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 The former Start Menu has been replaced by a full-screen view of tiles that you can scroll through horizontally.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.

Comments

Lovely and Intuitive?

[sconeu]

I had the Win8 Developer Preview, and I *HATED* the Metro Interface. IMHO it was ugly and a PITA to use. It does not scale well to a standard WIMP interface.

Maybe for a tablet, it's OK.

Re:Lovely and Intuitive?

[ByOhTek]

I can see it being "OK" for a tablet, like it is "OK" for a phone (not great, and I'd struggle to call it "good"). However, for a non-touch screen, or a screen that is large enough to hold a decent amount of text, this interface is a horrible, inefficient waste of space.

Re:Lovely and Intuitive?

[Samalie]

Agreed entirely. There is absolutley no fucking way my owners will want this at all in our office environment.

Complete and utter shit. Vista 2.0

Re:Lovely and Intuitive?

[w.hamra1987]

Well, as a computer technician, i loved the few years of Vista. I had so many customers buying new laptops, and asking me to downgrade them... Those were the good time, cash pouring in all the time.

Then came 7, it was good, no one wanting a downgrade, but certainly lots of people needing help to upgrade. Maintenance-wise, 7 didn’t prove to be a challenge, and fixing its problems is usually simpler, especially with the addition of repairing tools to the boot partition.

I guess now with windows 8, we'll go back to the downgrade frenzy phase... I look very forward to it.. and even more hopefully, Microsoft will again, as with Vista, learn the errs of their ways, and produce a good windows 9.

whatever the result... I’m happy with my Linux and KDE here... windows is nothing but a huge job opportunity to me :)

Re:Lovely and Intuitive?

[Joce640k]

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:Lovely and Intuitive?

[not already in use]

Typical of slashdot, people are either ignorant to the fact, or ignore the fact, that the desktop interface still exists, and that metro is not intended to be used in a desktop environment.

Re:Lovely and Intuitive?

[chucklebutte]

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:Lovely and Intuitive?

[Riceballsan]

You are quite right, Vista really is windows 7 pre-alpha that was released to the public due to massive overshooting of the balmer peak http://xkcd.com/323/ and then continous attempts to fix it before the damage was severe and they had to actually just finish the product and release it.

Re:Lovely and Intuitive?

[NatasRevol]

Next year is the year of Nerds On Steroids.

Re:Lovely and Intuitive?

[DigiShaman]

And the ribbons interface for Windows Explorer? WTF?! I would rather be waterboarded. Screw that!

Re:Lovely and Intuitive?

[DeathFromSomewhere]

Hit the windows key, type the first few letters and hit enter. Exactly the same as you would do before.

Re:Lovely and Intuitive?

[atlasdropperofworlds]

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?

[dave420]

You don't have to use it - a perfectly normal desktop is there if you want to use it. Bitching about this is like complaining that Calculator is a piss-poor Control Panel. Technically correct, but entirely pointless.

Re:Lovely and Intuitive?

[dave420]

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.

Re:Lovely and Intuitive?

[cayenne8]

Hit the windows key, type the first few letters and hit enter. Exactly the same as you would do before.

Hmm..I've never tried doing that before.

I'm guessing this would be new to a LOT of people too besides me...?

Re:Lovely and Intuitive?

[WaffleMonster]

Typical of slashdot, people are either ignorant to the fact, or ignore the fact, that the desktop interface still exists, and that metro is not intended to be used in a desktop environment.

I wonder if there could be a third option? Such as not wanting to go through another hoop to get to the desktop or the fact that when you click the start button it opens the metro interface rather than my list of apps.

Re:Lovely and Intuitive?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Lovely and Intuitive?

[DeathFromSomewhere]

I wouldn't doubt it. It's not something they show in the videos very often. It's not exactly new and there are so many other changes that the start menu search seems to get forgotten. That and it's nowhere near as discoverable as the search box is on windows 7.

Re:Lovely and Intuitive?

[MosX]

You don't have to wait for the desktop to load. Apparently Metro and the classic desktop load at the same time and are always there.

Re:Lovely and Intuitive?

[tibit]

If you don't know about that, you're really wasting a lot of time. Did you truly believe there are no new tricks to be learned as you upgrade your Windows? It's not like an undocumented poweruser thing. The damn key is on the keyboard, and has been for a while, what about pressing it every once in a while to see if they added any new functionality to it...

It's been quite long on both Windows and Mac since you actually had to browse lists to pick up items from them. You know, computers are quite good at looking things up. Command line with suggestions has come back, and it's known as Search or Spotlight.

Lists/menus/files in folders are good when you don't know what you're looking for. Once you remember the name (or a sample of contents) of the thing you need, let the machine find it for you.

</rant>

Re:Lovely and Intuitive?

[jmorris42]

> Hit the windows key, type the first few letters and hit enter. Exactly the same as you would do before.

Why am I having flashbacks to almost exactly identical threads when GNOME3 was excreted? New 'super simple' graphical interface that can't be used with a mouse but if you memorize a bunch of keyboard shortcuts..... It is/is not (at the same time, often with both sides argued in a single post) built for a touch only world. Windows ME will be moving up a notch from the bottom of the list of Microsoft's worst products. But dead last will of course belong to Bob; now and forever.

Re:Lovely and Intuitive?

[chispito]

I foresee I'll get modded down like the guy above me... but Vista SP1 isn't that bad. It's not much different than Win7, actually.

Re:Lovely and Intuitive?

[thomasw_lrd]

I'm actually curious to see how the xbox integration works.

Oblig Star Wars reference if you can use it remotely from work.
It was as if a million managers suddenly cried out in pain, and were silenced.

Re:Lovely and Intuitive?

[Defenestrar]

Presenting advanced features in a context specific UI is definitely worth the slight headache of learning something new - besides what else are you supposed to do? Shout "get off my lawn" and tell old stories about the vi-macs war?

