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| the Start Screen |
On a few occasions some of my co-workers have asked me if I plan
to upgrade to windows 8. I am sure they are not the only ones who find
themselves asking this question as I myself have been reading the reviews and
wondering if I am going to upgrade when the time comes around. In order to make
a more informed decision I decided to download windows 8 Release preview and
try it for myself.
SET UP
First off I want
to mention that I did not wipe away windows 7 to load windows 8. Having
done things like that when I was younger I decided to do my test on a virtual
Machine. After some failed tries to load up windows on the virtual
machine I finally had success. My recommendation for anyone trying to
follow in my footsteps here is to download the install file for windows 8
from Microsoft instead of the ISO. For some reason the ISO did
not seem to work properly.
WINDOWS 8
The first thing
that appeared when I got windows 8 up and running and got through all the
set-up questions was the start screen pictured above. This start screen
is a replacement to the start-up menu that windows has had since windows 95 and
as far as I can see it is the major difference between windows 8 and windows 7.
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| My Google Calendar as it appears in windows 8 |
The start screen
has some very nice features including live tiles for email, calendar, weather,
music and games. For the most part these tiles
were compatible with my Google account and I was able to easily get
my calendar and e-mail working in the live tiles. I can easily see how
these live tiles can add a new sense of convenience to Windows and also seem as
if they would boost productivity.
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| Google Chrome in Windows 8 |
Although the live tiles are nice for the most part I did find the new start screen to be inconvenient. First off I am not a major fan of Internet explorer, so I quickly went to download chrome. Although Google Chrome is functional in Windows 8 it does not work directly in the new screen (at least not right now) this caused a major inconvenience as in order to use many other apps I had to keep opening and closing the start screen. Despite this chrome worked fine and seemed to run quite smoothly.
Another minor
annoyance to me was how you scroll through the start screen. I will just
face the fact right now that the start screen will probably work better on a
tablet or phone than on a regular laptop without a touch screen. Using a
scroll bar on the bottom just seems like a blast from 1995 and I really just
wanted to move my mouse to the corner and see the tiles move along with it.
Despite these
minor annoyance I do have to say that even for a release preview running on a
virtual PC on top of another operating system windows 8 seems to be very
snappy, I ran it running 2GB of ram and it work great which is something I
cannot always say about Windows 7.
In looking at
recommending upgrading to Windows 8 in the future, my answer is really up in
the air to me Windows 8 seems as similar to windows 7 as Office 2010 is to
Office 2007. So in other words it just seems to have more
annoying and inconvenient menus but there are basically no major differences
between the two versions.
I would also say
that it might be worth waiting 6 months to a year to get windows 8 as well.
In a long term perspective Windows 8 will probably have more apps that
are usable from their start screen in the future, such as Google Chrome.
To conclude I
think that I would recommend windows 8 to anyone who is still using windows XP
or Vista as it is a lot better. However, unless you are a student and can get
the student discount on windows 8 I would recommend keeping windows 7 as
there doesn't seem to be any major tactical advantage to upgrading as
of now.
