Microsoft has released their long-awaited Windows 8 Consumer Preview today.
The download is available, and is just a bit over 3GB as a full ISO.
We will be putting up a guide to installing the OS on your current machine in the next few hours, but for now you can download the ISO or set-up tools here.
Windows 8 is a radical departure from past Microsoft operating systems, as it uses ... [ read the full article ]
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So far the booting has been just as fast (if not faster) than the Developer preview. On a standard mouse and keyboard setup things feel a touch disjointed at first but I'm getting used to swapping between traditional apps and metro. I don't think it will ever be truly easy but its not too daunting either.
One glaring fault is with IE, not that it will ever be my main browser or a browser I use even occationally, but a lot of people do. I noticed though that they don't alow you to share anything between the two versions of IE that come with win8 not even bookmarks its messed up they better get that fixed or IE will loose even more market share.
I need to a touch screen to give metro a proper review but its smooth with the mouse and very responsive. The whole system is snappy and should be really productive.
Also after a few minutes I stopped missing the start orb.
I made sure to use older hardware so i could better gauge its performance. I used an old core 2 duo clocked at 2.4 GHz with 1GB of DDR 2 RAM and a SATA II 5200 RPM HDD the GPU is an old ATI 2400HD
I installed the Consumer Preview in a VM yesterday and played with it. After a frustrating hour trying to figure out Metro I decided that it will be good for tablets but not so great for desktops. The Metro environment is front and centre. The desktop feels almost second class, which it shouldn't. I'd love to see the user given choice of which default environment they want to use, this would allow tablet users to bask with Metro, and desktop users be productive with Aero. I guess we will see what Windows 9 is like.
