The Windows 8 Thread

Glaucus · 14 Sep 2011 at 18:23

Conference running late?

Says starting at 9am PST, isn't it 10:20 already?

gropingmantis · 14 Sep 2011 at 18:54

I cannot for the life of me get this to work in Virtualbox. I load the .iso and I get the black screen that says Windows Developer Preview and three of the white dots for the loading animation appear and then it freezes. Any ideas?

Edit: Fixed it! Protip: Set to "Other Windows" NOT "Windows 7 64-bit" as mentioned in the linked article.

Edit2: Nope now its just looping the loading animation. Oh well.

Photek · 14 Sep 2011 at 19:03

gropingmantis said:
I cannot for the life of me get this to work in Virtualbox.

This is of the many reasons i'm looking forward to Hyper-V in Win 8. No more of this 3rd party junk needed!

marc2003 · 14 Sep 2011 at 19:24

is everybody ok running metro apps with a keyboard and mouse. i'm finding it a royal PITA!!

admittedly i'm running it inside vmware on a not so great pc but the animations seem smooth so i don't think there is much delay causing problems??

Glaucus · 14 Sep 2011 at 19:26

Which apps, socialite, news feed and twitter run fine with keyboard and mouse, as does the split screen.

I haven't tried the games, I'm assuming they are mostly made to show of touch.

Subliminal Aura · 14 Sep 2011 at 19:43

Anyone played with hyper-v ? I only see the management tools and the task manager says that Virtulization is disabled ? :confused:

Meatball · 14 Sep 2011 at 19:52

Looks like the BSOD as we know it has gone!

http://www.engadget.com/2011/09/14/windows-8-bsod-ditches-confusing-error-codes-for-uninformative-f/

Photek · 14 Sep 2011 at 19:54

Meatball said:
Looks like the BSOD as we know it has gone!

http://www.engadget.com/2011/09/14/windows-8-bsod-ditches-confusing-error-codes-for-uninformative-f/

Yes we know already

looks much better.

marc2003 · 14 Sep 2011 at 19:55

AcidHell2 said:
Which apps, socialite, news feed and twitter run fine with keyboard and mouse, as does the split screen.

I haven't tried the games, I'm assuming they are mostly made to show of touch.

my main problem is the start thingy doesn't always show when hovering the mouse in the bottom left meaning i can't seem to get out of the app (such as weather or news feeds). only frantic double clicking around the left edge at least gets me back to the desktop. also in the weather app, trying to add/delete cities was very unresponsive although that might just be an app thing?? :confused:

Glaucus · 14 Sep 2011 at 20:00

Will give that a try later,
I've been using the window key, easier than moving mouse around.

Watching today's keynotes so will be a while.

marc2003 · 14 Sep 2011 at 20:01

AcidHell2 said:
I've been using the window key

i shall try that. also i just noticed that from your other thread simply typing searches for apps. most handy - i was starting to get irritated by the lack of the old start menu.

it's typical, i lent my laptop to someone for a few weeks just when i could do with a spare machine for playing on. i'm sure it would be better on real hardware instead of vmware but it won't play nice with my existing dual boot setup - infact it completely nuked my bootloader without warning.

CAT-THE-FIFTH · 14 Sep 2011 at 20:14

For those who don't want the metro UI and want the traditional desktop,you can force Win8 not to run it via two methods.

The first is via the following registry change:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer
set the key RPEnabled to 0

The second is via renaming a dll file:

http://hypertext.azrul.com/2011/09/14/windows-8-disable-metro-ui/

I gave the second method a try if it would work and it seems it does.

Subliminal Aura · 14 Sep 2011 at 20:20

CAT-THE-FIFTH said:
For those who don't want the metro UI and want the traditional desktop,you can force Win8 not to run it via two methods...... .... ....

People doing this should be crucified :cool:

Evilpaul · 14 Sep 2011 at 20:25

Well, I've just given win8 a quick go and I've got mixed feelings about it so far.

There are some nice touches about the Metro UI, but with some stuff still using the old layout (e.g. system settings) it feels like the OS has a split personality. Also, there are elements in the metro UI that seem to imply that there was an assumption that the device it is installed on has multi-touch capabilities. This is all well and good as far as phones and tablets are concerned, but for desktops it's not a valid assumption.

In my day job as a software developer I can still see the metro UI becoming very annoying compared to the old style start menu, so I hope that there will be a more user friendly way to disable the metro interface than a registry hack or renaming a dll.

Glaucus · 14 Sep 2011 at 20:26

Subliminal Aura said:
People doing this should be crucified

Yep, also shooting them in the foot when it is released, it is clearly the future and if people spent a bit of time watching yesterdays keynotes, would understand why. Disable that and within a few years you'll be missing out on pretty much everything.

Today's keynotes are pretty much all developer orientated and not so basic as yesterday, but to be expect as. It is a developer conference.

So far there's two annoying things.

1) not knowing how to do stuff, but already learning by playing
2) it keeps flicking between metro and desktop as most things are desktop applications. So until most stuff is released as metro which hopefully will be on release day or before, that will be kind of annoying. But developers have a year to get there new apps ready.

CAT-THE-FIFTH · 14 Sep 2011 at 20:29

Subliminal Aura said:
People doing this should be crucified

AcidHell2 said:
Yep, also shooting them in the foot when it is released, it is clearly the future and if people spent a bit of time watching yesterdays keynotes, would understand why. Disable that and within a few years you'll be missing out on pretty much everything.

Today's keynotes are pretty much all developer orientated and not so basic as yesterday, but to be expect as. It is a developer conference.

So far there's two annoying things.

1) not knowing how to do stuff, but already learning by playing
2) it keeps flicking between metro and desktop as most things are desktop applications. So until most stuff is released as metro which hopefully will be on release day or before, that will be kind of annoying. But developers have a year to get there new apps ready.

People can do what they want. You have no right to tell people what to do. Its their problem not yours. They can choose whatever OS they want and whatever style they want.

Glaucus · 14 Sep 2011 at 20:39

Good god, calm down dear it's only an OS.

Are we stopping anyone doing anything, just pointing out it's pointless. Unless you aren't going to run metro apps and the chances of that will be small, due to developers.

CAT-THE-FIFTH · 14 Sep 2011 at 20:48

AcidHell2 said:
Good god, calm down dear it's only an OS.

Are we stopping anyone doing anything, just pointing out it's pointless. Unless you aren't going to run metro apps and the chances of that will be small, due to developers.

I think some of you need calming down TBH. I just showed a few links for the people who want to switch off metro(as mentioned in this thread) and now there are calls for crucifixion.

You seem to forget the massive installed user base of Windows 7 alone who won't necessarily all migrate to Win8. It will be years before all crucial applications will be metro only.

By then most people would have got used to it anyway!! Just because not everyone is gong to run Win8 at launch does not means their computer suddenly becomes unusable the year after! :rolleyes:

Deleted member 77746 · 14 Sep 2011 at 20:50

Great, we have movement.

Glaucus · 14 Sep 2011 at 20:50

It's a Pre developer version, it's not finished and probably not stable. There is zero point running it, other than to look at the new features.