I'm actually quite fond of the ribbon interface. Sure it wasn't what I learned on, but anything common was still keyboard navigation and =COMMAND (or VB work), the ability to have a pull down menu which would select and present options for specific figure modifications (just try modifying/deleting horizontal error bars when the scale wasn't convenient for the default values using 2003). It's a shame they didn't get the ribbon setup simultaneously launched for the entire suite (e.g. Project '07 was old style).

In both cases 95 and 98 were massive improvements over the prior edition, IE6 was the winning shot of the browser war (and nobody likes the compromises war brings), and zune was just a mp3 player - so what if it didn't go viral? (You will note I did not discuss ME)

Re:Lovely and Intuitive?

[msclrhd]

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?

[Defenestrar]

Hip hip hooray!

Did you truly believe there are no new tricks to be learned as you upgrade your Windows?

What's up with all the people here who can't stand change or well tested improvement? (like the stats they run on data like button clicking, eye movement, etc...). Shouldn't a self-proclaimed technical elite be enthusiastic about change on a computational device, or are some of us hitting an early and disillusioned middle age from the tech crowd that started here in the late 90s?

Re:Lovely and Intuitive?

[atlasdropperofworlds]

Mutlitasking is more complex than that. It is possible for tasks to run continuously, it's just an API call to request that ability. If for whatever reason the OS can't give your application the resources it has requested, it notifies you. This means that if you write an application that will do long-term tasks in the background, you will have to write code that will handle the OS suspending you, which will happen on, say, weaker systems than what you envision (such as low-memory ARM devices), but on systems like my hex-core desktop, your application will be allowed to run indefinitely.

This is pretty much the same situation you encounter on Android and ios. ios in particular is quite draconian about shutting you down. Android is much more lenient, but as a programmer you have to pay attention to what you're doing. Win8 seems to be very much like Android.

Re:Lovely and Intuitive?

[s73v3r]

I don't want to have to hunt through tabs and list boxes just to bold something

I'm sorry, but that was a piss poor example. The Bold button is right there at the top, where it always was.

Re:Lovely and Intuitive?

[s73v3r]

So your anecdotes are worth more than empirical data gathered through studies?

Re:Lovely and Intuitive?

[atlasdropperofworlds]

Using the kinect if you don't have a mouse could actually be really quite cool. However, I hear they are actually working on eye-tracking technology to control the mouse pointer with a company called Tobii (http://www.neowin.net/news/windows-8-demoed-with-new-gaze-eye-tracking-tool).

I have an xbox with a kinect. It's actually a good party distraction. The wife plays fitness games. And I don't need a controller at all to use my TV... outside of turning everything on (you listening MS?). I can rent movies on it too. From a product standpoint, it's quite good for non-hardcore console gamers.

Re:Lovely and Intuitive?

[nightfell]

Who wants to start up their PC and use it to actually work?

Only a minority of PC owners.

Slashdotters are always harping on about "working" on computers. The iPad isn't for "real work", now Metro isn't for using to "actually work". By that metric alone, I'd expect Windows 8 to be a smashing success.

Though that's just one metric, but although I'm sure a lot of Slashdotters do work on their PCs, most people just want to communicate, play, create (not work), and the like. And for the "create" in that list, very little in terms of text or numerical projects (some writing, short newsletters at most), but heavy on creative projects like photos, invites, and videos.

And I don't see how Metro in any way hinders any of those, other than being different. If the iPad has shown us anything, it's that Slashdot-type geeks are the *last* people to consult regarding the preferences of the average person.

Re:Lovely and Intuitive?

[CohibaVancouver]

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:Lovely and Intuitive?

[bored]

Except in the developer preview I have, I wasn't smart enough to figure out how to get a proper start menu. I was constantly flipping back and forth to start applications.

It basically left me scratching my a** a couple of times trying to figure simple stuff out. It might be intuitive for my 5Y/O but anyone over 20 is going to be like WTF? From someone who actually owns a touchpad and an ipad, and didn't find either interface to be that foreign. The developer preview was a mess.

Re:Lovely and Intuitive?

[CohibaVancouver]

a perfectly normal desktop is there if you want to use it

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 'perfectly normal desktop' then no, you can't use the normal desktop.

Re:Lovely and Intuitive?

[msclrhd]

I said desktop on ARM -- the desktop on 32/64-bit will work with existing applications just fine. The point was that "desktop" is not available as an option on the new platforms for any serious development (e.g. porting Photoshop or LibreOffice to ARM); you are relegated to using Metro and the WinRT APIs which are not designed for creating complex applications.

App Suspension:

  1. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/02/09/building-windows-for-the-arm-processor-architecture.aspx -- can't find the specific quote in the article, but checking out the comments: e.g. "I hate that the OS suspends the app when it's not in the foreground. To fix this issue, I always run it in Visual Studio, so it doesn't get suspended."

  2. http://hexus.net/tech/news/software/35057-microsoft-windows-8-feature-app-suspension/ -- "This time around it's Microsoft's announcement that its goal is to suspend Metro apps that are currently not visible on the screen to curtail and, with any luck, cut completely their power consumption" and bear in mind that the desktop is just another application (unless Microsoft are treating the desktop applications in the Desktop application differently to Metro applications in Metro).

  3. http://www.techpowerup.com/160208/Windows-8-To-Introduce-App-Suspension.html -- "Simply put, it is a kernel optimization that "suspends" applications that are running in the background without much activity." This is a further clarification on the suspension behaviour, which would mitigate the problem (e.g. what about an alarm clock application, an application polling a server infrequently, or VMware with a powered on but idle OS).

Re:Lovely and Intuitive?

[Zuriel]

not sure why companies think less control of what we use is better.

A sure sign that this is a man who has never had a user:

1) delete Word and complain the next day that they can't open Word files
2) Zoom in to 200% and complain that the text is too big

I'm sure everyone here has stories to tell... Making users jump through some hoops before they can break things is fine, but removing control altogether isn't fine.

