Anyone else playing with it yet? Just got an e-mail today for the Dev Preview. It’s available to all if you go to the MSDN site. Made a partition and loaded it up, been playing with it a little bit. So far I like it, at its core its pretty much Windows 7, at the surface seems like more GUI change then anything else, although how windows is managing memory is a little different as it seems much more like a smartphone now.
Microsoft seems to be doing what Apple is doing between OS X and iOS, blurring the transition from the smartphone to the PC to feel more natural and more inter-connected.
Lock screen is somewhat like a smartphones, its a picture, shows the time/date and I belive you can add/remove information, you click and slide your mouse up to enter the user screen.
When windows starts you are greeted with a “Start Screen” basicly a full screen gui that covers the desktop, with links/pictures to apps you deligate. Once you get to the desktop everything is much the same, although the start menu is no longer the start menu if you will, clicking the windows icon opens up the Portal to the start screen in which you can select to go back to desktop/settings/apps etc, similar in look/style to that of Windows Phone 7
Sounds more confusing then it is, once you figure it out its pretty easy to use, I find that I like it even when some things may take an extra click or two.
If you have dual monitors, you can deligate which monitor you want to display the Start screen and still have a full desktop on the other.
Windows intergrates with a windows live account
Menus/options/settings are more detialed and easier to find/navigate.
File system now uses a Ribbon bar much like what you see to navigate in office 2007/2010, im not sure how I feel about this yet
Windows seems to manage memory much like a smartphone now, in that when you close an app, it stays suspended in memory, and will close itself out if memory is needed.
Task manager, process manager is completely overworked, process manager gives a shit ton of usefull information, and makes all the old existing information much easier to read/understand
Task manager gives much more CPU information, system information that you’d otherwise need a program liek CPU-Z to view.
Thats all the quick stuff off the top of my head, im going to try and use this as my primary OS for as much and for whatever I can and really check it out, its an early build so their are some bugs.
All the Windows 7 Drivers ive tried work just fine, I installed a lot of programs which all seem to work fine, although firefox has some graphical glitches for some reason when it comes to colors on the menu bars and a problem with the transparency.
If your not into this shit you won’t care, but I know a lot of people on here are and might find it interesting