Microsoft Launches Windows 8 Consumer Preview 500
suraj.sun writes "Microsoft on Wednesday made the Consumer Preview of Windows 8 available for download to the general public. Built with touch computing and apps in mind, Windows 8 is crucial to Microsoft's efforts to make inroads against Apple and Google in the red-hot tablet market, where the company is significantly behind rivals. Windows 8 marks the biggest change to the OS since the aforementioned 95 flavor (which, shockingly, turns 17 this year). With Windows 8 comes the introduction of a Metro-style interface, inspired by the lovely and intuitive presentation found in Windows Phone. In it, apps and functions are pinned to tiles and, to interact with those apps, you simply tap those tiles. The former Start Menu has been replaced by a full-screen view of tiles that you can scroll through horizontally. You can pin applications, shortcuts, documents, webpages and any number of other things, customizing the interface in any way you like — so long as what you like is rectangular and only extends from left to right."
MrSeb wrote on with info on generating a USB stick installer from the available images, and itwebennet with details about IE10.
Re:My desktop is not a tablet. (Score:1, Informative)
Re:"Consumer" Preview (Score:4, Informative)
Re:My desktop is not a tablet. (Score:5, Informative)
No, you can't.
You can launch a desktop tile and bring up a standard desktop UI, but you can not disable metro.
If you have found a way to do so, please let me know, as I've been trying for several weeks now, as it interferes with some of my automated test regressions.
-nB
Re:My desktop is not a tablet. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Lovely and Intuitive? (Score:4, Informative)
They're dreaming if they think it's anything other than a tablet OS.
I don't think I have the upper body strength to use it on a monitor for more than half an hour.
Re:My desktop is not a tablet. (Score:5, Informative)
Nope, no love on the last developer build. :(
Maybe on this release, but not on mine
Re:"Consumer" Preview (Score:5, Informative)
Doesn't consumer just mean an entity that consumes?
No. It comes from the broadcast industry.
... those are the consumers. Compared to your customers, they have little or no power to change your content or make requests. One of them threatening to watch another channel means nothing to you. They only matter in very large groups.
Say you run a TV station. You broadcast TV shows plus commercials over the air at no charge. Anyone with the right receiver can watch your content without paying you a cent.
The advertisers who buy commercial time are your customers. They are the ones paying you. If you piss them off, say by airing programs they find distasteful, they will take their business elsewhere and you will lose that revenue.
The viewers who provide eyeballs for the advertisers but pay nothing
They are not remotely the same thing. A customer can be influential as an individual. Referring to a customer as a "consumer" is an Orwellian Newspeak method of trying to disempower them, to tilt the balance of market power in your own favor without having earned it. It is belittling and degrading and shows a certain contempt that can only come from taking them for granted.
Re:My desktop is not a tablet. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Lovely and Intuitive? (Score:5, Informative)
Metro UI is default in dev preview, and pretty sure it will be in final retail. Your desktop is still there yes, its just a tile now, that you have to press, and wait for your desktop to load, which makes a lot of sense. Who wants to start up their PC and use it to actually work?
Re:A new kind of copying (Score:5, Informative)
You should do your homework and find out where are the roots of the Metro interface, then you'll see iOS was not even in Jobs' wildest dreams when they started.
Neither was the first mac when windows 1.0 came out, but that doesn't stop the fanboys from claiming windows stole something.
checking dates:
"Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS"
"The first Macintosh was introduced by Apple's then-chairman Steve Jobs on January 24, 1984"
It's hard to see why one could claim that the first mac was "not even in Jobs' wildest dreams" when Windows 1.0 came out, since the mac had been on the market for nearly two years by the time Windows came out.
Why is this post moderated "informative"?
Re:Lovely and Intuitive? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Lovely and Intuitive? (Score:4, Informative)
People are bawwing too much about metro. The desktop is available right there. You can pin desktop apps to the metro interface and they launch in desktop mode. I've 2 30" monitors, and I've got win8 set up on it. It's fine. The monitor space actually shows a ridiculous amount of icons, and a flat structure for finding my top, oh, 40 apps is just fine. Granted, I'm still a keyboard user, but metro is actually making me think of using the mouse more.... on a desktop.
Metro is just a fullscreen start menu with large icons (ie. BIG hit targets). It's actually a good direction, and the desktop will always be there for us who use WIMP interface suitable to large displays.