I suspect less user control directly reduces the money companies have to spend on tech support...

Re:Lovely and Intuitive?

[aztektum]

Windows 7 has done me well. I am still running an install I performed in Feb of 2010 (purely gaming install).

In fact, I put the hard drive in a new i7 box I put together last year. Ran a "repair install" tool and it's been working fine ever since.

I was wiping WinXP every 6-12 months, so color me impressed.

Re:Lovely and Intuitive?

[exomondo]

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?

It's kind of like what Apple did with LaunchPad, only that Microsoft has done it the wrong way around. On tablets sure Metro should be the default but on mouse/keyboard setups the Desktop should be the default.

Re:Lovely and Intuitive?

[shutdown -p now]

You ever used menus in Explorer?

(the ribbon is minimized by default, by the way)

Re:Lovely and Intuitive?

[arkhan_jg]

that the desktop interface still exists, and that metro is not intended to be used in a desktop environment.

Except it's replaced the start button entirely, and you can't even kill it with the reg hack any more. So as a desktop user, you have 4 choices:
1) pin your most common apps to the taskbar - while I do do that, I use far too many to pin them all; such as the administration tools for servers.
2) have them as shortcuts on the desktop; great until you have an app window covering the icon you want
3) take hand off the mouse to hit start, flip to metro, type the app name you want (yes, I touch type), and flip back to desktop, put hand back on mouse
4) put up with the flipping into metro and back every time you want to launch a frigging app

There's a noticeable delay with the pretty flip window for switching from desktop to metro to desktop; and since certain apps are metrified, you go there anywhere when it launches. It's not as quick, nor as simple as a dock + plus application folder.

Sure, for those people who only use their computer at home for light use - facebook, mail, photos, google search for 'the internet' metro is fine; but they're the people buying ipads in such large numbers anyway, or they buy an ipad to do their light use on the sofa with, and leave the desktop/laptop for the serious business.

At offices, where windows is utterly dominant, metro seems utterly terrible. Not one person, and I mean not one I know has seen the metro interface from where I've been running it on a test rig at the office (I'm the head IT guy) and expressed anything positive - my wife has threatened to divorce me if I put it on her laptop! It's just not a decent tablet interface (too many small fiddly buttons still, such as on ribbons or the non-metro desktop) OR a decent desktop interface; they've taken a really solid OS and frankly ruined it.

The 'push up against the sides/corners for charms, metro shortcut and running apps' gimmick is also a frickin nightmare on virtual machines or RDP - if you run them windowed, as I often do when I'm testing new software rollouts on multiple images, you can't hit the fricking hot corners or edges reliably because of course your cursor goes past the edge of the VM window. If you run fullscreen, you just hit up against the host bringing up ITS UI on screen edges - start bar on a windows host, or the top mac bar on parallels/osx. It is literally rage inducing.

I've been running windows desktop/linux servers as my primary OSes for a good 15 years now. After a couple of weeks with the developer preview, I got so sick of it I built a hackintosh; given my boss is a bit of a machead, it wasn't hard to get him to eventually buy me a mac at the office, and I've now switched to OSX as my primary OS (at home and work) for the first time in my life; save for gaming and a win7 vm for vmware tools/AD work. I've never been a fan of OSX, but it's growing on me; between multiple spaces and a magic touchpad, gitbox, totalfinder, iterm, alfred and sublime text I've grown to find it quite useful, if a bit expensive. And mac mail can go die in a fricking fire for its non-standard attachment handling.

I've been testing the consumer preview of win 8 out today, and it's still just as broken on a VM with the new UX. I'm going to have to force myself to use it so I can support it later, but it's going be a cold day in hell before most of the staff accept it as a replacement for windows 7 on their machines. You thought getting through the switch from office 2003 to 2007 was bad? (We've still a few staff refusing an upgrade to 2010 it was so traumatic, they don't want to go through any more). The switch from win 7 to metro is so jarring, I seriously think we're going to see a lot of users jump ship from windows entirely, myself included.

Re:Lovely and Intuitive?

[SpryGuy]

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?

[SpryGuy]

Also, XP wasn't actually good (clearly you've forgotten all the bitching over the cartoony UI and issues it had with compatibility and especially security)... XP SP2, however, was very good.

And as mentioned, Windows 98 and Windows 98SE are both missing from your list (both good).

Also, Vista SP1 eliminated most of the real problems with Vista.

So yeah, this meme is everywhere, but it really doesn't hold any water, as you really have to cherry-pick in order to make it work. Better to just stop repeating it.

Re:Lovely and Intuitive?

[SpryGuy]

No, the start menu isn't gone.

The "Start Screen" *is* the new Start Menu. You can arrange it as you wish, group things as you wish, remove anything you don't want to be there. Yes, it looks a lot different... but the old "start menu" had major changes in every major release of Windows since Windows 95.

Re:Lovely and Intuitive?

[SpryGuy]

The Developer Peview UI wasn't complete. It wasn't for consumers or the UI really. There were place-holders and some things just completely missing.

The Consumer Preview changes things and is a lot more consistent and usable. There is much better support for mice and keyboards.

You should try the Consumer Preview, give it a few hours so you can get used to it, check out the right-click menus and keyboard short-cuts, and realize it's not that bad at all.

But yeah, there are some things that are lacking in the "Discoverability" aspect. But hopefully constructive feedback will help polish the remaining rough areas.

Re:Lovely and Intuitive?

[SpryGuy]

Okay, the ignorant homophobic slur wasn't necessary and paints you as kind of a clueless rube.

But ignoring that, the start menu is there: It's called The Start Screen. Yes, it looks a LOT different. But each start menu in each Windows release has operated a lot differently. It takes a bit of getting used to. Some things have moved around. It's frustrating to lose the advantage of muscle-memory, but once you give it a chance, a lot of it makes sense "in the new world". And you can stay in the desktop as much as you want.

