The Windows 8 Thread

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groen said:
If they have made this API they might as well make metro skinnable and for it to be completely customizable. Have all sorts of weird ui elements and not just squares.

How long before we can have the same sort of features that we see in rainmeter application. How long before we have graphs of system usage?
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Give it time and all these things will be there...

Don't expect it to happen on pre-beta releases though. I don't know any developers working on Win8 projects yet. They're just tinkering with the new APIs to see what they do and how they work. Nothing serious.

Give it 8 months and it'll be a whole different matter!
 
Photek said:
It's the total opposite with Apple. I've been running OSX Lion in VMware for some time... compared to even Windows 7 it feels dated, let alone Win 8. It's just a bench of shiny icons and cheesy animations, but that dont make something simple, innovative, or easy to use.

It's amazing that it still has all the old "file / edit / view" options around the place, even on the desktop. That part reminds me of Windows 3.1! Only now has OSX just got the ability with the Lion update to resize a window from any corner, and to make a window full screen (to anyone who's not used OSX, i'm actually serious!). But if you have multiple monitors, you can only make a window fullscreen on the first monitor, which also then makes all other monitors useless (they go grey, you cant do anything on them).

People give Apple way too much credit. But then, the best thing Apple do is advertising.
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I've used Macs for over a decade, so I know all the differences. I never said OSX is perfect, I said "Apple have shown us that you don't need a thousand context menu items to make a great and productive OS", i.e. the OSX interface is far simpler than Windows, but that doesn't make it less productive.
 
I installed it on that tablet I had kicking around yesterday. It's an atom-based tablet with 2GB of RAM. They really are a pile of crap those atom processors. The WEI rating was 2.4 so you get the idea about how average this hardware is. Good news though - Win8 actually ran quite well on it. Boot was quick although login time left a bit to be desired. Once you were in though it was generally fine. Flipping between screens was instantaneous although running apps side-by-side wasn't great. For example, loading the weather app in it snap view alongside another app resulted in the background video spluttering and eventually grinding to a halt. Pretty ugly to watch.

One thing that has impressed me throughout is how responsive the Windows button has been - no matter how dire things look the Windows key/Start screen has always responded. Which brings me to a point - they really ought to consider, in my opinion, making killing apps easier than having to launch task manager and end the process. I'd almost go as far as to suggest making it a function on the Start menu, or double-tapping a hardware button like iOS. I know it's pre-beta and things are buggy, but it's such a chore having to kill apps this way.

One thing I wasn't so impressed with was the panning and zooming in IE10. It's not as good as the experience on iOS, although admittedly the hardware might not be helping in this case. I also found myself launching the Start screen accidentally by gripping the lower left corner of the tablet in such a way my palm hit the screen. This could be a bit of an issue with tablets with thin bezels but I wouldn't say it was a big deal.

Overall, I'm pretty sold on the idea of picking up an ARM based Win8 tablet when they come out which is saying something as I've not been particularly bothered about tablets since I use my iPhone for most mobile stuff.
 
Anyone else had problems getting a Win8 PC join a homegroup set up from a Win7 machine? Trying to join an already existing homegroup which Win8 can see but when I enter the password and wait for ages it eventually tells me that the homegroup no longer exists.

I've got IPv6 on both machines, times are synced with the internet correctly and both machines have the network marked as Home. Well, the Win7 machine does, but the Win8 machine is showing it as "Private" which I assume is the same thing.

Tried it from a Win8 install on a laptop and from a VM, both give the same results.

Also need to work out how to join a homegroup I set up on the machine I'm dual booting Win8 on...
 
With regards to killing apps, although you don't need to, I see a lot of uses for it. I assume MS will implement a long hold cards thing at some point, like that on Mango WP7.
 
Theres a few new posts on the MS Win 8 blog...

Reengineering the Windows boot experience

Protecting you from malware

Running Win 8 in a virtual machine

...The last one brings up a point that i was saying earlier on in this thread and also mentions problems i had. Basically if you run Win 8 in virtualization it's going to be crap. The UI wont run as silky smooth, the OS wont be as fast, it will have more bugs, and it wont use some new hardware features. Atleast for now anyway because no virtualization software properly supports Win 8.
 
i was pleasantly surprised by how well windows 8 ran in vmware considering my poverty spec host (pentium dual core/3gb ram).

but i'm now running it for real and i have a question. is anybody else running firefox 7 beta? i'm getting pretty bad graphical corruption all over the navigation buttons, address bar and min/max/close buttons. i'm running an nvidia 8800gts 512mb and latest drivers but i'm sure it's not that as all other apps are fine and so is windows 7 running on the same machine. i might have to consider another browser. :p
 
RobP said:
Anyone else had problems getting a Win8 PC join a homegroup set up from a Win7 machine?
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Found the solution, in case anyone else has this problem, you need to use a local account to join the homegroup. Either create a new local account and log in with that or convert your Live account to a local one.

Think I'll stick with the local account for the moment, it's nice to have settings sync between machines but I don't know how the live account works with WHS.
 
Dont think this has been mentioned yet (?) but the whole boot process has been updated in Win 8. I just added this to my original post...

The whole boot process has had a overhaul. All interfaces including the dual-boot screen for multiple OS's, the Windows Recovery Environment, Disk Check and others have been updated to use a proper graphical interface (no more text on a black background from the 1970's), and also include some new features. They now all support touch and mouse input too, not just keyboard like before.

 
New post about the secure boot feature.

There was lots of confusion from Linux using idiots that this new feature was something sinister from MS, as if MS was trying to stop Linux being installed on a Windows 8 PC. As secure boot needs a key and it would be hard for Linux distros to get keys, so therefore Linux couldn't be installed on a Win 8 PC.
But in reality secure boot is part of the UEFI spec, it's nothing to do with Microsoft, and W8 simply makes use of the feature and it's also something that can be disabled in the UEFI settings, atleast on most motherboards. So you can still install any other OS you like, and W8 will still work as normal with secure boot disabled.
 
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So are Microsoft going to put in a decent application system like on Linux? I like the ability to be able to centrally update all installed applications.
 
MilanoChris said:
So are Microsoft going to put in a decent application system like on Linux? I like the ability to be able to centrally update all installed applications.
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For Metro apps, yes, they all go through the windows store. In fact when an app has an update you only download the blocks that have changed which is great news for those on metered connections as in theory a small change in the code with equate to a very small download.
 
theheyes said:
For Metro apps, yes, they all go through the windows store. In fact when an app has an update you only download the blocks that have changed which is great news for those on metered connections as in theory a small change in the code with equate to a very small download.
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Delta updates, it's about time.

I hope you can disable Metro when it's out, standard start menu ***.
 
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