Re:Lovely and Intuitive? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Lovely and Intuitive? (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, Vista SP1 made Vista usable. Windows 7 only added a few frivolous features on top of post SP1 Vista and no real performance improvements.
Most of the Vista naysayer have either never used it beyond RTM or have never used it at all.
So just disable metro: (Score:5, Informative)
1) Click the Desktop "Tile"
2) Open up File Manager and point your browser to C:\\Windows\\System32\\
3) Rename shsxs.dll to old_shsxs.dll
4) Confirm UAC Dialog Prompt
5) Reboot the Operating System
6) On the new login screen, click the mouse button and drag up
7) Login to the machine
8) Your operating system should act like a desktop OS without the "crap"
Re:Lovely and Intuitive? (Score:4, Informative)
The desktop is right there in Windows 8, just another tile. Just like DOS was still there on Win 3.1. The desktop is only available on ARM for Office and Explorer.
I see Microsoft trying to move from traditional Win32/64-based desktop applications to pure WinRT Metro applications in the future. However, I don't see this working for complex business applications.
And, reading about the multitasking behaviour in Win8, if you have something like VMware running, or are encoding a video for YouTube or have a build running on Desktop and switch to Metro, Windows will kill the desktop process in 10 seconds (it gives it that long to suspend).
Re:Lovely and Intuitive? (Score:5, Informative)
You can still use the normal desktop UI if you want, which I'm sure most desktop computer users will.
Except that the start menu is gone - Clicking 'start' returns you to the metro tiles - Sort of like clicking the button on an iPad. So if you consider the start menu to be part of the 'normal desktop UI' then no, you can't use the normal desktop.
Re:A new kind of copying (Score:4, Informative)
Apple bought the rights to use it, MS abused a contract with Apple to claim they could use it.
A few actual things (Score:5, Informative)
Since you'll otherwise just get a bunch of sarcasm...
* Memory page de-duplication (automatically reduces system memory usage in most use cases).
* Lower base memory usage than Win7 (pretty impressive, IMO).
* Improved file operation interface (copying/moving files now shows all ops in one window, allows pausing, and generally provides more info).
* IE10 is built in (I assume it will be backported; it's a nice release).
* ISO mounting without additional software (finally!)
* App Marketplace (not mandatory, but convenient).
* Sign in with your WLID (now called "Microsoft Account"; enables syncing favorites, settings, and user-selected files/folders, plus downloading your Marketplace apps on other PCs).
* Automated ability to restore the OS to basic post-install state without losing the user's files or customizations (simplifying and speeding up the "pave-it-over" solution).
* Vastly improved multi-monitor support (taskbar spanning both monitors, wallpaper spanning the monitors, separate wallpaper on each monitor, each monitor gets taskbar icons for the apps open on that monitor only, and other options).
* Improved theme capabilities (automatic selection of chrome color based on current wallpaper, even during "slideshow", for example).
* Built-in antivirus option (Microsoft Security Essentials is now integrated into Windows Defender).
There's more, that's just what I remember from some of the demos I saw and my own personal experimentation.The "BUILD" conference demoed a lot of stuff, and that was before the release of the previous preview. I'm also just mentioning things that matter to the user, not mentioning the new developer features (though of course BUILD had a bunch of info about those).
Re:Lovely and Intuitive? (Score:2, Informative)
Windows seems to go through a pattern of "Good Windows, Bad Windows".
What?
Looking at this list: 3.1, NT, 95, 98, ME, 2000, XP, Vista, 7 I don't see the pattern.
Looks like yet another oft-repeated, yet totally baseless, meme.
Re:Lovely and Intuitive? (Score:3, Informative)
You realize the ribbon is collapsed by default, and you need never use it.
But if you want it, you can expand it and use it.
So... no need to run off to the water-boarding facility... you're not being forced into that.
Meanwhile, Windows Explorer has lots of really good enhancements, from integrated SkyDrive to native support for mounting and burning *.iso files (FINALLY), and a return of the 'up' button to go up a directory level.
So this isn't really something to rant about and get all angry over.
Re:Lovely and Intuitive? (Score:4, Informative)
3.1 (good) -> 95 (bad) -> 98 (good) -> ME (bad) -> XP (good) -> Vista (bad) -> 7 (good) -> 8 (bad?).