*From:* Simon Crees <(Address removed)>
*To:* Anorak Nation <(Address removed)>
*Date:* 28 Oct 2012 15:24:40 +0000

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.

Free thought + Free speech + Free radio = Anorak Nation
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