Re:Lovely and Intuitive?

[SpryGuy]

Well... no.

Metro's overhead is hardly onerous (in fact, Metro apps are much more energy efficient).

Beyond that, the Start Screen can be very efficient in an Enterprise situation. You can pin anything to the start screen, including deep links. So your first screen can be tailored to your work-flow, or your tasks... whether you're an administrative assistant, or you're an IT professional.

And the server versions are FULLY scriptable (finally), and scripts can be pinned to the start screen too. As well as reports, documents, folders, whatever.

I just don't think you're thinking it through.

Re:Lovely and Intuitive?

[toddestan]

Well, it depends on how you order them, whether or not you include the server releases, how finely you split hairs about things like 98 and 98SE, and how you deal with the consumer/professional split before Windows XP. Generally, looking at what you might find on a typical home PC, you might have:

3.1 (good) -> 95 (bad) -> 98 (good) -> ME (bad) -> XP (good) -> Vista (bad) -> 7 (good) -> 8 (bad?).

Re:Lovely and Intuitive?

[SpryGuy]

There is no "Start button" on the taskbar any more.

Use the windows key to go to the start screen, which is the REPLACEMENT for the Start Menu. It uses the Metro design language but it is not, in and of itself, "Metro".

You also don't HAVE to click the desktop tile to get to desktop. You can also click on any desktop application tile to just launch it and you'll be right there in the desktop. And you can continue to click on apps pinned to the task bar (which can now span multiple monitors) to launch additional apps, minimizing the number of times you actually have to go back to the start screen to find and launch a new desktop app.

The Start Screen *IS* your list of apps. Sort it, group it, arrange it, add and remove tiles, ... any way you want. You can optimize it to exactly what you want and how you want it.

And the "start menu search" still works the same way as always: just start typing. WinKey + "cmd" + Enter, and voila, you've launched a command window. Just the same as in Win7. Or you can have the command window pinned to your task bar. Or pinned to the start screen. Or as a short-cut on your desktop.

You have options.

Re:Lovely and Intuitive?

[w0mprat]

I foresee I'll get modded down like the guy above me... but Vista SP1 isn't that bad. It's not much different than Win7, actually.

Well mod me down too because I spend a boat load of time with OSX and Linux and as much as I love each, I have to say Win7 is damn good. W7's taskbar is the undefeated productivity king, I'm happy to settle it with fist fight with anyone who wants to disagree. Microsoft nailed integrated search in the OS, and popping of advanced searches from the start menu is pretty damn useful. The metro interface, love it or hate it, was far from a let down at it's release - If you've used it on a touch interface it was actually ahead of it's competitors at the time. It is at least highly innovative and a level up from the iPad's 2007 interface paradigm rut that Apple won't be able to get out of.

Actually.... Microsoft hasn't fucked anything up since Vista. Kinect, even, was actually more of a success than expected. Windows 8 doesn't seem to have any sign of problems.... erm... yet...

Re:Lovely and Intuitive?

[Anonymous Coward]

> give it a few hours so you can get used to it

Why should I ?

I *like* the interface I've got with Win XP. I *liked* the interface of Gnome 2 (Gnome 3 is dogshit). I *do not want* a new interface.

The various desktop and start menus etc. exist for one purpose only - to allow me to start the programs I want to use. They're not an interactive game. I *do not* want animated crap, flashing crap, desktop effects, popups, notifications or any other crap. Piss off and stop using my CPU cycles for unnecessary crap - I'm trying to do a job here.

And things should especially not start trying to "help" me as they always. always get it wrong and get in the way.

Personally I'm fucking sick of all these computer illterate newb children that now pass as developers redesigning the basic UI and throwing away 30 years of good, refined, interface deign.

My linux boxes now run with Blackbox (and a permanently open terminal) and I'll not be upgrading any XP machines until they (or I) die.

Fuck all these new interfaces - they all suck donkey balls. Fisher Price inspired shit for idiots.

'Tractor' Barry (who can't log in and Slashdot won't email me my password...)

My desktop is not a tablet.

[Kenja]

As such I will not buy any computer with Windows 8 on it. Hope Apple realizes this before the next OS X is released, but I doubt it.

Re:My desktop is not a tablet.

[networkBoy]

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.

[MosX]

You know, I'm not so sure about this. Do you have a source? I know you can go into a 'classic' Windows desktop mode, but from all the videos it looks like it behaves more like an application (meaning certain Metro style 'Windows' or panes or whatever can pop up OVER the Windows desktop mode). People keep saying you can just stay in this classic Windows desktop mode, but I don't know if that's the same thing as disabling the Metro interface.

Re:My desktop is not a tablet.

[Baloroth]

"HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer" in regedit, set "RPEnabled" to "0". Haven't tried it myself (don't have Win8), but supposedly it completely disables all the Metro and Ribbon stuff in Explorer.

Re:My desktop is not a tablet.

[networkBoy]

Nope, no love on the last developer build.
Maybe on this release, but not on mine :(

Re:My desktop is not a tablet.

[CSHARP123]

According to Zdnet this registy entry do not work in the current version.

Re:My desktop is not a tablet.

[Osgeld]

good god whats the point, just dont upgrade... people do that and for microsoft it works ... for example

MS-DOS4
Windows NT
Windows ME
Windows Vista

"Consumer" Preview

[redneckmother]

Does anyone else take exception to the use of the word "consumer" instead of "customer"?

Re:"Consumer" Preview

[sixtyeight]

Yes. It's somewhere between "helpless end-user" and "grazing cattle".

Re:"Consumer" Preview

[DogDude]

No. "Consumer" is used to differentiate between regular people and developers and corporate partners and such. Those developers and businesses are "customers" too, so using the word "customer" for today's release doesn't make any sense.

Re:"Consumer" Preview

[masternerdguy]

Doesn't consumer just mean an entity that consumes?

Re:"Consumer" Preview

[sixtyeight]

Doesn't consumer just mean an entity that consumes?

