My MSDN subscription finally earned its keep this week. Windows 8 RTM, build 9200, went up for subscriber download last Wednesday, and I had it pulled down and installed on my desktop by Thursday night. Not the laptop I actually need for work, obviously, because that would be sensible. The desktop. The one with two monitors and a mouse that is going to fight me every single time I need to hit a corner.
I've been in it for about three days now and I want to write some of this down before I get used to it, because I already notice myself getting used to it, which is its own kind of warning sign.
First, the boot time is genuinely startling. This machine has a Samsung 830 SSD in it and it's going from cold to desktop, sorry, to Start screen, in something like eight seconds. My old Windows 7 install on the same hardware took closer to twenty five. I don't fully understand what they did under the hood and I'm not going to pretend I do, but it's not subtle. If nothing else survives from this release, I hope that part does.
The Start screen itself I have mixed feelings about, and I'm trying to be honest about which of those feelings are "this is bad design" versus "I have used a Start menu since 1995 and my hands know where to go." Some of both, probably. The full screen tile thing is fine on its own terms, I actually like the weather tile and the way live tiles update without you opening anything. But there is no Start button. None. You move your mouse to the bottom left corner of the screen and a little ghost of the old Start button appears and you click it and it kicks you to the tile screen. That's it, that's the whole mechanic, and it took me an embarrassing number of tries on day one to find it because I kept expecting something more obviously clickable.
The corners in general are a problem for anyone running dual monitors, and I say this as someone who apparently keeps parking his cursor in the top right by accident, which is exactly where the charms bar wants to slide out from. I've had the search charm pop up mid-sentence in a text editor probably a dozen times now. I assume there's a way to disable hot corners and I just haven't found it yet, or maybe I have to go dig through PC settings, which is a whole separate control panel from the actual Control Panel, which, sure, why not, let's have two.
One thing I want to note for the record: I keep almost typing "Metro" for the tile-based apps and then stopping myself, because Microsoft apparently can't call it that anymore over some trademark issue with a German retail company, and nobody at Microsoft has actually told anyone what the new name is supposed to be. So for now I'm just calling them "the full screen apps" like everyone else on the forums, which is not a name, it's a description, and that tells you something about where this naming situation currently stands.
File Explorer got a ribbon now, like Office did years ago, and I know some people are annoyed by this but I don't mind it much. Copy dialogs are better too, you get one combined progress window instead of five overlapping ones when you're moving a bunch of files at once, and it'll let you pause a transfer now instead of just canceling it outright. Task Manager got redone too and it's actually useful, color coded resource use, a proper heat map on the Processes tab. Small thing, but I use Task Manager more than I probably should, so I noticed.
I haven't touched the tablet-oriented stuff at all because I don't have a touchscreen, and I think that's going to be true of a lot of people running this on desktops. Whether that matters for how the whole thing is received when it actually ships to regular people in October, I have no idea. Three days isn't enough to have a real verdict. I'll probably write about this again once I've lived with it a couple more weeks and the mouse-corner rage has either faded or gotten worse.