It's been deafeningly quiet on here the past week or so !
Thought it was about time somebody sparked up a discussion.
Has anybody else on here had a play with - tried the consumer preview of - or subsequently now bought Microsoft's latest version of Windows ?
I had a play with a very early developers preview nearly a year ago - then tried the consumer preview earlier this year. To be honest , I wasn't that impressed with it in the early days - the new start menu with all those tiles over the screen just seemed to get in the way of what I was doing all the time. So I kept going back to Windows 7 and muttering about it to myself as you do when you find something just plain irritating LOL ! Then , about a month ago I acquired ( cough ! lol ) a RTM copy - the finished thing for manufacturers to install on new computers - and for reasons I still don't fully understand , it suddenly clicked. I actually found I could make this strange new start screen with all those coloured tiles do exactly what I want - you don't have to leave the ones on that are there by default when you first install it. You can create a Tile as a shortcut to whatever you want on your computer. These can be either purpose written - so called 'apps' _ the buzzword of the 21st century it seems - or traditional desktop computer programmes. Yes , you can switch to a traditional desktop view which looks very close to exactly like the one in Windows 7 if you want to - and indeed toggle backwards and forwards seamlessly between the two - New Windows start screen tiles , and traditional desktop.
The long and the short of it is that last Friday - the official release date of Windows 8 , I trotted into my local computer store and bought a shiny official retail boxed copy of it and installed it onto my main home computer which is a laptop.
It's clever the way they have made this perfectly usable for both the traditional keyboard and mouse , and ultra new touch screen devices. Once you get used to it , you can open and close and slide tiles around the screen , even just with a mouse or laptop touchpad , and work with speed you have never done before. It's also worth mentioning that it boots up from cold in under ten seconds , so is much quicker than before. When I eventually splash out on a SSD hard drive , it will be about half the time again !
I know that this posting might be taken as an advertisement for Microsoft , but I can assure you it is not intended to be . It's just a report into this much talked about new operating system based entirely on my own findings. After all , everybody who uses computers will have used Windows primarily in the past.
I think , initially , people might well dislike it on first impressions ,just as I did because people don't like change , so it's highly likely there will be some bad press about it from quite a few sources. However , if people learn how to make it work for then , as I have done , they might just find that it is in fact a step in the right direction.