Increasingly, the term means an entity whose sole defining characteristic is that it just consumes.

It's becoming appropriate for the majority of people. But a lot of this is due to strategic coordinated efforts between corporations and the media - making the term, when used by the mainstream media, doubly offensive. Injury, as well as insult.

Re:"Consumer" Preview

[causality]

Doesn't consumer just mean an entity that consumes?

No. It comes from the broadcast industry.

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 ... 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.

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:"Consumer" Preview

[fnj]

And we have Gnome3, which is the only pile of shit worse than Windows8.

Ooo, look!

[msobkow]

We called iconic borderless buttons "tiles"!

Aren't we cool and relevant and creative and all that shit?

Re:Ooo, look!

[gstoddart]

We called iconic borderless buttons "tiles"!

Yeah, it looks just like my Xbox -- when they updated it and added ads to it. I don't want ads in my fucking Xbox screen, why did they feel compelled to "monetize" my game console? They already got paid for it.

Greedy bastards.

Possibly too little, too late ...

[gstoddart]

My organization is in the middle of deploying Windows 7 to replace XP desktops.

Given the costs and time of doing this, it will likely be several years before this gets replaced.

I wonder if other organizations are only just getting to Win 7, if Win 8 might become one of those releases that everyone bypasses since they just finished upgrading. That would likely hurt MIcrosoft.

Anybody got any screenshots for the new interface? I'm curious to know how trying to make something optimized for phones and tablets is going to work as an actual desktop interface. It sounds like they might be trying a bit of a "one size fits all" approach, which doesn't always work so well.

Re:Possibly too little, too late ...

[gstoddart]

No screenshots from me (would violate NDA), but there is a tile you can launch that brings up the classic desktop.
So your average user experience will be boot to metro, click this tile, now start working.

Please tell me that you can turn that on once and leave it? Or do you have to turn off the stupid every time?

As bizarre as it may sound, I'll likely stick with my Vista for now. Apparently I'm one of the few people who has really had a good experience with Vista.

Re:Possibly too little, too late ...

[gstoddart]

Allow me to link TFA to you again.

Yeah, saw those.

Half of the pictures are of a monitor so small I assume it's a tablet hooked up to a keyboard (the screen is *smaller* than the keyboard. The other half have no surrounding context and look like they're on a tablet. One of them is a picture of a web browser with a picture of a screenshot -- that looks like it's a picture of a tablet.

Seriously, if they're giving me this Romper Room GUI they deployed onto my Xbox lately, I'll be underwhelmed. I'm just having a hard time visualizing this as an actual desktop UI people would use.

The idea of turning my 23" monitor into something with big giant lego color buttons just seems kind of lame.

Re:Possibly too little, too late ...

[dan828]

Perhaps MS realizes this and figures they've got a good 9 more years to experiment before they need to make a solid desktop OS that'll be adopted by their enterprise customers? I mean, Windows 7 looks like it's going to have all of the staying power that XP did. Perhaps they're thinking they can do some radical experimenting and still maintain their user base with windows 7.

Re:Possibly too little, too late ...

[Billly Gates]

Nothing wrong with betting on Windows 7.

Even if Windows 8 had the same gui as Windows 7, and none the Metro-ness that we all flame here there are bugs. A good enterprise rule is to wait until Service Pack 1 is out. XP, Vista, and even Windows 7 had issues before SP 1.

Windows 7 still is flaky with shared drives if you have a crappy wan link and hanging if ARP tables are not cleared for them etc. This is after SP 1 is released so even Windows 7 is still being ironed out. I am sure at your organization you have seen work orders for "Why do I have red Xs" etc.

"Anybody got any screenshots for the new interface? I'm curious to know how trying to make something optimized for phones and tablets is going to work as an actual desktop interface. It sounds like they might be trying a bit of a "one size fits all" approach, which doesn't always work so well."

Here is your answer from the Windows 8 product manager. The second half of the video talks about the desktop and last minute mouse and keyboard integration. I tried the developer preview and it sucked goatballs hard. However MS, listened to us complain so I can not comment on using it myself with keyboard and mouse. It will take some time for an adjustment. Your users will be much happier with Windows 7 as it is more familiar to them and XP like. The only thing I can see is a plus for Metro is you can organize icons/programs by group. Something XP did and that is lacking in Windows 7.

Re:A new kind of copying

[sideslash]

How are they mimicking iOS? Aside from lots of use of multitouch, I'd describe it as a radically different UI style.

Re:A new kind of copying

[GameboyRMH]

From a geek's perspective, ever since iOS came out, OSes have been competing to out-crapify each other.

But is it art?

[Quiet_Desperation]

Huh. So Microsoft hired the ghost of Piet Mondrain as their lead designer?

It looks... really... straight and... yeah. It sure is a thing.

(sudden panicked thought) They still have the Ribbon, right? How will I live without the concentrated awesome of Teh Ribbon?!

Re:But is it art?

[Quiet_Desperation]

Aw. Someone needs a hug.

Copying

[sixtyeight]

I was just watching the Developer's Preview. They were touting "a new kind of copying files ... you don't have to copy files to your hard drive anymore, they can just stay in the cloud".

Well how nice! Why have the tedium of being sure your files will be there when you go for them, when you can suddenly become dependent upon a third-party service? It's not like they've ever ratcheted up the price on their customers before.

I'm just waiting for them to abandon the hard drive entirely, in favor of a coin slot. Using your computer will be just like internet video poker.

Re:Copying

[adonoman]

I think you missed the point of a new kind of copying - they're finally fixing the wild guesstimates, uninformative dialogs, and constant interuptions when copying files using the GUI. It finally lets you queue up copy operations, has a helpful keep/replace dialog that only prompts once at the beginning, and actually maintains a graph of copy performance if you go to the advanced view.

The cloud thing is a whole different issue.

