IvanV

Microsoft will release a developer preview of its upcoming Windows 8 operating system tonight, the company announced at its BUILD conference in Anaheim, Calif. today.

The download will be available via the Windows Dev Center at 8pm Pacific time Tuesday night. That includes a 64-bit (x64) build with development tools to build apps and a 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) build without development tools.
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Source: PC Magazine

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If anyone has Portal 2 and hasn't played the co-op and wants to do me a favour, let me know (PM me or whatever).

Judas

hmmm this should be interesting.... wouldn't that be something if this version fixes all the issue i'm having with my SSD

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IvanV

Well, could be, though it's described as neither feature complete nor stable. Either way, I've got an empty 100GB partition ready, so when I wake up in the morning, I'll get the download started.

__________________
If anyone has Portal 2 and hasn't played the co-op and wants to do me a favour, let me know (PM me or whatever).

Judas

well running it on a heavily modified HP slimline s3720f style system (4gb of single channel DDR2 PC6400) with a NVidia GeForce 9600GT... 320gb deskstar sata drive... and a asus BD-ROM drive...

so far... pleasantly surprised aside from the fact that for about 2 minutes i was fucking lost trying to get out of the control panel.... had to hit the damn windows key to make it go back to the screen....

and i'm a bit annoyed for the time being that clicking start will result in it going to that main screen as well.....

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IvanV

I just got home and installed it and... WTF?! Seriously... First I thought "Maybe I'm a little old school for this" when it asked me if I wanted to log in to my computer using my Live ID, but when it loaded the desktop (if that is a desktop)... scratch that, that wasn't the desktop, I've just found it (and I'm not making drama here, I wanted to post a screenshot, but I couldn't find Paint or anything familiar).
Ok, found Paint, but Ctrl+V doesn't do anything... I give up...
Oh, and BTW, Alt+F4 does not close an application, I don't know how to close Paint or that photo slide show thingy, had to use Task Manager, seriously...

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If anyone has Portal 2 and hasn't played the co-op and wants to do me a favour, let me know (PM me or whatever).

IvanV

I killed the evil entity called Metro! (here's how) After that, the look and feel is identical to that of 7. That's not particularly impressive. BTW, Metro apps are intentionally made so that you can't exit them normally, copying what we get on mobile phones, for better or worse.

Also, I get a weird bug where my mouse pointer freezes somewhere along the way when I try to quickly move it to the upper left corner. I-ve read of such a bug in ATI drivers, but I-ve never experienced it on any version on 7 or Vista.

EDIT: I installed Catalyst 11.8 Preview (because that's what I had on hand and what I'm using on 7) and it works like a charm, no upper left corner issue.

EDIT 2: When I selected Windows 7 on the OS selection screen, the PC was restarted (POST and all) and then loaded 7 without showing me the OS selection screen again. Strange way of doing that.

EDIT 3: I did a small performance comparison with Unigine Heaven. There is some graphics corruption (pronounced horizontal lines when changing scenes), portions are reduced to slideshows (10fps, on repeated runs, whereas on 7 I have around 19 min fps with the same settings) and not so smooth animation even on parts with higher framerate. Final score? Identical to that on Windows 7 (just over 1000 on default settings in 1920x1080). Hopefully this means that once they iron things a little 8 might even turn out faster than the predecessor.

On the other hand, those screenshots showing how much less RAM it will use? Forget about them, at least from what I've seen, it will be the same as 7 (though that's not really too bad).

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If anyone has Portal 2 and hasn't played the co-op and wants to do me a favour, let me know (PM me or whatever).

mkk

Yeah they say you're not even supposed to close those "Metro Apps" but leave them running all the time. Good luck with trying to teach Windows users that after a decade of teaching users to close what they don't use.
I was installing the preview today but the drive I planned to using seems to have died half way through. With all the information available I'll just wait until the actual beta.

Robert McClelland

I'm about installed windows 8 on my partition hard drive I got all windows 7 up to dated and installed windows 8 next. I let you guys know tomorrow if creative drivers install hehe.

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"XTREME AUDIO IS CRAP!" "There no support for it. It's crapist card on face of the earth it should be throw into the sun"
http://www.speedtest.net/result/1949536385.png
correct the correct one now

Robert McClelland

Found issue it doesn't installed AMD SB lol I had refreash my system yikes. lol But so far I'm diging into win 8. Only issue after refreash no windows media player lol.had used old one from my other system lol. But great news I got first ever creative driver for PCI XFI for windows 8 to work .

