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General => General discussion => Topic started by: Jay on 29 February 2012, 21:48

Title: Windows 8 Consumer Preview
Post by: Jay on 29 February 2012, 21:48
It's finally out, I had forgot about it till I saw an email just come through.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/consumer-preview

Going to try it out at work tomorrow if I get some time.
Title: Re: Windows 8 Consumer Preview
Post by: Jay on 29 February 2012, 22:14
Big old run down of some of the more noticeable changes.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/windows-8-consumer-preview-a-fresh-start-for-microsoft/4540
Title: Re: Windows 8 Consumer Preview
Post by: The Mighty Elvi on 29 February 2012, 22:22
I was gonna post this earlier...but....

Title: Re: Windows 8 Consumer Preview
Post by: R32UK on 29 February 2012, 23:11
seems to kind of get rid of the whole idea of 'windows'  :shocked:

i woudl much prefer on them getting previous versions of windows to run properly... if it wasnt originally broke...  :lipsrsealed:
Title: Re: Windows 8 Consumer Preview
Post by: Adam on 29 February 2012, 23:18
Not sold on it. Hate the Windows Mobile and this just looks far too much like that.
Title: Re: Windows 8 Consumer Preview
Post by: Jay on 01 March 2012, 06:58
seems to kind of get rid of the whole idea of 'windows'  :shocked:

If you think of each tile as a Window to that app, it makes sense, seeing as the tiles are live and show you updates to the app/social network etc :wink:

i woudl much prefer on them getting previous versions of windows to run properly... if it wasnt originally broke...  :lipsrsealed:

They did with Windows 7  :grin: and XP was pretty solid after it's 6+ year life span.
Title: Re: Windows 8 Consumer Preview
Post by: R32UK on 01 March 2012, 07:50
granted xp was much better... although certainly not without issues. I had the msi installer issue recently which wouldnt allow me to install any other apps.

looking for solutions online and I found 1000's of people complaining of the same problem. Lots of links to the MS site to so called apps that fix the issue.  :huh: ..... erm "hello MS!!!, you CANT INSTALL ANYTHING!!!"

then a few registry fix's which didnt work. then a small app that fixed the messed up registry keys that didnt work and took you back to dead link on the MS site  :sad:

Was a total pain in the a$$ to fix.... thats the kind of problems they need to address! im sure for many users the system will be great and fault free. However for many they will just have to continue to suffer, which shouldnt be the case. I have even had a couple of blue screens on my brand new laptop running W7 pro.

I guess the difference is simple MS has to run with numerous different products/vendors/hardware specs etc. Where as someone like apple rule the roost over anything to do with their systems.

The price to pay for freedom??? I think i may well be  :grin:
Title: Re: Windows 8 Consumer Preview
Post by: Jay on 01 March 2012, 13:08
Well, to be fair no OS is without faults and we're forever getting problems % wise around the same with our Mac clients as with Windows clients.

With Windows 8 there is a Store where you get the new apps from and the apps MUST run as MS want them to or won't get through or will get pulled - Windows Phone 7 apps have strict requirements as to what they can and can't do before being put on the Store.

Had a quick play today in a Virtual machine and seems MUCH MUCH better than the Developer preview released 6 months ago, I'm going to install it on another partition to get the 'full' experience. My boss wants a Windows tablet now too see what it's like on a tablet but they're all Atom based crud that wouldn't do it justice or Expensive i5/i7 machines. Roll on the Arm or new Intel based tablets later this year  :cool:
Title: Re: Windows 8 Consumer Preview
Post by: Kerrse on 01 March 2012, 17:06
We are only just moving from XP to windows 7 at work  :grin:
Title: Re: Windows 8 Consumer Preview
Post by: R32UK on 01 March 2012, 19:23
let us know what its like J! I cant see myself moving tbh..... i still have my windows in the classic 2000 look with no animations/gadgets/screen savers/desktop short cuts.  :grin:
Title: Re: Windows 8 Consumer Preview
Post by: Jay on 01 March 2012, 19:40
Oh dear lord! :shocked:  :laugh:

Going to make space on my laptop and repartition it and see what the full experience is like :smiley: It comes with a Skydrive 25Gb cloud storage (http://www.windowslive.co.uk/skydrive)App (YES!!!! stick your 5Gb cloud drive/sugar sync/drop box/icloud storage in your Yaris )
Title: Re: Windows 8 Consumer Preview
Post by: R32UK on 01 March 2012, 19:56
it does mean the new laptop runs as sweet as a cola cube :grin:
Title: Re: Windows 8 Consumer Preview
Post by: Jay on 01 March 2012, 21:18
Holy sh!t!!! On my 5 year old laptop it runs well and IE10 is forking quick! I mean it would leave Chrome on my 1 year old i7 16Gb ram behemoth for duuuuust.

