So I finally did it. Friday night, after Windows 8 went on sale, I sat down with a bottle of the cheap red wine that's been sitting on top of the fridge since some dinner party in July, and I paid my $39.99 for the upgrade download. Microsoft's been running that price since launch day for anyone coming from XP, Vista, or 7, and honestly it felt like a fair enough deal for a whole new OS, so I figured why not, my ThinkPad is three years old and could use a reason to feel new again.
The download itself took a while. I've got decent cable internet but the Upgrade Assistant tool chugged along checking my drivers and programs for compatibility before it would even let me pull the installer, and then the actual install ran for almost 40 minutes with the laptop just sitting there churning. I made dinner, came back, it was still going. That part's fine, I expected it, nobody upgrades an OS expecting to be done in five minutes.
What I wasn't ready for is how disorienting the first ten minutes actually using it are. You reboot, and instead of a desktop you get dropped onto this full screen of colored tiles, the Start screen, and there is no Start button anywhere to be found. None. I know this has been the big complaint since the preview builds came out over the summer, and I'd read about it, I thought I was prepared. I was not prepared. My hand kept going to the bottom left corner of the screen out of ten years of muscle memory and just finding nothing there.
Once you know the tricks it's not actually that bad. Moving the mouse to the top right corner brings up this sidebar thing they call the charms, which is where search and settings and the rest live, and Windows key plus X gives you a quick menu with Device Manager and the Control Panel and stuff a power user actually wants. That one I like a lot, honestly, faster than digging through Start menu folders ever was. But it took me looking it up to even know it existed, and that's kind of the problem with the whole redesign on a laptop with no touchscreen. This interface very clearly wants to be swiped and tapped, and I'm stuck clicking and dragging a trackpad through it like I'm using a touch UI with the touch part surgically removed.
The tile screen itself is a mixed bag. I like that Mail and Calendar and the weather app are all live and updating without me opening anything, that part is genuinely nice for a glance in the morning. But the app selection at launch is pretty thin. I poked around the store for maybe twenty minutes looking for anything worth pinning next to the built in stuff and mostly found placeholder-feeling apps or things that were clearly rushed out the door for launch day. That'll fill in over the next few months I'm sure, it always does, but right now the store feels a little like a house that's been sold but not moved into yet.
The desktop itself, once you get there, is basically Windows 7 with some visual tweaks, and that's the part I actually spend most of my time in for real work anyway. Browser, email client, a couple of dev tools, none of that cares what the Start screen looks like. So the honest verdict after two days is that I don't hate this, but I also don't understand who exactly it's for on a machine like mine. It feels built for a tablet that happens to also run desktop software, not for a laptop that happens to also run some tiles. My cousin's getting one of the new Surface tablets for his birthday next month and I have a feeling that thing is going to make a lot more sense of this whole design than my ThinkPad ever will.
Anyway. If you're on the fence about the upgrade and you mostly live in a browser and a couple of desktop apps, it's not going to break your workflow, just give yourself an afternoon to relearn where things live. If you're expecting your old habits to just carry over, they won't, and no amount of reading about it ahead of time actually prepares you for that first ten minutes.