After their Build Conference unveiling of Windows 8 on Tuesday, Microsoft released a developer preview of Windows 8 for public download. After a little finagling, I managed to get it up and running on a Dell Studio 17 that has served me well over the years. This particular machine runs a 2GHz Core 2 Duo Processor and 4 GB of RAM. In every respect, it's a boring and fairly outdated computer. The screen is 17 inches, but for some reason this install wouldn't let me bump the resolution above 1220 x 768. As a result, everything looked a little stretched and worse than it needed to, but the new Windows 8 Metro interface was still a pleasure to look at and use. After a day of tablet demonstrations online, what was interesting was to use the new Windows on a traditional laptop. It's hard to get a full picture at this early stage, but it's clear that the Metro interface is built for touch. On a traditional computer, it's visually appealing but fairly pedantic to use. Aggravating this is Microsoft's insistence that it fall back to the traditional Windows desktop for certain tasks and apps. There will be much more to say over the next year, but for impressions and a walkthrough after only 15 minutes of playing with the system, check out the videos below!
Part 1: Boot, login, introduction to Metro apps and new Start screen
Part 2: Control panel, traditional desktop, IE 10
Part 3: Contextual menus (charms), Control Panel, Wrap-up