crack a nut type solution) but it doesn't help when using Metro mode IE.

On an only mildly related note, has anyone come up with a Metro-free way of saying Metro-style applications yet? Modern-style really doesn't work and neither does Windows 8-style, as evidenced by the countless MSDN posts and pages that still refer to it as Metro.

59 seconds ago, AndyC wrote

On an only mildly related note, has anyone come up with a Metro-free way of saying Metro-style applications yet? Modern-style really doesn't work and neither does Windows 8-style, as evidenced by the countless MSDN posts and pages that still refer to it as Metro.

I'm thinking Mmmmmm-apps.

I think "immersive apps" was one of the early names in development, and it's still the one that makes the most sense IMO ("Metro style" was IMO never a good name and always confusing because what if it's a desktop app that uses the Metro design style like MetroTwit or Office 2013, or even an app on another platform like Windows Phone or Xbox). If I got to pick, I'd pick that, but in practice I still usually use "Metro style" because people (the sort of people who hang out on tech forums anyway) are more likely to actually know what it means.

In the long run, I think the idea is they are simply called "Windows apps": http://www.neowin.net/news/from-the-forums-microsoft-whats-metro-called-then

1 hour ago, contextfree` wrote

In the long run, I think the idea is they are simply called "Windows apps": http://www.neowin.net/news/from-the-forums-microsoft-whats-metro-called-then

What then does one call an app that runs on Windows but is not metro?

41 minutes ago, cbae wrote

Just call it what it really is: Zune UI or Zune-style

Careful...they might just pull a Surface and do that.

1 hour ago, GoddersUK wrote

*snip*

What then does one call an app that runs on Windows but is not metro?

a Desktop Application.

Windows -> ("Metro style") App

Windows -> desktop -> app

Think of it as

C:\Windows\app1, C:\Windows\app2

vs.

C:\Windows\desktop\app1, C:\Windows\desktop\app2 ...

The point is that because "Metro" is conceptually the top level, it doesn't need to have ANY name (other than "Windows") - it's just the "root directory".

4 hours ago, blowdart wrote

*snip*

I'm thinking Mmmmmm-apps.

Not to be confused with Google Mmmmmmm-apps

http://www.google.com/mobile/maps/

The good:

• Straightforward installation, kudos on the new license agreement! It's actually readable!
• Fast boot, fast UI, no glitches at all. When placing a metro app on the side, it's a smooth transition, there is no flickering of the desktop and my desktop apps aren't going crazy.
• Good compatibility. Although I had to reinstall VMWare in order to get it running, and the graphics driver crashed on me before I downloaded the official one from nVidia, and Windows Live apps were screwed up, it was mostly smooth sailing. If this were a clean installation, everything would be tip-top.
• The new sounds - pleasant, simple, non intrusive. 
• The new "PC settings" option. Although it's waaay waaaay underfeatured, it's a good start. If your mom & pop want to set up their PC, they won't get scared as they once used to when they opened up Control Panel.
• "Simplicity" - wanna launch a browser? There's the icon, click the damn thing. Wanna listen to music? Sure - there's the icon (ehm... tile) for that. How about I wanna go back? Just press the windows button. It's that simple. You can put Windows 8 on your computer illiterate friends' and parents' desktops and have a piece of mind, they won't screw anything up, they won't call you to ask how to get out of "this and that". There are no bundles of icons and no toolbars to crowd the screen.
• "Refresh PC", "Recycle PC". You can reinstall pretty much everything and fix almost any problem with this... OVER THE PHONE! "Click this" and you're done! No DVDs, no reinstalls... it just works.