Re:Copying

[sixtyeight]

Spread a bunch of trendy coffee-shop, faux-minimalist, designer-colored graphics over it, and make sure it works with social networking, and the majority of people will mob to buy it. /. types won't find much value in using it, but will be able to make a bundle coding glitzy apps for the technologically-unsophisticated social networking crowd. I suspect Microsoft has been watching Planet of the Apes again.

Re:Copying

[SplashMyBandit]

That's funny they want your files in the cloud considering Windows Azure just went 'tits up' for an extended period (possibly due to them not being able to handle a leap year - that would be amazingly dumb if true).

Re:Copying

[NJRoadfan]

Wasn't all the changes to the file copying interface in Vista supposed to fix all that? Oh wait, it made it worse. It turn file copying into a twisted "choose your own adventure" game.

Because you haven't bought enough blades

[tepples]

why did they feel compelled to "monetize" my game console? They already got paid for it.

Because Microsoft didn't yet get paid for games that you haven't yet bought for it. In video game consoles, there's a concept called "attach rate" of how many licensed games and licensed accessories are bought for each console.

what's new?

[DaveGod]

So what are the significant changes? Other than the UI.

I did try Googling a few previews, they talked about the UI.

Re:what's new?

[gl4ss]

well, server version has a new filesystem option.

3 processes less(MEANS NOTHING! but fills a powerpoint slide) running by default.

screenlock screen has some data on it, about how many mails etc. you know, the kind of thing you'd usually just use some 3rd party sw. could easily be shipped as a win7 sp extra.

you'll have refresh points. you know what restore points are? yeah, those. but they're refresh points.

it's like they gave 7 to a fucking UI modder and then lied to him that the dominant platform for running it is going to be a 10 inch slate, gave him an android honeycomb tablet and told it to copy that but "make it more metro!". well, what matters really is that it defaults to booting to metro and the desktop mode has no regular start button anymore, probably to discourage you from using it(apparently you'll have to pin programs to the taskbar, which all nice and good except for first launches and for seeing wtf all legacy stuff you have installed in the first place - also, making the regular desktop a bit worse and slightly better in some other ways doesn't make much sense either, you can mount .iso's in w8 without extra programs, file copy dialog is like a copy of a decent drop-in-replacement for explorers file copy and so on).

Re:End User, as in End User License Agreement

[Dog-Cow]

Because "End User" is just as ambiguous in this context as customer.

Re:A new kind of copying

[MightyMartian]

Exactly. How else do you think Hitler came to run China?

Inspired by Windows Phone, with no market share

[G3ckoG33k]

"inspired by the lovely and intuitive presentation found in Windows Phone"

Is that just mean, or plain ignorant? The Windows smartphones have no market share any longer. Look at the stats for smartphones - http://www.engadget.com/2011/12/14/shocker-android-grew-us-market-share-after-q2-ios-was-static/

That expensive effort from Microsoft was killed by Android and Apple.

Why copy a product with a sinking market share? Do they believe the new Nokia hardware will sell their operating system for PCs?

Re:Inspired by Windows Phone, with no market share

[SadButTrue]

Because Microsoft believes, and correctly so, that no matter what they do to their OS PC manufacturers will still preload it on all of their hardware. This will lead to more developers targeting metro apps which, in time, will lead to a more robust ecosystem for their phone platform.

Re:Suspicious..

[masternerdguy]

And it's a bad interface in both cases. I love Star Trek but the Federation's UI designers should be shot with a phaser on maximum, and everything they ever touched sanitized. Colored tiles are a really bad interface model.

Turnabout

[Anonymous Coward]

"HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer" in regedit, set "RPEnabled" to "0". Haven't tried it myself (don't have Win8), but supposedly it completely disables all the Metro and Ribbon stuff in Explorer.

all of this low-level technical registry mumbo-jumbo that Grandma could never handle is why we will never have the Year of the Windows Desktop...

I'm gonna be hated LOL

[BudAaron]

I used the Developer Preview as my main OS for a few weeks. On Windows 7 I pin all of my apps to the taskbar. I did the same thing with Windows 8. So I had all the goodness of Windows 8 but all the availability of Windows 7. I came to think of it as Windows 7 on steroids.I may well go back to Windows 8 as my OS of choice.

Re:I'm gonna be hated LOL

[shutdown -p now]

Pinning the apps is all well and good, but I don't want to pin all the crap that I need only occasionally (and there wouldn't be enough space for that, in any case). So I would normally use search to find those, i.e. press Win and type whatever it is. Which, of course, still works in Win8, but the fact that it pops up the Metro UI is so distracting that it drives me nuts.

Yeah, yeah, get off my lawn.

Very slim margins

[tepples]

I paid for the device

But you didn't pay enough for the device. Console makers traditionally make very slim margins (or occasionally even a loss) on the device in order to make it up with high margins on the products that contribute to attach rate.

Re:Very slim margins

[gstoddart]

But you didn't pay enough for the device. Console makers traditionally make very slim margins (or occasionally even a loss) on the device in order to make it up with high margins on the products that contribute to attach rate.

I understand what you're saying ... buy why is it my problem? I'm not here to prop up their business model.

As I said, they can also find out about the detach rate too.

Re:A new kind of copying

[Geoffrey.landis]

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:Microsofts going out of business sale

[Minter92]

This tactic has worked well for apple over the last ten years.

It reminds of Yahoo and Portals

[SmallFurryCreature]

Remember them? When your ISP still thought that you would visit their home page for anything else but to find the way to cancel the service?

Yahoo was just one of many to do this and often it meant that what you came for was completely impossible to find. MS has never lost this, its web presence is a design nightmare. There really even isn't one. Every little thing gets its own site, often barely working and then gets forgotten. It also happens to bigger things, MS pushed its own solution for selling music for music players, then it dropped it completely when it launched the Zune and then it dropped the Zune. Games for Windows has had many forms, launched and forgotten again.

