Windows 8 Consumer Preview review

So like I posted earlier, the consumer preview of Windows 8 is now released. The consumer preview is basically just a fancier word for beta. When Microsoft was making the developer preview they had to rush it out a bit and left out a lot of features which has now made it to the consumer preview.

A lot of people were very displeased with the developer preview but that release was just made so that developers could start developing metro apps. So now that the more polished and feature rich version is released I though I'd give you guys a review and give my thoughts on it.

Installing Windows 8 Consumer Preview

I made a page about this for those of you who are interested. There are quite a bit of changes but thing too major in there.

Here is the link if you want to read that: Installing Windows 8 Consumer Preview.

The start screen

So this is the new desktop/start screen. Maybe it's just me, but I dislike it. It is superior from a logical and statistically based point of view, but I don't like the looks or feels of it, at least not when on a desktop.

Scrolling down or up with your scroll wheel moves the screen right or left very slow and smoothly, and pressing right or left with the scroll wheel (like for example the Logitech G500 and lots of other mice can do) you jump towards that side you pressed. This feels right I guess, but it does feel like it was designed with touch in mind and I tried to press down with my mouse and drag to the side to move (like you would with a finger) but nothing happened.

Before we go any further I'd like to get something out of the way. The current Guest additions for VirtualBox does not support Windows 8 CP, so installing the drivers will not allow you to increase the resolution or get access to for example Aero. You can solve the resolution problem by typing in this in CMD (on your host, not the guest OS).

>D:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox>VBoxManage setextradata “Windows 8 CP” CustomVideoMode1 1920x1080x32

You will of course need to change the path or whatever you used to install Virtualbox, and also change the resolution to whatever you want to use (but leave x32 alone). Now start or restart your virtual machine and you should be able to change resolution.

Increasing the resolution will obviously increase the amount of space you got on the start screen. I'm not sure about you guys, but I will probably have a pretty hard time filling even one screen with this much space.

Pressing the right mouse button brings up some options which you can see in this picture. It appears that tiles can only be "small" or "large" and I am not sure if this will change in the future. Also, only some tiles can be large. For example, Internet Explorer can not be resized and will stay small no matter what you do.

This is what you get when you press the "All apps" button. It just shows you all your programs. I dislike how they now call programs "apps". It's not really a big deal, but it does feel like they changed just because Apple started using it and now everyone is.

When I want to start a program, I press the windows key and type in the first few letters and press enter. Microsoft has removed the start menu but luckily you can still search for programs. All you have to do is be at the start page and simply type.

If you are on the desktop then you will have to press the Windows key to bring you back to the start page and then type.

Windows Store

Now this is a pretty interesting addition. You might call me a hypocrite because I disliked the OS X App store, but when Apple launched it I thought it would be a slippery slope, which it kind of ended up being if you look at the new Gate Keeper program they will introduce in Lion. I hope Microsoft won't do this with their Store. Anyway, you can browse and buy applications in this store. I dislike the big empty space at the bottom and the bright white is a bit hard to look at. If you look in the right corner you see that I got 4 updates available.

If you click on the text telling you about the updates you go to this page, which shows which apps you can update. Just press the install button in the lower right corner and you will begin updating the apps you got selected.

Again, lots of bright and empty white space which I do not like that much.

Now here is something I like (except the bright white color). It displays lots of useful info in a clean and simply manners. You can buy and download a trial version of apps (this one is free so I didn't get the trial). You can also see multiple pictures, the description, what the major features are and the developer can add a link to their website if they want.

Like I said before, I did not sign up with my Microsoft account and you can't download apps without it. I simply used my hotmail account and started downloading. Also, that little button to the right of my password? If you hold that down you can see the password you have written. A pretty nice feature if you ask me.

Again, lots of empty white area. I am not sure how you guys feel, but it hurts my eyes. maybe I should turn my brightness down or something.

Anyway, this is how it looks when you download an app.

You might have noticed that there are tabs over the description and image on an app in the Microsoft Store. If you click the "Details" tab you will see more in depth info about the app like which architecture it runs on and what permissions it requests.

The last tab just shows reviews.

If you go back to the start page while downloading an app you will get a big live tile telling you that the app is downloading. 

In this picture I am downloading "Cut the rope", a very popular game which started out on iOS but has been ported to HTML5 and javaScript, which by the way are the languages Metro apps can written in (as well as C++, C#, Visual Basic and a few other).

Once the download is finished you will get a small notification in the top right corner. This new notification style is used all over the OS.

The desktop

This was actually the first thing I did when I had installed the OS. I went and installed the guest additions, which didn't do anything.

Anyway, I noticed this new notification box popped up which is far less intrusive than the old box which asked you if you wanted to run autorun.exe when you put a disc in.

If you click on the notification box you get a few alternatives which you can see here.

The new task manager is in my opinion pretty awesome. This is how it looks in the simple view.

The detailed list is, as you probably guessed, more detailed. Another nice thing is that you can expand the info of one process if it has multiple instances running, like tabs in a browser. Also, the programs change color depending on how much resources they use.

This is the performance tab. As you can see it has also gotten a facelift. I am not sure if I like this view more than the old one. Maybe it just takes a bit of time getting used to. You can still get the old resource monitor to open by pressing the "Open Resource Monitor"button at the bottom.

App history just shows you what apps you have recently used. I don't really see the point on a desktop, but on a tablet when something might be draining your battery life in the background it will be nice to quickly see what apps you have used and how much resources they used.

This is pretty interesting. I have noticed that switching user is a lot easier in Windows 8, and you often get the option to launch something as a different user easily accessible. This is probably very nice if you are sharing your computer with someone, or if you just have multiple users for security reasons. It is a good idea to have an admin account and a regular account, and only use the admin account when you must.