The bad:

• Metro. OH GOD WHY!? I get it though... Microsoft wants to create a nice friendly ecosystem that you can enjoy on your tablet, as well as on your PC. If you create an app for RT, it should run on x86/x64, and I respect that. But why the hell did you have to demote the desktop to a single tile? It's that tile where I spend 98% of my day on! And even worse, it's completely cut off from the metro UI. While metro can intrude and present notifications on the desktop (which I find to be great), there is no vice versa. The desktop shuts up when it's not being used, and that's a bad thing.
• The metro UI. OH GOD KILL ME NOW ARGHHAHAH!!! - To elaborate... I'm using a widescreen monitor in a comfortable chair. My hands are in front of me, and I'm using a keyboard/mouse combo. I'm not on a tablet. Read my lips Microsoft - I DO NOT WANT HUGE INTERFACES on a huge widescreen monitor! Why the hell do I have to have every single app show up in full screen? Even if it's just a crappy mail client, I want to see what's going on in the background. I don't want a 10ft user interface on my desktop.
• The metro UI/desktop inconsistencies. Right click in a metro app - a huge menu pops up... wanna click quickly on an item in it? NOPE! You have to drag your mouse over to the huge label that just popped up and click the damn thing, as if I'm using a finger. Here's a hint, Microsoft: if I'm using a mouse, I don't need that big of a menu. Remember Windows 7 and it's touch interface? When things on the taskbar got "touched", a large finger-friendly menu popped up... when it was the mouse doing that, the menu was shorter and smaller - mouse friendly, if you will. Alright... now how about you right click the recently used apps on the left sidebar? A plain windows UI menu pops up! Click on the date/time in the system tray... an old fashioned Windows Vista/7 like box pops up... click on the language bar - and here you have a HUGE language menu selection bar! Click on the sound icon next to it, and here's classic windows next to it. Click the network icon next to it, and here's a metro sidebar popping up! Click the action center icon on the left, and it's back to plain old Windows UI again. MAKE UP YOUR MIND! And what's up with that right click? Sometimes you get plain popup menu, sometimes you get a popup bottom-bar with some options, sometimes it pops up on top, and there's very little to do here! Say I want to delete an e-mail in the mail app... you right click it and... wait, what? Where's the delete button? Oh, it's UP THERE, in the top-right corner! Ok... Now, I want to drag the mail into a separate folder... I can't? Wait, what? I want to create a new folder... I can't? OH COME ON!
• You'll be using the desktop. A lot. If you're sitting in front of a PC, you're most likely a multitasker. A few computer illiterate folks will appreciate the simplicity of the Metro Start menu, as I have stated above, but after a while, you'll find it very difficult to read e-mail and then quickly switch to another song in a music app while in Metro. On a tablet, this would be normal, but this is the desktop - we won't go back to the stone age. I want to get s**t done.
• Network settings. Why oh why can't I do anything in PC settings with the network without switching to the old interface in the control panel!? Are you mad?
• The control panel. It's still there, and you'll have to use it if you want to set stuff up.
• The start menu. Although it's fast, I see no reason for it to take the whole screen, and for it to be so drastically lacking in customization. I can't even drag a shortcut to it.
• Everything else. It's plain ol' Windows 7. There. Windows 8 is an updated, polished Windows 7 with the Metro UI pretending it's boss, when in fact it's just NOT. The metro UI on the PC should have been broken down and separated into layers for non full-screen, mouse-friendly use, but not this. Instead of trying to fuse the desktop with tablets, Microsoft just threw up it's tablet UI on the desktop and created a desktop "tile". BAD.

Imagine if Google released an x86 android "desktop" where you could basically use the android touch screen apps (even those have buttons), and marketed it as a Windows competitor? Well, we'd laugh it off and tell the big G to go screw himself. No multitasking, no shuffling with activities, big lacks in customization... But what different is that from this? An oversized mobile platform on a 22" screen with an app store acting as the commander in chief of my PC? Please, no. Go away.

Back to the desktop, the best "app" on this system. I won't be using many metro apps on my PC, that's for sure.

"And even worse, it's completely cut off from the metro UI. While metro can intrude and present notifications on the desktop (which I find to be great), there is no vice versa."

This technically isn't true (though it might be true in practice, depending on what desktop apps you use) - desktop apps do have access to the APIs for the new notifications which can appear on top of Metro style apps and the start screen. However, support has to be added by the developer (so far the only app I'm aware of that supports them is Outlook).

" you'll find it very difficult to read e-mail and then quickly switch to another song in a music app while in Metro."

While I don't disagree with your general point, this particular scenario is pretty easy - you can just hit a volume control key or button (on a keyboard, tablet, or whatever) and an overlay will appear displaying the now-playing background audio, next, previous and pause/play controls.

