Out of the Office

I installed the Windows 8 Consumer preview on the Samsung Series 7 slate (I have the Windows 7 retail versions not the build conference version).

The install was fairly straightforward and this time I was allowed to upgrade from Windows 7 rather than a “from scratch” install like the Developer preview.

The installer gave me a helpful assessment of my Windows 7 installation and pointed out any issues it could foresee with regards to drivers or installed applications. It even had a few recommendations as to how to deal with these issues such as downloading newer drivers, etc.

The install was easy, reasonably fast too. As soon as the Metro interface fired up I was excited until I ran into the first problem. I couldn’t connect to my home Wifi network. You need to be connected to access lots of things in Windows 8 such as personalisation settings, updates, activation.

I searched the web, un-installed and re-installed the drivers. Messed around for ages trying to work out how to install a driver in Windows 7 compatibility mode (see notes below) but all without success. Finally after literally hours of mucking around I found out the driver for my wifi card doesn’t support shared WEP keys in Windows 8 so I had to change my router to use an open WEP key. Fixed.

There are a lot of changes from the developer preview version. Lots of things now work better for a tablet but more interestingly there’s a lot of enhancements that seem to make it a better user experience if you’re using a mouse and keyboard. The scroll wheel works well to navigate and the right click does useful things in the Metro UI not just in the old desktop style parts of Win8.

The apps are few, and buggy and I have had crashes with most of them. This should get better as more feedback is submitted from us early adopters and as developers get better at both drivers, the OS and the apps themselves. A positive is that it’s easy to submit bug and error reports.

There’s things in this version that feel quite Android like in the usage. One of these is the app switching bar. In the Developer preview if you swiped in from the left hand side of the screen you could flick other “open” apps onto the main screen. These apps are sitting in a suspended state and you could switch to them this way, like alt tabbing. If the first app wasn’t the one you wanted you could back it out and swipe in again and it would change to a new app. It worked OK. Now though if you back it out it brings up a vertical menun of all the recent apps, similar to the honeycomb interface for recent apps.

It appears that every change has worked for the better and somw od the changes havw that wow factor that makes the touch experience better and you don’t even know how they could have thought of that – but it makes perfect sense.

This is much closer to a releaseable, usable operating system now.