Windows 8 Release Preview Discussion

By Roger H.
in The Fast Ring (Insider Previews)

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Grand Master

ViperAFK

Posted
Posted

What I like:

New, sleaker aero theme. I think it looks pretty nice.

New file copy dialogue

New task manager. Great combination of eye candy and functionality.

Quick boot. Updated drivers (when I installed win7 on this laptop I had to manually install intel graphics and wireless drivers. It all works out of the box in windows 8.

What I DON'T like:

Metro. I tried to like it, but it feels shoehorned in and flat out does not work well with a mouse. I found it straight up confusing and intrusive on my laptop. The only thing I found it good for was hitting the win key and searching for apps, it seems slightly better/faster than win7's start menu search. I can already tell metro will be confusing as hell to users. Some apps will open in the metro screen and behave a certain way, other apps will suddenly take them back to the classic desktop and vice-versa. I found it really annoying that opening images on the classic desktop opens the metro viewer by default, feels jarring and confusing. Getting to the control panel/settings is REALLY annoying with my laptop touchpad, I have to use the hotcorner on the bottom right, and it seems finicky (And its not made obvious at all that there is a hot corner there BTW. At least the start screen hot corner has a mouseover icon.) The start screen hot corner is annoying too. Google chrome is the first icon on my superbar, whenever I go to the chrome icon with my touchpad, the damn hot corner icon comes up. Things just feel really inconsistent, and I feel that it will be confusing to users, as well as making my tech support job harder :p.

And I have to go to "settings" to restart... really?

I just don't see how anyone thinks metro is a good idea to shoehorn into a desktop OS, at least in its current state. It does not work very well, its confusing, and its inconsistent. I'm sure it works dandy on a touchscreen, but it doesn't work here. The start screen should have been an opt-out feature at least.

  • +Warwagon, MrChuang and McKay
  • Like 3
Grand Master

McKay

Posted
Posted

"Windows 7 File Recovery", right there, in the corner

Yea, noticed it right after I posted the pic, removed it right away :rofl:

Me: Must.... not.... install................on............main.........PC....

Main PC: Desire... is... Irrelevant,...... I AM.... A.... MACHINE

Do it, you know you want to ;)

Grand Master

Detection

Posted
Posted

Do it, you know you want to ;)

I`ll give it a while I think, the CP ran fine on my laptop, but bluescreened most days on the PC, seems pretty slick on the laptop but I thought the same with the CP when that first appeared, the novelty quickly wore off

Grand Master

McKay

Posted
Posted

I`ll give it a while I think, the CP ran fine on my laptop, but bluescreened most days on the PC, seems pretty slick on the laptop but I thought the same with the CP when that first appeared, the novelty quickly wore off

The novelty has long worn off of using Windows 8, sadly for me there was no way for me to save my software, it's 2AM here now and i've been dicking with this clean install since 11pm, got to get up for work at 6AM, going to be fun :woot:

Grand Master

theyarecomingforyou

Posted
Posted
New, sleaker aero theme. I think it looks pretty nice. (and lol at the rumors that they 'removed' aero. This is aero, with a flatter theme)

That's because it's not the final theme that they discussed on the Windows blog. The screenshot they showed clearly didn't have transparency, whereas the Release Preview does by default. Unlike most release candidates (which this is despite the slightly different terminology) this doesn't seem to be feature complete and there's talk they'll be pushing updates through WU.

As for the new theme, the new scrolls bars are annoying when the windows small as it's not clear what part you're supposed to click on because it's completely flat. On bigger windows it's not an issue as you can easily tell which part to click on.

Proficient

alisalem

Posted
Posted

it looks really silly on my setup with everything inside metro being full screen. It's pretty obvious that the apps are designed for tablets and such. On my 30" 2560x1600 screen (of which I have three on my desktop) it just doesn't look right there is wasted space everywhere, below app content, to the side. I just don't get why they have included Metro on non-tablet devices and not included a way to deactivate it. Even if all the apps I use had Metro versions I'd be a lot less productive, I mean first of all it doesn't even cover all my screens, only the centre one and again the unused space even on one screen is jarring and irritating. Is Microsoft trying to kill multitasking? I just don't get it.

This.

Grand Master

PGHammer

Posted
Posted

This is cool! Now you can change the DPI settings on a specific part of the GUI:

Yup - moved the Title Bar to 13 and Bold. Contrasts nicely with Aero.

Grand Master

devHead

Posted
Posted

this :

I had this issue with the CP. Are you trying to install it onto a GUID partition of your hard drive? If so, it will fail. You can't install it on such. It has to be on a MBR drive.

Grand Master

devHead

Posted
Posted

This is cool! Now you can change the DPI settings on a specific part of the GUI:

I don't understand; they give you this new granular control, but remove the whole ability to change fonts for the UI elements?

Contributor

Thingol

Posted
Posted

Errors with display driver here too. Also using GT 430. The system locked and a bunch of artifacts appeared on the screen followed by this notification: "NVIDIA display driver has stopped working". This happened in the Consumer Preview too, however this is the first time the whole OS froze. Had to hard shut down the machine. This is not a problem with my video card as this does not happen in Windows 7. By the way, I'm using the drivers that come with Windows 8. Hopefully NVIDIA releases updated drivers soon.