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"XTREME AUDIO IS CRAP!" "There no support for it. It's crapist card on face of the earth it should be throw into the sun"
http://www.speedtest.net/result/1949536385.png
correct the correct one now

IvanV

I think that it's a bad decision. I've read a complaint from a guy who opened one of the apps to check it out and when he was done with it, since he wasn't supposed to close it, he simply went and fired up Photoshop to see how it will behave. As he was doing that, the silly app you're not supposed to close was still playing some silly music in the background, which I hardly think is ideal. And it's obviously not just him, that's the standard behaviour only I've been killing the buggers with Task Managers so I didn't bump into that. So, while it's cool that you "don't have to" do it, an option to exit or suspend the application would be more than practical!

Also, making a trivial app run completely full screen so that "you don't get distracted", while all the normal applications still have all their normal window decorations and the ability to resize their window, doesn't sound like a valid argument. I think that it's just the fact that they are porting the whole thing from cellphones and not any usability concerns.

Then, replacing normal desktop and taskbar and programs menu with one huge scrollable surface where you find literally everything is another thing copied from cellphones and it works fine there (although I actually wish there was a better way of organizing apps on my phone as well, so I was never sold on that in the first place), but there is no reason why a proper desktop computer would be limited to something like that. Plus I don't think that it "agrees" well visually with the normal desktop that you switch to when you load a proper desktop application (which is what I'm guessing I'll be sing most of the time anyway).

So I'm not keen on Metro being stuffed down my throat. It might be all right for a phone or a tablet, but I don't want it on my desktop PC. Especially since it denies you a proper Start Menu and Programs menu and you have to start it's version of Control Panel and then ask it to load the normal one when it's enabled. By strange coincidence, that's exactly what Ubuntu users were complaining about in the latest release which uses Unity UI, that Canonical was turning their desktops into cell phones. Oh, the humanity!
Yikes! Sorry to hear about that.

__________________
If anyone has Portal 2 and hasn't played the co-op and wants to do me a favour, let me know (PM me or whatever).

mkk

Yeah the default to fullscreen is another awkwardness for a desktop system. Even if it's possible to rearrange so that one part of the screen runs one thing and another half or third something else like in the demos, I don't really fancy working on something on the side of the screen. I will give it a good chance once it's out though, but seeing that there's even a simple registry switch to turn Metro off I have good hopes for Windows 8 for my own use. And I think there's a lot of potential in the Metro style app model development over a period of time. On overall it's a good move, even if it's somewhat awkward for desktop systems with large monitors.

Robert McClelland

My PAX PCI XFI Software suite works on Metro :P

__________________
"XTREME AUDIO IS CRAP!" "There no support for it. It's crapist card on face of the earth it should be throw into the sun"
http://www.speedtest.net/result/1949536385.png
correct the correct one now

Jac

Seems to me like their trying to hit two different targets with one shot. The Metro UI might be good for tablets and smartphones but for desktop use it's not ideal. It feels clunky when you're using one interface and then it just jumps back to the other.

Turn off the Metro UI and you have something almost identical to Windows 7. I do like the squared edges of the Aero interface though. Even on a Full HD screen the corners on previous versions of Aero always looked like a pixellated mess.

I'm getting a few UI quirks especially with Firefox (Aurora) but other than that it seems pretty stable. Punkbuster doesn't work for me as I expected so I can't play BF2142 under this OS.

Judas

wish i could edit the start menu to some degree.

It's a little unsatisfying that they put all this effort into the touch system and then go back 17 years to a windows 95 style start menu and options..... using Hotkey combinations to get around including turning the damn thing off or restarting or whatever.

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BlueMak

What a shame. The more I read and watch about W8 the more I don't want anything to do with it.
W8, I plan to W8. My guess is if I have to get a new Windows, it will be 7. lol.

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The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others(Bertrand Russell)"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil,You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them." - Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis
This is slavery, not to speak one's thought. [Euripides-The Phoenician Women (c.411-409 B.C.)] http://www.macedonia.info/FALLACIESANDFACTS.htm Sic semper tyrannis.

Neshi

same here bluemak.. reading all these things, the more I am sure windows 7 suits me fine.

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If one does not attach himself to people and desire, never shall his heart be broken. But then, does he ever truly live?

Life is just too damn short for if's and maybe's

Judas

i'm still using windows 8 as my main OS..

it's really not all that bad... all the elements of windows 7... combined with some of the newer elements that are available in windows 8..... plus the boot times are impressive on a standard slow pokish 5400rpm 8mb cache SATA 1.5GBPS drive...

although seeing it boot up on a hybrid or SSD drive is omfg fast.

I'm sure after they get more of the feature fine tuned and options applenty... giving everyone the straight up windows classic interface either ONLY and allowing the manual disabling of the metro interface.... Windows 8 definitely looks and runs like a damn good OS so far.... stable as a rock for a pre-year release.

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