"The start menu. Although it's fast, I see no reason for it to take the whole screen, and for it to be so drastically lacking in customization. I can't even drag a shortcut to it."

Technically you can put any desktop shortcut on the start screen (though not by dragging). You can right-click or use the ribbon for desktop apps/executables and folders, and though it's not exposed in the UI, it's actually possible to pin individual documents as well by copying shortcuts to them into the Start Menu folder (the same one in Windows 7) - you can get there via "Open file location" on the right-click menu for a pinned desktop app. This is basically a hack and for some reason it takes a few minutes for the document tile to show up.

Not knowing what the heck was going on, I reboot, and lo and behold, I've got 77GB free.

Checking the event log, it says the indexing service deleted the old search index because it was corrupt. So something the search indexer was doing managed to corrupt the index and grow it to 77GB in size. WTF?

I've never seen anything like this before, not with the old desktop search on XP, nor on Vista or Win7. Anyone ever experience something like this?

@Sven Groot: I think you must be holding it wrong. You either have bad drivers or it's something that Microsoft will fix before release (you know RTM v2). In either case no worries.

@Sven Groot: I think you must be holding it wrong. You either have bad drivers or it's something that Microsoft will fix before release (you know RTM v2). In either case no worries.

This is why I dislike Agile/Scrum because you end up with software like Windows 8. The Product and Program managers have met their releases/deadlines, when the testers found bugs, it was put in the "will be fixed via Windows update queue".

I have been using it for little while as well, and boy is it buggy. This may have been mentioned before, but on two monitors, I keep missing the charms bar and going to my second screen. Maybe I need to move my main desktop to the right, but obviously the charms bar was very well thought out for people with two monitors and not a tablet.

35 seconds ago, vesuvius wrote

This may have been mentioned before, but on two monitors, I keep missing the charms bar and going to my second screen. Maybe I need to move my main desktop to the right, but obviously the charms bar was very well thought out for people with two monitors and not a tablet.

That's strange, because the hot corners "capture" the mouse for me, as long as you move there along an edge that's not adjacent to another monitor (in my case the top or bottom). Also, the corners work on any monitor, so you could always just get the charms bar on the right-most monitor if you're having trouble with the other one.

Won't bother commenting on "Metro" itself as it's been done to death, but if MS really want to sell it to the users, the OOB apps supplied with Win8 should've been much, much better.

I'm not expecting bundled music or video apps to be anywhere near as good as, say, Winamp or MPC, but the ones supplied are truly dire. They're all gloss and no functionality. My music collection is a dozen unknown albums by unknown artists with several hundred songs in each. Bug with the tag reading methinks.

The photo app won't read photos from the network (loads of folders, no content).

Don't get me started on lack of codec & container support (but it was only to be expected, so not exactly shocked).

Lack of Start button on desktop really is insane though. Even if it came completely empty and let you hang stuff off it that would've been sufficient. Seem to have to go to Start screen, show all apps, pin to taskbar (no option for create desktop shortcut).

Start up from hibernate with my SSD is excellent, so no qualms about performance so far.

Had to disable signed drivers to get graphics driver installed though (laptop...sony...64-bit...hacked inf...grumble).

So far, so hmmm.

but ...

I would have liked the option of grouping them by store category from the outset - even if that is just my starting point for further sorting.

No brainer?

1) Will any version of Visual Studio work on RT? I know VS 2012 will let you develop for RT, but if I buy an RT tablet, will I be able to do any sort of development. (A full PC would be my primary development environment.)

2) How does 'Right-Click' work on a tablet? Does it exist? Is it a gesture?

touch+hold = Right Mouse on the legacy desktop (I don't think it is relevant for the 'new' interface)

Sorry Sven, just noticed this was aimed at you.

Touch+hold has been the touch gesture for right click as far back as the old Windows Mobile OSes (when it was still called PocketPC). It doesn't apply on metro because all right-clicking accomplishes there is showing the app bar, which you get by touch by swiping from the bottom (iirc).

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/library/windows/apps/hh465415#touch_language

I'm looking forward to the new hardware that will be on the market in the form of tablets or hybrids.  My opinion is that it will be a slow adoption, but it will eventually gain respectable marketshare.