Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Launches Windows 8 Consumer Preview
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 The former Start Menu has been replaced by a full-screen view of tiles that you can scroll through horizontally.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.
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
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
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.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
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?
Visit my Forums?
The Metro UI is not an OS. You can still use the normal desktop UI if you want, which I'm sure most desktop computer users will.
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"
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.