Official: Windows 8 Release Preview Now Out

[hoorah]

That's not what Media Center is for. Unlike Apple's Front Row, Media Center is meant for watching live TV and recording TV as a DVR.

I have an HDHomeRun Prime triple tuner with a cablecard. Media Center is on all day long. It's a much better interface and DVR than the Scientific Atlanta cable boxes my cableco uses. Also, my recording capacity is much higher.

Same here. The removal (or, pay a bunch to add it back in) of media center makes me sad. Not because I won't be able to use my setup, (I can still stay with 7), but just that with microsoft dropping support, its going to be a dead industry. Add onto that the terrible opposition the cable industry has to cablecards and I think the DIY DVR doesn't have much of a future.

I guess if everything does move to a streaming format that might make things simpler, but I still liked holding the 'roll my own DVR' card when playing with the cable companies.

 

[hhhd1]

This new desktop environment doesn't appear to do cpu usage as much as before ..

 

[PingviN]

Running it for 2 days now, on my laptop. I kinda like it a lot. Metro works extremely well on mobile devices, no more useless Start menu, woo!

 

[Dominato3r]

This new desktop environment doesn't appear to do cpu usage as much as before ..

They've upped performance across the board and will only get better once we get release drivers :thumbsup:

 

[yinan]

Running it for 2 days now, on my laptop. I kinda like it a lot. Metro works extremely well on mobile devices, no more useless Start menu, woo!

Ya, the "useless" Start Menu now takes up the entire screen....

 

[hoorah]

I've been using windows 8 release preview for about 2 weeks now on my desktop, which is mostly used for unimportant tasks like gaming and browsing online.

At first, the lack of a start menu irritated me just because I kept going for it to find it wasnt there. When I started to find workarounds for the start menu being missing, I started to find all my workarounds were actually faster.

Start - run - mstsc just became start mst enter
start - control panel or start run control became start cont enter
Same for a few other programs that didnt have icons on the desktop, but I eventually made icons for them which sped up the process.

I guess I realized the only thing I ever even used the start menu for was start-run.

I also really like the file copy/move interface. It gives more data about the transfer speed as well as the ability to pause transfers (although thats not a feature specific to windows 8, that could just as well be added to windows XP if they wanted to).

I'm setting up a new computer for my mother right now who does very little outside of email and shopping online. I'm putting the release preview on her new setup and using her as a guinea pig. If she likes it, great! If not, I guess I'll roll her back to 7 and apologize.

 

[StinkyPinky]

I've gotten used to it now and quite like it. More than Windows 7/Vista, you need to know a few key shortcuts to really make full use of the OS. In many ways this makes it less user friendly than Windows 7. I put Win 8 on my wife's laptop and she finds it a frustrating experience.

I feel Windows 8 reviews are going to be mixed, which is probably about right.