I've taken the plunge and installed Windows 8 Release Preview on my work laptop. I'll be living and working with Windows 8 as my primary OS for the next 30 days. I must say... so far so good. The only hiccup came from HP Printer driver installer that insisted I didn't have a compatible version of Windows loaded even though 8 is built on the 7 framework.
No Fuss No Muss
Installation was quick and easy. I purchased a 320 GB drive for my laptop and replaced the existing 500GB drive with my Windows 7 Pro load. This way, if I hit a sticking point, it's just a matter of swapping out the drive to get me back up on Windows 7 with all of my docs and settings still intact. The install to the bare drive went very quick from the 4GB USB drive I created using Microsoft's Bootable USB Maker. The install is image based, the same as Windows 7 and had me slogging through configuration dialogues in nothing flat.
I hit one sticking point where it asked me to use my favorite e-mail address to log in with. Uhh... no. A little looking around the screen brought me to the escape link that let me set up a traditional local admin account. The e-mail address is used to setup a Microsoft Live account for app store and cloud service integration. If you skip this step, you can set it all up later. The rest of install went very smoothly with only a few restarts to accommodate driver installations. After a very quick boot process, I was at the redesgined login screen and ready to go.
The Metro style start menu took some getting used to, but after about an hour of installing the apps I needed for work, I'd pretty much gotten used to it and had it pared down to just what I wanted there. You can right click and unpin any of the icons from the Start Screen to create a custom list. You can further drag the tiles around to create your own custom layout. I do like the weather tile which I customized for my locale. The photo tile can be set for a "live view" which cycles through your pictures in a slide show.
The desktop tile is what has taken the most pounding so far as it drops you out of the Metro interface and back to the traditional desktop complete with icons. Be advised, however, that the start circle has been removed completely. When you mouse down to the lower left had corner, you get a square live icon view of the start page. Clicking it returns you there instead of the Windows 7 style start menu.
I also have to say that I've been impressed with the snappy feel that the OS has as a whole. Granted, I have it loaded on an i7 with 8GB of RAM, but still, there's some noticeable differences between my barely a year old 7 load and Windows 8 Preview.
I'll be back with more screen shots and more impressions in a couple of days. But, so far, so good.
Happy Computing!
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