Windows 8 Consumer Preview

By Savyg on February 29, 2012 4:34:37 AM from

Who's excited? I'm excited.

I love the idea of the Metro UI to remove distractions and make computers more efficient (suspended apps will be taken off the CPU scheduler and most likely the video resources will only be in virtual mem). It was a little awkward on the Dev Preview but that isn't what the CP will look like anyway.

Storage spaces is probably my favorite feature they've talked about so far. I'm not sure I want to ditch my Win7 install yet though, but it probably won't take long using 8CP before I do.

I do wish ReFS was in the client builds, but it doesn't sound like it will be. (At least in the final OS...don't know about the CP.)

I definately like the plugin free browser idea too. Most of the time you browse they're unnecessary anyway.

Otherwise it's mostly just more efficient, and I can't argue with that!

+11 Karma | 196 Replies

It should have read "How to confuse the hell out of people 101"

Quoting Uvah,

reply 51

It should have read "How to confuse the hell out of people 101"

I seriously don't get it. It took me about a half hour using the dev preview and I was comfortable with it.

Which is why I laughed so hard at 'old dogs'

As the annoying little shit in the Mazda commercials says, zoom zoom!

I still love it. I got like two hours of sleep last night though so all you'll get from me right now is I got my Storage Spaces pool set up and am copying shiz to it.

OK, just for grins and giggles.

Running Win7 and Win 8 on the same laptop.

Win 7 gets higher WEI score than does Win 8. Just saying...

Quoting RedneckDude,

reply 54

Win 7 gets higher WEI score than does Win 8. Just saying

Indexing is updated as and when there are advancements in hardware ... in theory your WEI should end up going backwards each time you retest it....

I went all in and did an in place upgrade. Everything still works. There's a learning curve but once you get used to it it's quicker to use than 7.

I got my SATA and eSATA drive set as a Storage Space pool and that's awesome. Uninstalled Perfectdisk and cFosSpeed before I dove in, since storage spaces autodefrag, my other disks are SSDs, and the networking is improved over 7. Uninstalled Adobe Reader for Metro Reader just now.

There're a lot of right click actions that you don't expect at first but once you know where everything is it's fantastic.

Metro is undoubtedly not 'pretty' but it gets everything out of the way so you can focus better on what you're actually doing.

My only gripe is Windows Update...switching from Metro to the Control Panel ver for more information is just silly. Not really a huge deal but annoying.

I'd check my WEI score but I'm not really concerned. The drivers aren't final yet so whether it went up or down I'd shrug.

And the game/store apps don't seem to think I'm logged into my WinLive account. Not a deal breaker but keeping me from viewing the extra apps.

WEI is still 7.4 here.

What I'm concerned about is that it has two UI's on it and you have to switch all the time. For example, user settings are split between classic Control Panel and Metro PC Settings: some are in one spot and some are in another. It's certainly not unusable but it's quirky in an annoying way.

Quoting juryal,

reply 58

I think everyone would agree that 8 is progress in many ways. Microsoft is constantly adding features and refining things that make Windows more useful, like Storage Spaces. That's a neat idea, although I'm still not sure why you wouldn't simply RAID instead.

What I'm concerned about is that it has two UI's on it and you have to switch all the time. For example, user settings are split between classic Control Panel and Metro PC Settings: some are in one spot and some are in another. It's certainly not unusable but it's quirky in an annoying way.

From http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/01/05/virtualizing-storage-for-scale-resiliency-and-efficiency.aspx

Q) Are Storage Spaces some kind of RAID? If it is, what RAID versions do you implement?

Fundamentally, Storage Spaces virtualizes storage in order to be able to deliver a multitude of capabilities in a cost-effective and easy-to-use manner. Storage Spaces delivers resiliency to physical disk (and other similar) failures by maintaining multiple copies of data. To maximize performance, Storage Spaces always stripes data across multiple physical disks. While the RAID concepts of mirroring and striping are used within Storage Spaces, the implementation is optimized for minimized user complexity, maximized flexibility in physical disk utilization and allocation, and fast recovery from physical disk failures. Given these significant differences in objectives and implementation between Storage Spaces and traditional inflexible RAID implementations, the RAID nomenclature is not used by Storage Spaces.

