Windows 8 Consumer Preview: First impressions

I got my hands on the Consumer Preview of Windows 8 courtesy of Microsoft, imaged my netbook and PC, and decided initially to try a clean install on the netbook (a Dell Mini 9, 2GB RAM, 32GB SSD, 32GB SD card, 3G modem built-in, wifi/bluetooth etc, 1024x600 widescreen display). All installed fine, until rapidly realising that I couldn't actually use most of the metro apps. Then noticed I was running in 800x600, and had no display adapter installed. Fine, installed the Windows 7 driver, all great and accelerated.

... And still couldn't run the metro apps. Minimum stipulated resolution is 1024x768.

I did ugly registry hacks so they would work, via a virtual resolution scaling tweak (1024x768 into 1024x600, or 1152x864->1024x600) and they worked fantastically, albeit they looked somewhat lousy and stretched. I can understand locking a minimum resolution for games, but for the messaging app and mail clients, and Metro-ified IE? Pointless, utterly pointless, they'd have fit perfectly well. It's an arbitrary setting. The suggestion I'm going to stick on the MS feedback forums, and I hope it doesn't fall on deaf ears, is that each application should have a minimum resolution setting internally or via the registry or similar, and if it's below the minimum acceptable for that application - and to be honest, 1024x600 would likely be the bottom end, as there's a lot of the older netbooks that are at that resolution. Fine, don't give me the pinball or the option to run the apps that require a bigger screen, but don't impose that I can't run any because it doesn't fit an arbitrary minimum resolution, when they clearly would perfectly well.

After this, I wiped the netbook again, and tried doing an upgrade from the preview, as it hadn't picked up my built-in 3G mobile broadband card properly (by which I mean "it didn't show the signal like it did in Windows 7, and I couldn't do the nice automatic setup"), and I couldn't find the bluetooth system anywhere. It got all the way to the end... then told me it'd failed, and rolled it back. Nice. Installed it clean again, had a play with it, but it just seemed to be like Windows 7, with extra bits I couldn't actually use. I got severely irritated, and imaged it back to Windows 7.

Not to be deterred, I also installed it on my main desktop PC, after duly taking an image. On here, I fared a bit better - the Metro apps seemed to work. Well, they launched, anyway, configuring quite a few of them was nothing short of a nightmare. Clicking on add account to mail or messaging brought up blank boxes, attempting to add email accounts to the Metro mail client often got an immediate response of being unable to add the account or to provide further details - yet when I rebooted it worked?! The messaging client was quite annoying too - it was actually nice enough to use, but refused to actually sign out. Using the new Metro start screen wasn't too bad. As soon as you assigned Chrome as your default browser, Metro IE wouldn't work anymore (it reverted to desktop), and the app store just plain didn't work most of the time for me once I tried to clean up the duplicate machines I had due to multiple reinstalls, no matter how I tried to re-add the machine to the app store. Apparently once it's gone, it's gone, and I wasn't going to reinstall or delete my user for a few Metro apps. It also felt very weird that I couldn't just drag the start screen across with my mouse and clicking/dragging, like I would on a touchscreen - at least, I'm assuming I would. It felt completely counter-intuitive to use a scroll wheel to have to move across. Another note on counter-intuitiveness - the "charms", as they're apparently called. Top right and bottom right of the screen pull up a bar for settings and the like on the right hand side... yet I found myself continually going to the right hand side of the screen to "request" said bar. That bar should really just appear when you're on the right, if you want it to make any sense. The top left task switcher seemed like "metro app, metro app, metro app, WINDOWS DESKTOP AND ALL IT'S APPS, metro app", and the start screen was... well. It didn't make me happy. Clicking start, typing in what I'm looking for - great! You got that right, Microsoft, good show. It's what I do on Windows 7. But did you really need to throw that interface in, or is it change for the sake of it? Another bug that annoyed me - when I was networking into my NAS box, it plain refused to remember my password, regardless of clicking the "Remember credentials" button. Not sure why, could have been because it was the same name (capitalised and all) from Windows with a different password? Who knows. I'll report it anyway.

There's a lot of good in there. It's fast. From reading up, looks like they threw out some of the old compatibility crud. This is good. If people still need stuff that's just compatible with XP, I've no doubt XP mode will be made available in the same way it was for 7, and the old support for the likes of Windows 95/98 apps really needed cleaning out a long time ago. There's some nice concepts in Metro, but they need major polish, and an interface should be complementing my thought process, not making me switch mental contexts when I want to do things, and not getting in my way. That I think is my biggest complaint - Metro felt in the way, not a complimentary technology, just unnecessary cruft thrown in my face because that's the direction Microsoft want to go. Mind you, if they gave me the 7 start menu on the 8 core, I'd be happy with that, too. I can't see that happening any time soon though, it seems to be far too big a part of their strategy, and if it's not different enough, they'll not see people buying it. Of course, they could go the OS X route - "Here's your upgrade, it's not that unlike the last version but it's better, faster, and you'll appreciate the changes, £30 please" - which I'd happily pay. But again, I can't see that happening, seems they're already quite set on their course, and that would no doubt make the bean counters quite unhappy, not getting the margin they're looking for, although I suspect they'd sell a whole lot more units. Still, mere speculation, of course.

Sorry Microsoft, but unless you do something to drastically improve the experience between the Consumer Preview and the final thing, it's not something I'll be jumping on, or recommending to anyone. Which is a shame, I had a lot of hope for this operating system, and a lot of enthusiasm. Let's hope you do a better job with Windows Phone 8 - I quite fancy one of those Nokia Pureview cameras on a multi-core Windows 8 Phone. Hopefully Windows 8 apps will make it easier to get Windows 8 Phone apps too, as it's currently trounced on that score by iOS and Android, although there's obviously a lot of pointless rubbish on said app stores.

I want something that'll do everything I want, and not get in my way doing it. Do that, and you've got my custom and my heart, on the PC desktop. The phone side too for that matter. Until then, I'll be sticking to Windows 7, which does everything I need it to rather admirably. I'm wondering if Microsoft have put something that good together in Windows 7 that they're going to face the XP effect, which is still on desktops 11 years later, because it was good enough for the purpose.