But now... this approach has made it to the desktop and it ain't new at all. Active Desktop, widgets,gadgets, someone at MS seriously believes that people spend all their time looking at their desktop. Are you? Right now, how much space on the screen in front of you is taken up by the browser?

Right... where are all those Metro blocks supposed to go?

The engadget article doesn't suprise me. Did you see the monitor in the video? I didn't even know they still made them that small. The original Mac had a bigger screen for fucks sake. Now try the same interface and the scroll down for start menu on a triple 30 inch monitor setup. And I am thinking of going to 6. Apples unified menu system, Unity, Gnome 3. They ALL suck with big screens. Of course not everyone has a big screen... even more reason to use the available space for what you are working on. Where are the metro apps? Hidden... now you want something else... so you are supposed to minimize all applications, then click on the desktop and get that app running fullscreen because you need full details... that is handy?

No... this is a classic designer mistake, it looks pretty but it isn't usable. If you demo it, you have only one app running and as you make the metro desktop appear you pause and show the wealth of information available to you and how easy it is to get a detailed view open... very nice, very smooth and totally NOT how you do it when you are working.

Jagged Alliance 2 was a turnbased game that on every move, had the bottom 3rd of the screen drop out and appear again to change the display. Very pretty... once... the millionth time, you want to exterminate the designer and everyone he ever met.

I just don't see people use their PC's the way the metro app seems to think. Most people I know work with either full screen applications or have them covering the desktop and switch them the taskbar or by alt-tabbing. The desktop just never is in view. That is why Active Desktop never got anywhere, people never saw it. With the new linux desktop Enlightenment it is possible to make animated wallpapers... cute... and there is a reason nobody else has bothered with it, because you never see the damn thing. The desktop and start menu are there to get you started... from then on, you switch between applications and never ever close them. Only the most infrequent users and under powered constantly shut down their PC and start it up again. I know one person like that and she has firefox on autostart and arranges it to cover the desktop with her IM.

The Metro style is the domain of movie UI's. I remember one Sci-Fi movie with I think Robert Sellect (magnum PI) in which he goes through a morning routine with a robot. It is a common enough scene in future movies and it just doesn't happen. A: No human being can possibly care to be informed in detail about the weather outside, the news, appointments, social chat with relatives, banter with the AI before they got a cup of coffee. B: Any AI system at the moment that would display so much information would display the wrong thing at the wrong time and C: INFORMATION OVERLOAD.

I check my mail... then I read the comics... then I check the weather. Display them all at once... and WHERE ARE YOU GOING TO PUT THE ADS FOR THOSE FREE SERVICES?

I think this will be another MS Bob. Vista? To small a disast

The more things change the more they stay the same

[kirkb]

http://i.imgur.com/avgcv.jpg

Mixing metraphors

[psydeshow]

I'm a longtime Apple guy who also owns, uses, and mostly enjoys Windows Phone 7. Metro is a fresh take on what software should look like, and since Apple hasn't done any graphic innovation since 2007 I really appreciate it.

But on the desktop? Mixed in with traditional Windows applications? On your boss's computer? OMG train wreck!

Mixing two UX metaphors is an unbelievably bad idea. It's a big reason why Linux on the Desktop is a hard sell. It's why people intuitively avoid Java applications. It's why Adobe has struggled on OS X. And in all three of those cases we're talking about power users having trouble switching UX contexts.

If you do this in plain vanilla Windows you're going to have confusion on a whole new level. Grandma is not going to understand why some apps work this way and some apps work that way. Or why there are two versions of Internet Explorer. Or what happened to the Start button that I've been clicking to do *everything* for the past 15 years?

I have a lot of respect for Metro and what the team behind it is trying to do. They should just stick with a phone/tablet OS that is Metro-only all the time and not try to do this unholy mix on the desktop.

Too soon

[Lawrence_Bird]

Uncle with the OS do overs. Win 7 has been out less than three years. Heck I still have two desktops running XP because a) it works and b) I don't have to buy new hardware just to make the OS work. Win 7 is stable enough that they should be doing incremental point releases to that and not wholesale changes like win 8. Who is crying for this crap any how? And you mean there was no way to modify 7 to work as desired on a tablet? Hard to believe. Freaking NetBSD runs on damned toasters and mega servers for gods sake!

Re:Too soon

[Your.Master]

Much as I'm not a fan of this interface on the desktop, I think this *is* the way to modify windows 7 to work as desired on a tablet.

Windows 7 ran on tablets for years and it sucked because the entire interface was designed for a mouse and keyboard, with some bones thrown in for keyboard-only users. Tablets have fundamentally different constraints -- not nearly as precise as the mouse, so you need much larger hit targets and hit-testing correction; there's no "right-click" or any other button, so contextual UI has to be redesigned; can "instantly" move the pointer and even have multiple pointers simultaneously, enabling new interactions; no hardware keyboard means the UI has to dynamically account for a software keyboard; etc..

That's what the original iPhone got right: a phone is not a small desktop. People weren't asking for specifically what an iPhone was because they lacked the words to express it, like the tale of Ford and "faster horses". However, Apple seems to think that tablets are huge telephones -- and to be fair, iPad sales aren't exactly lacking, so they have a point to some extent. I think there's a different optimum to be found in that form factor, though. Microsoft seems to be betting on something that's a bit more phone-like but not really a big WinPhone, coupled with the old desktop which continues to work as crappily as ever on a tablet. From an approach perspective, I think it's interesting and promising for tablets. I think it's a mistake for any machine that doesn't primarily use touch input. I would recommend Microsoft make Metro the second-class citizen when you use mouse & keyboard, and make desktop the second-class citizen when you use a Touch device. Of course they don't want UI divergence because it would bisect their famously large 3rd party software market. But that's going to happen anyway because the compatibility is still there and the desktop is still better for mouse & keyboard. I think it's cool that you can run tablet-optimized software on a desktop and desktop-optimized software on a tablet, but I don't think that's what you should spend most of your time doing.