The details tab is basically just the old processes tab. Nothing special here as far as I can tell. It's nice that they help it though since it does feel a bit more powerful and mature than the new cartoonish controls.

The services tab is just like the regular services tab in Windows 7 and older versions of Windows.

The corners

Since Microsoft removed the start menu they had to replace it with something else to give the user access to certain things.This is where the corners comes in. If you hold your mouse in the bottom left corner you get the option to go back to the start screen.

Just hold your mouse pointer over and left click.

 The upper left corner is where you can switch between programs. Just hoover over the left corner and a thumbnail of your most recent used program will appear. Click to go to the program.

If you hold at the top of the screen your mouse cursor will change to a hand. If you hold the left button down and drag the window will be zoomed out, and if you drag it all the way down to the bottom you will quit the program. The desktop now acts as a program so if you do this while on the desktop, you will get thrown back to the start menu.

The upper and lower right corners are for the "charms". Here you get access to things like search, sharing things on social networks, going back to the start menu, access different devices connected to the computer and settings.

A boarder will appear if you move your mouse towards the buttons, and a clock will appear.

This is the settings menu.

I had a pretty hard time figuring this out, but in order to turn the computer off you open up the charms menu, press settings and you will get get the option to turn the computer off.

Explorer

This is how explorer now looks. Microsoft decided to keep the ribbon minimized by default and I think it looks nice. Please note that they have added the old XP back button which takes you back one folder in the system, instead of back to the previous folder you were in.

If you press the bright purple button over the address bar you get some specific options depending on which file you got selected. In this case I had a hard drive selected, so now I get options to turn on BitLocker, defrag it, format it and so on. These options change depending on the file you got selected.

Here are the options you get when selecting a picture.

If you click on a video you get options to play it and other things like that.

This is how the ribbon looks when it is not minimized. It gives you a huge amount of options and I can see myself using a few of these in the future, but leave it minimized for the most part.

If you press the file button, you get a few more options like if you want to open it in CMD and such. You also get the option to open it in CMD or power shell as another user.

The share tab is just what you'd expect. It gives you the option to email files, zip them (Windows has had built in support for .zip files ever since XP, but it's not that great) and a few other things.

If you want to change the way files are displayed in a folder you go to the view tab. It gives you lots of options to change and quick access to some of the more uncommon ones like show hidden files. This used to be quite annoying to get to and required you to go into sub menus.

This is the new copy dialog box. As you can see it how has the option for pausing a transfer, which is a great addition.

If you press the more details button you see things like how fast the transfer is going, how the speed has fluctuated , how much is left and so on.

You can now display multiple transfers in a single dialog box instead of having one for each file.

Yes that is right. Windows now supports ISO mounting as well as mounting virtual hard drives. I did not test a VHD but if you want to see that in action just head over to the article on Building Windows 8.

Mounting an ISO works flawlessly and I will most likely never use DAEMON Tools after Windows 8 is released. Very very nice addition to Windows.

Speaking of nice additions... Yes that is correct. Windows Defender now includes Microsoft Security Essentials out of the box. I am not sure why Microsoft didn't include this before. Maybe they were scared of getting accused for running a monopoly like they were with Internet Explorer.

The name collision box has gotten a facelift as well. It doesn't look that much different from the other one until you press the "choose the file(s) to keep in the destination folder" button.

This is what pops up when you press that button.

A nice and clean way of seeing which files are which, and an easy way of selecting which ones you want to keep.

Oh and I almost forgot. The old taskbar customization is still there for those of you who want for example a thinner taskbar.

I am not sure if this is in Windows 7 or not, but when an app, like in this case it was the weather app, tries access your location data you first get prompted if you want it to get that info, and then you will get a notification in your notification area telling you that it has gained access to it.

Most people have probably not used the Windows event viewer, but it looks pretty much the same in 7 as it does in 8. However, it seems like Microsoft has now made it so that when an app asks for permission for certain things, you will get a notification. If you click on that notification the event viewer opens up and you can see which app accessed that info, when it did it and lots of other things.

PC settings

Lots of new settings in here. I personally don't use a lock screen except on my laptop but it's nice to see that you can customize it a lot more in Windows 8 than in previous Windows versions. You can pick whichever picture you want for the lock screen by the way.

I like the options you get for your lock screen, but sadly I can't say the same amount the start screen options. Only 6 different backgrounds and the colors I showed earlier. Hopefully they will add stuff like the ability to pick your own picture later.

I won't show you all the options because most of them are boring, but this is a pretty hand feature. You now have the option to quickly refresh your computer (not sure what it does), remove all files and programs and start over (like a reinstall) and the option to boot from something like a USB memory stick instead of changing that in your BIOS/UEFI.

Also, there is now a built in spell checker.

This screen has one pretty interesting setting and that's "Make everything on your screen bigger".

This button makes everything on the screen about 50% bigger.

I assume this is for devices with high PPI like upcoming tablets.

Conclusion

I have no idea how I feel about Windows 8. There are a lot of things I like about it, but also a lot of things I dislike about it. I couldn't even figure out how to turn the machine off at first.

Microsoft has made a great job with lots of the features, and there are lots of stuff I haven't commented on in this article, like the reduced resource usage (my machine only used about 600MB), the support for secure boot, all the new drivers built in (for sensors, USB 3.0 and so on), faster boot, the new file system (NTFS is still standard but Microsoft is working on a new one which is included in Windows 8 Server), the improved backup and a bunch of other stuff.

So lots and lots of great improvements, but also that feeling that lots of the new stuff is designed with tablets in mind, and it does feel like they have just shoehorned into Windows when using it at a desktop.

Overall, I like Windows 8 and I will most likely use it when it is released. However, I will probably disable Metro if it is possible.