Windows 8 Consumer Preview - first impression

Thursday afternoon I saw an article saying over 1million people downloaded Windows 8 Consumer Preview (CP) on first day of its release.

I was so eager to join the club, so I installed it, too.

Yes, it happened.

The installation was done from my USB thumb drive, and it took about 5min 30sec again.

One thing I noticed this time is that during the installation, it's not really installing windows. Instead, it copies and pastes files from the USB to the hard driver. Why do I think so? Well, after this 5:30 "installation" period it restarts once.
Then, it starts to configure all the hardwares and install drivers during this 1st re-start. The configuration takes about 8 minutes.

So, I guess it's fair to say it takes 13-14 minutes to install Windows 8 on a decent hard drive.

One thing to notice is, its Metro UI became more PC friendly. In the developers preview it was quite  a hassle to find things I wanted with Metro UI on. Now I just type the first few letters of what I want, it'll bring them up to the front.

For example, if I type "cont", it'll find control panel and bring it to the front.

It's true that it's a bit odd to see Windows without "start" button, but brining the mouse arrow to the bottom left corner has similar effect as clicking "start" button. It may feel a bit odd, but I doubt people will have hard time getting used to this.

Here are a few important things I'd like to mention.
1. Firefox 10.0.1 is unstable. I just installed 10.0.2, and it's working fine.

2. Symantec Endpoint Protection 12.1.1000 64-bit Client doesn't run right. After installing it, it prompted me with a message requesting re-start. When I restarted, it entered infinite loop of re-starting. Well, it stopped looping by itself after about 4 re-starts, so it's not really infinite. Windows gave me a message saying it's trying to fix it, and when the fix was done all the Symantec files were gone.

3. MS-Office 2007 works fine (duh~!).

4. Internet Explorer 10 is still in beta phase. It's fast (faster than Firefox) and smooth, but you can tell it's not complete.

5. Within 10 seconds of waking up from sleep, my computer's wifi is connected to the internet, being ready for an action (fast re-connection is what MS has been bragging about)

6. When you click the bottom left corner of the screen, this shows up. It's like clicking "start" button. The problem is, it will show everything it has without suppressing details. I mean everything. Take a look at the picture.

See? It spits out everything on the screen. Everything!! Why don't they hide details?

7. App store is activated, but there's not much to see yet.

8. It comes with a built-in disc image viewer. No need for Daemon tools.

9. It has a pdf reader. It's not as versatile as Adobe reader yet, but it's there.


I'll write more about it if I find something interesting.