Other than that, the RP feels faster than the CP. Oh, and first post. Registered months ago but was not able to login for some reason.

Indeed. Even though built-in MSE, feels a lot faster than Windows 7. Also, my new SSD's blue screen errors which makes Windows 7 totally useless for me are gone :woot: Nvidia hurry up :laugh:

Mentor

Xerax

Posted
Posted

Definitely a great improvement from CP. I was hoping Music Libraries from a network share would be fully supported in the Music App by now but it is not :(

I share the folder and create a shortcut (not a network drive). Works 100% for all apps and libraries.

Experienced

br0adband

Posted
Posted

Not sure if anyone else noticed but, the current rumor mill from canouna over at that Winunleaked forum is that Windows 8 could RTM by end of July. Now, while I may find that somewhat unbelievable, another thing that I did notice when I installed the Release Preview a few hours ago was - by scrolling to the end of the EULA statement - the tagline for the document version, and was somewhat surprised to see:

EULAID:Win_RC_3_PS_R_en-us

That's RC3 for those not in the know, and even though this is just a document, Microsoft has never gone past RC3 aka Release Candidate 3 stage for an operating system release. The last time they did 3 full Release Candidates was Windows XP iirc. So...

If Windows 8 Release Preview is Release Candidate 3, we're almost home people.

This tends to lend a lot of credibility to the canouna statement about RTM coming as early as the end of July, maybe a bit sooner. From RC3 to RTM it's typically 1-2 months so, let's hope this all pans out accordingly. Microsoft appears to have Windows 8 on a very fast track indeed, especially considering there was no "advance warning" officially about this Release Preview coming out except the "early June" rumors - they never offiically said it, and that little booboo on the blog yesterday well, that could have been part of the plan all along. ;)

Neowinian

Ads88

Posted
Posted

Not sure if anyone else noticed but, the current rumor mill from canouna over at that Winunleaked forum is that Windows 8 could RTM by end of July. Now, while I may find that somewhat unbelievable, another thing that I did notice when I installed the Release Preview a few hours ago was - by scrolling to the end of the EULA statement - the tagline for the document version, and was somewhat surprised to see:

EULAID:Win_RC_3_PS_R_en-us

That's RC3 for those not in the know, and even though this is just a document, Microsoft has never gone past RC3 aka Release Candidate 3 stage for an operating system release. The last time they did 3 full Release Candidates was Windows XP iirc. So...

If Windows 8 Release Preview is Release Candidate 3, we're almost home people.

This tends to lend a lot of credibility to the canouna statement about RTM coming as early as the end of July, maybe a bit sooner. From RC3 to RTM it's typically 1-2 months so, let's hope this all pans out accordingly. Microsoft appears to have Windows 8 on a very fast track indeed, especially considering there was no "advance warning" officially about this Release Preview coming out except the "early June" rumors - they never offiically said it, and that little booboo on the blog yesterday well, that could have been part of the plan all along. ;)

Could be. If there are no more bugs, there is no need to wait til sep. They will improve whatever is missing, include last features and for that one-two months is enough, not 3 or 4. Good news actually.

Grand Master

ViperAFK

Posted
Posted

it looks really silly on my setup with everything inside metro being full screen. It's pretty obvious that the apps are designed for tablets and such. On my 30" 2560x1600 screen (of which I have three on my desktop) it just doesn't look right there is wasted space everywhere, below app content, to the side. I just don't get why they have included Metro on non-tablet devices and not included a way to deactivate it. Even if all the apps I use had Metro versions I'd be a lot less productive, I mean first of all it doesn't even cover all my screens, only the centre one and again the unused space even on one screen is jarring and irritating. Is Microsoft trying to kill multitasking? I just don't get it.

Yeah, me neither man... Square peg round hole.

Grand Master

PGHammer

Posted
Posted
Could be. If there are no more bugs, there is no need to wait til sep. They will improve whatever is missing, include last features and for that one-two months is enough, not 3 or 4. Good news actually.

Actually, they have - once.

The original Windows 95 testing program had *six* Release Candidate builds - it was RC6 (4.00.950) that made the cut.

However, rather amazingly, I had nary a single issue with a Win32 application with the Consumer Preview - didn't have any with the *Developer* Preview, either.

So far, I'm finding the Release Preview to be wicked-fast and scary-stable (in both cases, not merely better than 7+SP1, but better than the Consumer Preview as well on the performance front - the Consumer Preview had fewer BSODs than 7+SP1, and exactly none due to applications).

The most frightening thing? The fact that I can do a *cold shutdown* (in short, without doing ANY of the usual steps to shutdown Windows) and the OS will start up without having to run CHKDSK or any other of the OS health-related things that usually follow such a shutdown - especially on a desktop, which this is. (To put that in perspective, that is something that no other operating system - not even Linux distributions or the BSDs - which are known and bragged upon to be normally far more stable than Windows - can do.)

Did quite a few with the Consumer Preview - on purpose. It didn't even quibble. (As I stated before, that's something that not so much as ONE of the BSDs can do.)

Better-than-BSD stability *and* the largest library of compatible applications on the planet? Even without WinRT apps that I can run, I would step backward to Windows 7 *why*?

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