Now on Windows 8

Windows 8 Developer Preview runs surprisingly well on my old laptop which has only 1GB of RAM and is powered by a dual 1.8GHz Intel Core2 Duo processor. Basically, four year old specifications. Before going any further, I installed Windows 8 on a laptop which is essentially now just a back-up machine. I do not recommend that you install it in your primary PC. This is a Developer Preview Release. It is not even a beta yet. That being said, it works well and I have not had any crashes so far. The only thing I had to do was to install a the Intel Graphics driver (you can use Windows 7 drivers).  I am actually posting this while running Windows 8. Well, that is all for now. Here are a few screenshots.

Here is the start screen. To get here you hide to "swipe" up
 on the screen with the mouse (or less spectacularly tap the space bar), just like on a mobile phone.

Clicking on the icon (er... Tile) labled Desktop brings you to a familiar looking desktop. 

The traditional Windows Start menu is gone.
To find your Apps (yep... no longer call programs), go to Search.

If you use a Windows Phone 7 device, parts of it should look pretty familiar. If you use both a Windows Phone 7 device and a Windows 7 PC you should have no problem getting use to the new set-up. Initial impressions? It is different. I am not sure whether I like this or not, but it does work, and it is surprisingly fast. Will use it for a few weeks to give it a fair shake.

Posted in: Operating Systems