Perhaps I should get glasses after all.

To me it's old. Hopefully with this years bonus I'll be getting a new laptop and my wife will inherit my "old" one.
As for win8 I'm quite liking it so far. The ui takes some getting use to but it's not so bad it's getting in the way. It's the learning where everything is which some people will Bitch and moan that it's changed who would Bitch and moan if it had stayed the same.

And that is still 4 times the RAM that the girls had on their computers (and they had Intel integrated graphics). XP ran like a complete dog, taking minutes to respond, when trying to open an application. I used some of my inheritance money to buy them new computers the first Christmas that I was with my girlfriend.

And Gf's sister was still using a Pentium 200 with 16MB RAM and Windows 95 until last year.

I think a 2Ghz C2D is a pretty reasonable spec.

Which is what worries me. I spend most of my time writing technical documentation or interpreting laws and regulatory guidelines for my boss, which means I need several windows open for reference, while I compose my material. "Full Screen" = totally useless in my job.

I do like the tiles, instead of the Start Menu. But, for a desktop user, forcing Metro Apps to be full screen is just wrong. For example, my Twitter feed uses up about 20% of the width of the screen, it doesn't need to be any wider. My browser window uses around 30-40% and I still have room in the middle for a word document or email.

Personally I can see Windows splitting into the two traditional offerings:

• Home - Metro by default & optional restricted desktop
• Pro - full desktop by default & optional Metro

I've not seen that written down anywhere else, but that sounds like a brilliant idea. If I get to give any feedback to Microsoft i will certainly suggest that.

I also downloaded the Visual Studio 11 Beta today, so I'll try that out when I finish the PGCE course and get my life back.

So, took the plung and installed it on my iMac.

I did have it running under Virtual Box on my Windows 7 PC, but that was limited to 1024x768 pixels.

Running under Bootcamp, it runs as a real machine. Performance isn't too bad, certainly a lot faster and smoother than OS X Lion on the same machine!

My biggest quibble with the whole concept of Metro seems to hold true to my fears. But first things first, I like the Metro Start Screen. It is very nice, reminds me of my Windows Phone 7 device. But on a 24" screen, the Metro Apps look bloody silly! Solitaire is unplayably big. Instead of fitting in a small window in the corner of the screen, where I can play along as I watch a film or wait for a task to complete, it takes up the whole screen, with cards the size of my fist!

The same goes for Contacts, Kalendar etc. they all get blown up and use the whole screen, magnifying the font to fill the Screen with the same amount of Information that a 1024x768 Screen would have! Why not use the extra space?

The desktop side works fine and non-Metro apps work great. The Problem is, when I Need Information from one Metro app for another Metro app or to share with Desktop apps… It works fine on small displays, but is completly unusable on a big screen.

It's pretty daft on a 42" screen too. FFS I have to scroll to see all the apps and I only have the default ones installed. Once I have over 9000 apps, it could take a lifetime to scroll that far!

It makes more sense if you sit 5 meters from the screen and use a Kinect style human interface device rather than a mouse.

5 minutes into day 1 of my Consumer Preview Evaluation and I'm screaming for the start button to come back! I guess I can add my own folder to the WonderBar or whatever they call it now...

I'm now installing Steam. I'll report back on how this goes!

*edit* went OK - Skyrim runs a lot better than it did on XP although that is probably down to the recent updates...

You only put the ones you regularly need on that screen, the rest can be searched for, as per Windows 7, as and when you need them; just start typing the name of the app and it will appear in a search list.

It might work on a TV. It works great on a phone and it should work well on a tablet, but it won't really work on a desktop monitor with high resolution and big size, in its current form.


I don't miss it. I find the Metro Start Screen is much better than the start menu.

It works on a phone but I'm not sure it's 'much better' on a screen. To me it's much the same as Launchpad in Mac OS Lion, a way to show you the same amount of information in much more space in a less powerful way. The difference is Launchpad is entirely optional, whereas Metro doesn't appear to be from my testing.

I tried the consumer beta in a VM. To be honest, I couldn't see anything compelling about it . It should be, as I saw one commenter suggest, Microsoft's 'Snow leopard'. It should be a stability, performance and security revision with some incremental improvements to the feature set thrown in and sold for a lesser fee (say less than 50 quid). As it is they appear to be crowbarring in changes where they simply aren't needed (and don't improve things for the majority) for little more reason than apparently to be able to justify the +1 on the version number and therefore the full-fat price tag.

Unless it gets a lot better between now and RTM, I think I'll be staying on windows 7 thanks.

Jon

Did I mention that I've got my PC with the Win8 Beta connected to a 50" TV? No problems with the Metro thingy for me, even though I never did like it on the phone screens...

I also installed Visual Studio 11 Beta, and may try some coding at the weekend, depending on what football is on.

On Windows 95 through to 7, if I wanted to use that clever little utility I installed last year then I find it by clicking start / utilities and look up and down until I recognise the icon. This involves moving my mouse a few millimetres and I don't need to remember that it was called snuzzlepop92 or whatever. Windows 3.x was not that dissimilar, as I would find it in my utilities folder.

Are you suggesting that on 8, I have to remember what it's called and use the keyboard to search for it? Like I did on DOS ? Or I could go into the program folder through explorer and search that way, much like Windows 2.0

That's... not what most people would describe as progress. The hierarchical menu is ubiquitous for a very good reason; it enables you to find things by context even if you don't know what you're looking for. I must surely be missing something

In that case, right click and call up the complete list of installed apps - it appears at the bottom of the screen and you can tben search through everything that has been installed, broken into categories and sorted alphabetically within category.

Alphabetical classification is useless if you can't remember the name of the thing you're looking for. In fact in Rusty's example (IMO only to be fair) you're probably likely to vaguely remember the name and also vaguely remember what the icon looks like. In that case, categorisation is a hindrance rather than a help, because while if you know what you're looking for it's doing a good job (hiding the things you know you're not interested in) if you don't it's doing the reverse - it's hiding things you essentially are interested in, because you don't know what interesting until you see it.

I have no objection to MS trying to find a new GUI paradigm. After all, we've had the basic system of windows for 17 years, more or less. However I'm not sure their new paradigm works as well for desktop computing as it does for touchscreen computing and in any case, attempting to make the same paradigm work for all different forms of physical interfaces seems to me to be a fool's errand. It hasn't really worked for Apple (the most iOS-y bits of Lion are the things people seem least enthusiastic about) and I don't think it will for MS in the long run either.

If you try to make a GUI work for all interfaces, it'll end up being optimised for none of them.

Jon