Steve Posted September 15, 2011 Share Posted September 15, 2011 You can grab it here: - http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/br229516 It's meant to be pretty buggy, so obviously don't try and install this as a main OS. If you've got a spare laptop, you could throw it on that to try it out (which is what I'm gonna do). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steve Posted September 15, 2011 Author Share Posted September 15, 2011 I got it installed on my laptop: - It took about 18 minutes to install and everything was set up apart from having to enter in the key to connect to my wireless network. My laptop is pretty old now - Core 2 Duo 1.6 GHz, 2GB of RAM, onboard graphics - but it runs nicely on it. After using the new interface for a bit, I think it's gonna be a hit. It'll clearly work on touch screen devices like tablets and being able to run a full desktop OS on a tablet is obviously a huge advantage. I was more concerned about how well it would work with a regular keyboard and mouse and it works really well. It's ideal for doing common tasks and most people using PCs are probably browsing the web, checking the news, sending email and what not, so you can have custom active tiles for all of those things, so they'll display weather updates, the latest news, whether you've received new email and so on. You can choose what tiles are displayed and customise the main menu to your liking of course. There are new features for restoring your computer too. You can choose from 2 options. The first lets you do the equivalent of a factory reset and puts the OS back to how it would be if you'd done a fresh install. The other allows you to keep your apps and settings, but it does some kind of wipe of the OS underneath, then reinstalls it. Apparently it takes about 5 minutes to run one of these tools. You can go to a regular desktop view and it looks just like Windows 7. There are some changes with things like Windows Explorer, which now uses the ribbon interface and Task Manager has been improved. There's an app store built in, but it's not active yet. Apparently, MS are not going to take a share of the profits from apps sold in the store (Apple take 30%) so it should be competitive on price. There's no excuse for devs to charge more for the equivalent apps that are being sold on iOS or OS X when they're getting 100% of the profits. Xbox Live will be built in too. Overall, it just looks and feels slick. It's a huge gamble for MS as this is radically different from previous versions of Windows, but I think it's gonna pay off. The developer preview that I've installed is limited and is missing things like the app store and Windows Media Center and a bunch of other stuff, so it's an early build, but I'm quite looking forward to seeing what the release candidate is like, which should hopefully be out early next year. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
2ndhand Posted September 15, 2011 Share Posted September 15, 2011 So long as I can quickly get to the command line it will be ok! Aha just read that the Windows keyboard button will call up the "search" box. That'll do. I just can't let my keyboard go, I am so old fashioned. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steve Posted September 15, 2011 Author Share Posted September 15, 2011 What really sucks about this (and hopefully it's just this build) is the way multitasking works. When you open one of the Metro-style apps via the tiles, when you leave that app it doesn't close. It goes into a frozen state and the resources are freed up for other apps to use. The only way to actually close an app is to force close it with Task Manager. It works in a similar way to Android in some respects, but that alone isn't what's bad about it. There are 2 things that are bad about it: - 1. When you are using an app and you move the mouse pointer to the centre-left side of the screen, you get a little thumbnail of the next app along (which will be frozen). You can click that to move to the next app, so you can quickly cycle through them, but as you can't close them this means that you end up cycling through every app you've opened since booting the PC. You can also use Alt+F4 to see all of the open/frozen apps, but again, this just fills up with too many things as you can't close them unless you force them to close. 2. I fired up a game and music was playing on the main menu. I didn't like the look of it, so I decided to go back to the main screen and choose a different app. When I did this, the music from the game still played in the background and the only way to stop it was to fire up Task Manager and kill the game. If this is how multitasking is handled in the final build, I won't be buying it for this reason alone. It's awful. I am hoping that this is just something that they've done in the developer build to test the waters, as it's already leading to a lot of complaints on the MSDN forums and hopefully it will be changed. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
djdiggla Posted September 16, 2011 Share Posted September 16, 2011 Looks too fancy for me. I fear change. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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