Q) How does the read performance of a space compare to RAID 0 or RAID 10?

For both mirrored and striped spaces, read performance is very competitive with optimized RAID 0 or RAID 10 implementations.

It also utilizes the file system differently than your normal drive partition (256 meg blocks which the OS decides how best to fill rather than it just being a normal drive to the OS) and can be used with all types of drives (eSATA, SATA, USB 2.0/3.0, Thunderbolt, whatever) in the same pool.

Where can I get the dual boot tool. I want to run it on my laptop.

Quoting Uvah,

reply 60

Where can I get the dual boot tool. I want to run it on my laptop.

http://blog.laptopmag.com/how-to-dual-boot-windows-8-while-keeping-windows-7-as-your-default-os

Having played with it for a couple of days now, I can definitely say that this when this finally becomes the "mainstream" OS for all new machines, it will be the OS that will finally push me to OSX or Linux.

I see absolutely no benefit to my personal workflow for Window 8, and in fact seems to make it an altogether painful experience to try to get actual work done.

Quoting GAIAStevef,

reply 62

Why not just stay with with Win7? I mean the support for 7 will go on for some time, if the support for XP is any indication. I understand and agree with your sentiment though, but i suspect Start8 is not the end of what Stardock will be able to do with the new OS.

I dislike the Metro side of Win8, but whats under the hood does have me curious, only if Stardock can work some serious magic though.

Quoting tazgecko,

reply 61

Quoting Uvah, reply 60Where can I get the dual boot tool. I want to run it on my laptop.

http://blog.laptopmag.com/how-to-dual-boot-windows-8-while-keeping-windows-7-as-your-default-os

As usual I gotta run into problems. When I click on the link it takes me to the overview of the tool. Where's the download button?

Do you mean this?

Windows 7 USB/DVD Download tool
the link is under the sub heading, Create and Install USB Drive or DVD, which takes you to the Microsoft store online where the link i gave is located.

Uvah, the tool is included in the ISO. Boot from it, choose a partition other than your main OS partition. It'll do the rest.

Even better.

Thank you so much.

BTW - The reason I asked was because it looked as if they wanted bucks for the tool.

I thought that too at first, in the end i had to read the page...funny how that helps!!

[wrong thread]

Can someone here running Windows 8 install the trial version of Winstep Xtreme and see how the NextSTART component behaves in Windows 8?

If you don't know, NextSTART is a complete and mature (been in development since 1999) Windows taskbar replacement. If it works properly under 8, it kind of makes not having a Start Button in it a moot point. Especially because the Start Menu in NextSTART is fully functional, skinnable *and* configurable (you can add whatever you want to it, even new menus, via the built-in Menu Editor).

Quoting JcRabbit,

reply 71

Can someone here running Windows 8 install the trial version of Winstep Xtreme and see how the NextSTART component behaves in Windows 8?

Funny thing you ask that, I installed Win 8 earlier and was going to install Xtreme in the morning... well it's morning now [3.47am here], but when I get up later... as in I'm going to bed in the next 5 - 10 minutes. Will post back here with the result in a few hours.

Thanks!

I downloaded the consumer preview of Windows 8 but haven't had time to install it here yet because I'm currently too busy trying to get v12.2 out the door.

Okay....need some help please....so what velse is new.....I copied the ISO to a USB drive. Clicked on the setup.exe and got all the way to putting in the product key and had to stop. There wasn't an option, that I saw, to install it on a separate partition. What did I do or not do?

Quoting JcRabbit,

reply 71

Can someone here running Windows 8 install the trial version of Winstep Xtreme and see how the NextSTART component behaves in Windows 8?

If you don't know, NextSTART is a complete and mature (been in development since 1999) Windows taskbar replacement. If it works properly under 8, it kind of makes not having a Start Button in it a moot point. Especially because the Start Menu in NextSTART is fully functional, skinnable *and* configurable (you can add whatever you want to it, even new menus, via the built-in Menu Editor).

Want me to try the full version?

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Windows 8 Consumer Preview