I’ve been using the RTM enterprise version Windows 8 on my work laptop and workstation for about a week now and these are some of my initial impressions of it.
The Good
Some of my better experiences…
It’s fast. It’s as fast, if not faster, than Windows 7. On a Dell Precision T3400 and ThinkPad x220, the experience is snappy.
It’s beautiful. Minimalist metro style, live titles, square edges in metro and desktop mode, and sleek background artwork will really catch your eye.
Keyboard shortcuts. There is basically a Winkey shortcut for almost everything. The Windows 8 secrets book has a full list in the appendix or you can visit Paul Thurrott’s Super Site for Windows for a quick guide on Windows key shortcuts.
Search. Press the Winkey and start typing. Find stuff. Enough said.
My kids could use it. I spent about 30 minutes last night reviewing metro interface with my 9-year-old. After explaining the screen gestures, she was able to download and play a couple of free metro games.
The Bad
These may be nit-picky, but I demand perfection…
No search with the Windows store. You have to use Start Search and filter on the store to see results. This is kind of annoying.
No Hyper-V client support for my workstation. You need SLAT or second level address translation support on your processor for client side Hyper-V. This is an optional requirement for server so why not on the client. I will gladly forgo VM memory optimizations to ditch VMware workstation. You can check if your processor is SLAT compatible by following this helpful blog post on How-to Geek.
Metro is designed for a touch experience. Not an earth shattering realization, but some actions, like closing a metro app and scrolling, would be much easier on a tablet device. Note: you can still use the old Alt-f4 standby to quickly kill a metro app.
The mail app doesn’t support Google apps for business. The mail app supports EAS. Google apps for business sync service use Google sync, which is EAS under the covers. Why can’t the two play nice? Mail does work fine with my work’s exchange account. This one was my fault Google Sync was disabled for the domain.
All in all, these small nuisances are not enough to deter me from using Windows 8 on a desktop/laptop going forward.
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