Sponsered by MS Sales article?

[cayenne8]

I have to believe this is one of the new "sales" type posts on slashdot. The part saying "inspired by the lovely and intuitive presentation found in Windows Phone" sounds more like a sales brochure, than a post about a new OS product on a Slashdot front page...?

Re:Sponsered by MS Sales article?

[danlip]

actually it sounded like sarcasm to me :)

Re:Windows 7, we hardly knew ye

[ChefInnocent]

It's like Star Trek movies. You can only watch every other one. 95 bad, 98 okay (SE better), WinME bad (Win2K was fine, but consumers hated it), XP okay, Vista bad, 7 okay, 8 bad. Windows 9(?) should be okay.

Re:Might work as a tablet OS...

[gstoddart]

I'm actually currious how long or if the tablet concept can hold up. They are great for reading, great for reviewing on the go, but I don't see any real advantage for creating content.

Because the use case for the tablet isn't primarily for creating content.

Everyone I know with a tablet is using it to surf the web, play games, play videos, and do a small amount of email. Doesn't matter who makes it. It's not their work machine.

As long as people know that they're buying a secondary machine for doing other things, the tablet concept will hold up.

Not everyone is doing advanced photo editing or writing spreadsheets -- in fact, I'd be hard pressed to tell you the last time I made a spreadsheet. But when I travel on business, the tablet lets me watch movies on the plane, check news and gmail from the airport and hotel, and gives me some games to play in the evenings, find nearby restaurants. After work I can put it on the hotel bar, have a drink, read a few things, and then decide what I'm doing that evening.

My last bunch of business trips, I've brought my laptop, but never used it. My tablet, however, gets loads of use.

The advantage is that I can use it in my recliner, in the backyard, in bed, in a car, and more comfortably in an airplane than I could a netbook. I can't do any content creation on my music player either, and I'm OK with that. Because that's not what I bought it for.

Is it so hard to accept that probably the vast majority of what most people are doing is simply consuming media? To me it's mostly an entertainment device with some light internet connectivity, and works well as that.

My brother managed to get himself a 7" Android tablet for about $150 after Christmas, and he's not much of a techie. But, he uses it for eBooks, watching movies, and quickly checking stuff on the internet. He occasionally does some CAD work as a hobby ... but he uses his desktop for that.

Do you have a smart phone? If you do, are you concerned you can't do any serious work on it? Or are you using it differently than you would your desktop? (In fact, I know people with smart phones who see the tablet as something they don't need ... I don't have a smart phone, so the tablet is better for me. To some people, they fill the same niche.)

Anybody who expects it to replace their work machine is going to be disappointed. If you have a little spare cash to buy it as an entertainment device, it's worth the money.

Wait for Win9

[kirkb]

Honestly, I think Win8 would be better off deprecating the desktop and being metro-only. But this can't happen on day one, because users will be in a situation where half their apps are metro and half are legacy. So Win8 forces us to endure the jarringly schizophrenic clash between Metro UI and the Classic Desktop. It's the "transition version" of windows. Win9 will get it right.

Re:My desktop?

[Sez Zero]

As such I will not buy any computer with Windows 8 on it. Hope Apple realizes this before the next OS X is released, but I doubt it.

I'm pretty sure Apple is quite happy to sell you a computer with no trace of Windows 8 on it.

Re:Windows 7, we hardly knew ye

[UnknowingFool]

I see two major strategic problems here with the Win 8 approach. The first is the MS insistence that everything must be Windows. Tablets are not another kind of device; they are PCs. Thus Win 8 shall be an all-one type of OS that works on tablets and desktops. Apple and Google take a different approach where a desktop OS is not the same as a tablet OS for practical purposes. I don't think this everything is Windows approach will work very well for users.

The other problem IMO is MS really lacks a sense of design and style. The tiles just look like someone threw them together. Going for simplicity is great but it looks to me MS isn't really trying.

Math fail

[SPBesui]

2012 - 1995 = 17. For some reason that doesn't shock me.

So just disable metro:

[Anonymous Coward]

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:A new kind of copying

[UnknowingFool]

Well Apple paid Xerox in IPO shares to the rights to use what they learned from Xerox PARC engineers. In the end, the Xerox engineers have Apple guidance and fundamentals of GUI. Apple had to build it and implement their own vision.

Re:You can bypass the Metro UI completely

[shutdown -p now]

It likely uses an undocumented registry key in Windows 8 developer preview to disable Metro. That key is gone in consumer preview.

Windows is cyclical.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's always been this way.

• 3.1 == Meh
• 3.11 == Woot
• 95 == Meh
• 98 == Woot
• ME == WHAT IS THIS FUCKERY?
• XP == FUCK YES
• Vista == NO WAY GUYS ITS AWESOME THE WAY SHIT BREAK SRANDOMLY VISTA IS OKAY GUYZ
• 7 == Oh thank fucking god.
• 8 == Windows for Metrosexuals

I suspect Windows 9 will bring orgasmic joy to those who opt to suffer through 8.

Also, the conspicuous lack of 2000 is intentional; while it is unarguably the best Windows ever(tm), it (like NT before it) was not targeted at the LOL I M USING TEH INTERNETS crowd.

Re:A new kind of copying

[geekoid]

Apple bought the rights to use it, MS abused a contract with Apple to claim they could use it.

A few actual things

[cbhacking]

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:Suspicious..

[geekoid]

Are you insane? Color differentiation is the recommended way to impart information quickly and intuitively.

LCARS is actual interesting. It's basically a dynamic menu(like Macs) on the side but with strong indication of whats going on. If you think about it, that make a great deal of sense, because the operators are really just putting information together, all the complex work is done by the computer it'self. SO you want to pull in the deflectors shields, and tie it to the shield within certain parameters.

Being able to present the pertinent information distinctly is key. With people access more and more information, but have a limited space to work, this style is how you would do it.