I think the nay-sayers need to try it before they dismiss it :smiley:
Title: Re: Windows 8 Consumer Preview
Post by: R32UK on 01 March 2012, 21:52
I will give IE10 a try... but why can they not change all the back end, and allow the user to chose the front  :undecided:

I dont mind faster software that does cool stuff... I just dont want to keep having to learn new stuff  :cry:
Title: Re: Windows 8 Consumer Preview
Post by: Jay on 01 March 2012, 22:04
That's because a lot of the back-end is still Windows 7(ish) and the new bit is the front end. Do you still have your old laptop? If you do, install a clean fresh Windows 8 Consumer Preview on it and give it a go, took about 30 mins top to install Windows 8 on this sh!tty creaking laptop.

Full screen apps and full screen IE10 FTW.

Won't take long to learn, bottom left and right corners and top left corner for different options, right click at the bottom of the screen for App menu, get to app settings from bottom right corner.

Not tried IE10 in the 'normal' version of Windows 8, but the Metro version is superb :smiley:
Title: Re: Windows 8 Consumer Preview
Post by: Ben Lessani on 02 March 2012, 00:24
We are only just moving from XP to windows 7 at work  :grin:

All our office PCs still run XP x64 (and laptops). Its 12 years old and still flawless. Don't see any reason to bother upgrading :lipsrsealed:
Title: Re: Windows 8 Consumer Preview
Post by: R32UK on 02 March 2012, 14:19
I may just give that a try Jay... not got much spare time at the moment. How long will it take to load on?
Title: Re: Windows 8 Consumer Preview
Post by: Jay on 02 March 2012, 16:47
Took about half an hour
Title: Re: Windows 8 Consumer Preview
Post by: Jay on 03 March 2012, 20:54
I like the autocorrect of IE10, just noticed it changed thats to that's automatically for me, I think it's spell check is also better the Chrome's crappy spell check. I know fullscreen web browsing has been around for ages using F11, but this is a really good experience (it just auto corrected experience for me too! :grin: )


Still think it is really good, it's got a few niggles - but hey it is an early preview aka beta :smiley:
Title: Re: Windows 8 Consumer Preview
Post by: clipperjay on 03 March 2012, 21:07
call me a dingbat do I need win7 to add this on?
Title: Re: Windows 8 Consumer Preview
Post by: Jay on 03 March 2012, 21:58
No, you dingbat :grin:

Win8 will run on anything with 1Ghz and 1 Gb RAM, I think you can do an upgrade from Win7, but I'd suggest installing on another partition instead.
Title: Re: Windows 8 Consumer Preview
Post by: clipperjay on 03 March 2012, 22:05
Cool its such a small file thats why I asked?
Title: Re: Windows 8 Consumer Preview
Post by: Jay on 03 March 2012, 22:12
There's the .exe which will download and help burn a DVD and install it I think, or the ISO on a link just below that which is over 2Gb for the 32bit and over 3Gb for the 64Bit :smiley:
Title: Re: Windows 8 Consumer Preview
Post by: redm4lc on 06 March 2012, 08:45
I've had the developer preview and a custom build from work. First time I used it I couldn't work out how to turn it off so did the 'manual off' :D

Honestly - I really, really dislike Metro.
Title: Re: Windows 8 Consumer Preview
Post by: Jay on 10 March 2012, 11:22
http://m.zdnet.com/blog/bott/the-metro-haters-guide-to-customizing-windows-8-consumer-preview/4610

Get used to it, its here to stay  :tongue:
Title: Re: Windows 8 Consumer Preview
Post by: DubFan on 20 March 2012, 15:50
It might work nicely on a tablet or netbook (I might try it on ours) but it looks too Fisher-Price for a full desktop OS.

I'm only using Windows 7 at home because it came on the new laptop, otherwise I'd still be perfectly happy with XP.
Title: Re: Windows 8 Consumer Preview
Post by: golf-sib on 25 March 2012, 00:58
What are MS doing, XP was to me the best OS, then vista was a disaster, win7 was ok, now this looks like "vista we will call you windows 8 with xbox dashboard".

