So Microsoft finally let MSDN subscribers get their hands on the actual RTM build of Windows 8 this past Wednesday, and I did what any self-respecting person with too much free time does: downloaded the ISO the second it showed up in my dashboard around 11pm and spent way too much of that night burning it to a USB stick with that little Windows 7 USB/DVD tool.
I'm not doing the full review-format thing here where I walk through every panel of Settings. Plenty of sites will do that better than I could, and honestly by October when this actually ships to normal people there'll be a thousand of those posts anyway. I just want to talk about what its actually like to live inside this thing for three days on a regular desktop, no touchscreen, just a mouse and keyboard like some kind of caveman.
The Start screen is fine, actually. I expected to hate it more than I do. Tiles are big, colorful, and once you rearrange them into groups that make sense (mine's split into "stuff I actually use," "work junk," and a graveyard of pinned apps I'll never open again) its not the disaster people were making it out to be back during the Consumer Preview months.
The corners, though. Good grief, the corners. Every time I go to close a window or grab something off my second monitor my cursor drifts near the top right and the Charms bar comes sliding in like an uninvited guest. I've caught myself yelling at my monitor more than once this weekend, which I'm sure my downstairs neighbor loves.
And yeah, the Start button is gone, and I don't care that much, but I get why people are mad. Muscle memory is muscle memory. I've been hitting that bottom left corner for something like fifteen years and now theres just nothing there, until you remember its a hot corner and not a button. Small thing. Annoying thing. Adds up over a weekend.
Desktop mode is basically still Windows 7 with a fresh coat of paint, and thats where I ended up spending maybe 90% of my actual working time, because there just aren't enough Metro apps yet to make living on that side of the fence worthwhile. The Windows Store has this sparse, half-finished feeling right now, kind of like walking into a store the week before its grand opening. I counted about a dozen apps I'd actually want, and half of those were weather widgets with slightly different color schemes.
One thing I will say: boot time is genuinely fast. I'm running this off a regular 5400rpm drive in an old ThinkPad, not even an SSD, and I'm looking at maybe 12 seconds from power button to lock screen. That alone might be worth the upgrade for some people, especially anyone still nursing a machine that takes two minutes to limp into Windows 7.
Microsoft's also been pretty aggressive on pricing, which is honestly the smart move here. They've had that $39.99 upgrade offer running since June, good through the end of January, and thats a real change from the $120-plus upgrade pricing Windows has traditionally shipped at. Whether that's enough to get regular non-nerd people to actually want this UI shift is a completely separate question, and I don't think anyone actually knows the answer yet. Including Microsoft, probably.
I'm keeping this install on the spare partition for now rather than committing my main machine to it. Not because its unstable, its actually been rock solid the entire weekend, not a single crash or weird driver hiccup. Its more that I've got real work to do and I don't want to be relearning where every setting lives in the middle of a deadline week. Give it a month, once a few more apps show up in the Store and I've stopped accidentally triggering the Charms bar every four minutes out of pure muscle-memory panic.
Three more months until this actually ships to regular people on October 26th. My guess is this is going to be one of those operating systems where everyone forms a strong opinion within the first ten minutes of touching it, myself very much included. I already have several.