Can't say I'm sold on it for a typical PC user. For a tablet system or a touchscreen monitor I would say yes its heading the right way. But the fact is the consumers are always behind by a long way till more and more people will end up with touchscreen PC builds. Just look how long x64 took to take off. Plenty of us had 64bit processors yet the OS let alone the drivers where not ready for a very long time, to me it all only really caught up with the consumer by the time windows 7 was out that everyone actually cared about 64bit on the development side.

Its a similar scenario to the PS2, yeah it could have a HDD installed and a network adapter, which allowed you to play games off the HDD, have a mini OS for HD film support with 720p support via component cables and let you play online with a processor with 128bit architecture, but again how long did that take to catch on...?
Title: Re: Windows 8 Consumer Preview
Post by: bobbarley on 25 March 2012, 02:12
I can't believe w're still using Windows XP at my office to be honest.  Operating in 37 countries with 35,000 employees you reckon they'd have something a little more "cutting edge".  We're still using.. get this.. Lotus Notes!!  :shocked:
Title: Re: Windows 8 Consumer Preview
Post by: Jay on 25 March 2012, 10:58
Lotus notes, I feel for you Nige, we used it at TNT / Ceva  :sick:

Outlook is far superior!

The problem is people running these firms see it as XP will do and they have lots of propriety software they haven't tested on 7, or don't want to pay for it to be made to run on 7 (even though there is XP within 7, using XP mode!)
Title: Re: Windows 8 Consumer Preview
Post by: bobbarley on 25 March 2012, 11:59
They've promised that we'll be upgrading to Outlook by the end of the year, I'm not holding my breath though.
Title: Re: Windows 8 Consumer Preview
Post by: Jay on 25 March 2012, 12:50
Good luck on the upgrade to Outlook hopefully they'll move you to 7 or 8 at the same time, CEVA apparently moved to Outlook after I left, it's a vile sadistic slow mail client  :sick:
Title: Re: Windows 8 Consumer Preview
Post by: DubFan on 27 March 2012, 15:18
I can't believe w're still using Windows XP at my office to be honest.  Operating in 37 countries with 35,000 employees you reckon they'd have something a little more "cutting edge".  We're still using.. get this.. Lotus Notes!!  :shocked:

You've given the reason right here ^

With that many people, upgrading PCs and licences costs a huge amount. Also when operating in other countries you also have to factor in language support. Some languages aren't supported very well and some fonts don't work at all with certain software.

My work are only just moving to Windows 7 but it's being done as part of an office move so all the old XP computers are being left in the old building and the new building is having completely new PCs with Windows 7 and this has been factored into the moving cost. We're also changing over a number of our major software packages from stuff that works on XP to stuff than works on Windows 7.
Other parts of our organisation will only get the upgrade to Win7 when they do small scale PC upgrades.
We "upgraded" to Outlook 2010 (from an older version) earlier in the year and it's cause no end of problems and struggles to run on some of our Windows XP computers, but on Win7 it's fine.

As for Windows 8, no business would touch it till it's been proved to be stable and secure and all your software runs on it properly.
Title: Re: Windows 8 Consumer Preview
Post by: Jay on 22 May 2012, 14:18
It's been almost 2 weeks since I removed Windows 7 from my Work machine and am using only Windows 8, enjoying it more now at work than I do at home  :smiley:
Title: Re: Windows 8 Consumer Preview
Post by: The Mighty Elvi on 22 May 2012, 14:31
Isn't Windows 8 just a polished version of 7 if your on a PC?

It's only different if your using a touch screen / tablet.



Title: Re: Windows 8 Consumer Preview
Post by: Jay on 22 May 2012, 19:50
No, architecturally A LOT is changing. It will run on traditional CPU's as well as ARM CPU's (with some limitations on the ARM version called Windows RT). Mounting all those ISO's you have? No problem it is baked in. Lots of new things that make using Windows easier, sure there are lots of changes but so far I've not found many issues even with the previews.

Also say good bye to Aero  :lipsrsealed:
Title: Re: Windows 8 Release Preview
Post by: Jay on 02 June 2012, 12:38
Microsoft have done a U-turn in the latest public release :lipsrsealed:

They've got an built in version of Adobe Flash in IE10 Metro  :shocked: :undecided: A few more refinements over the February release and seems good overall  :cool:

It's even got our Mac lover new girl installing it on her laptop  :laugh:

The only problem is that you have to do a fresh install when coming from the Consumer preview to the Release preview, you can upgrade from previous version of Windows though  :undecided: