06:02
kyle
The Windows 8 Consumer Preview (here's the Windows 8 download) updates the look of the Developer Preview, adds a lot of new features and revamps a few old ones.
The round Start button is gone, the Metro-style Start screen remains and yes, you can only pick from nine colours and five patterns for the Start screen background.
But there's far more to the Consumer Preview user interface than the Start screen, and far more to Windows 8 than the user interface.
There are new ways of switching between apps, as well as more updates to the desktop tools. There are changes under the hood to file copying, power management, security, networking, hardware support and more.
And then there are the first real Metro apps, so you can find out what it's like to use Metro for more than just trying out Metro, and the Windows Store for the first third-party apps from real developers.
This is the version of Windows 8 that's going to give you a real feel for what the final operating system will be like and the first version you could realistically use for day-to-day work. But will you want to?
Running the Windows 8 Consumer Preview
First of all, it's worth noting that the Consumer Preview is only for x86/64 PCs; there isn't an ARM version that you can download and try out, since there aren't any ARM devices that will run it.
That's because of the extremely custom way that ARM devices are built, where not even the way to control a physical button is standard. Microsoft isn't supporting tablets built to run Android or WebOS, either.
Much of what we're seeing in the Consumer Preview will be the same on Windows on ARM (WOA) systems. Most stuff - from the Metro user interface to the touch gestures, to the Windows desktop and built-in Windows tools such as Explorer and Task Manager - will be practically the same. But until we see it in action, we don't know what WOA performance and battery life will be like.
Consumer Preview doesn't include the desktop Office apps that will be bundled with WOA either - and of course it runs all the x86 desktop apps that won't work on WOA.
When you download the Consumer Preview, installing is easier than usual with a beta operating system. You can start the installation directly from the web page, instead of having to download an ISO file and burn that to an optical disc.
You can still burn an ISO if you want, and the installer can also create a bootable USB stick so you can download Consumer Preview once and install it on multiple machines.
The tools for creating a Windows To Go USB stick aren't available yet, so you can't run Windows 8 directly from USB, but you'll get a far better feel for how Windows 8 performs if you can try it out directly on a PC.
The Metro interface doesn't look that different, but having your email, photos, appointments and friends pinned to it livens it up considerably - as does the new Metro tile for the desktop, which sports a cute Metro-ified version of the Windows 7 beta fish.
You can also pin libraries here as well as Explorer, but you have to do that from Explorer set to view the desktop rather than from within a library itself.
The improved touch gestures also make it far easier to work with. Swipe from the right edge of the screen and you get the redesigned charm bar; Search, Share, Start, Devices and Settings.
You can do the same thing by leaving your mouse pointer in the top or bottom right corner; first the charms appear as white outlines, then if you don't move your mouse they disappear. Windows assumes you didn't want to trigger them, since you might be moving the mouse to scroll or closing a window at the side of the screen instead. If you are, you don't have to wait for the charms to vanish to do so. Move the mouse towards the charms and the black bar and charm titles draw in on screen.
Start, which is highlighted in the accent colour of the colour theme you choose, swaps between the Start screen and whatever you were doing last. Search is now context sensitive; if you're in IE when you choose it, you get results from Bing first.
Swipe up from the bottom on the Start screen to get a quick link to the All Apps view, which is now neatly organised into program groups, arranged alphabetically.
As you swipe across the Start menu, it stops with the group of tiles you've swiped to line up under the word Start; this bouncing into place is the promised 'speed bump' to help you navigate around. Scrolling with a mouse works far better - if you push the mouse past the edge of the screen, the tiles scroll as if you were swiping with your finger.
This works so well you'll miss it in apps that don't support it, such as Photos, where you have to go back to grabbing the scrollbar or use a touch pad or Microsoft Touch Mouse, which enables you to swipe sideways.
The Semantic zoom feature now works too; pinch to shrink the tiles on the Start screen to tiny thumbnails so you can see everything at once or move an entire group. Select a group and drag it down to get the option of naming it.
This is also the view you get when you drag a tile you're moving to the bottom of the screen, which makes it easier to move an item a long way across the screen without disturbing the arrangement of all your tiles and groups.
As you drag a tile between two groups, when you position it between them a vertical grey bar appears to show that you're creating a new group to put it in.
Switching between apps is now far easier. You can still drag in the next app in the stack from the left edge of the screen to be full screen or to snap into a side window, but when the icon of that next app appears, you can also drag it back to the edge to get a vertical pane of thumbnails.
This only shows six thumbnails of recent apps (including the desktop if that's open) plus the thumbnail for the Start menu. Tap a thumbnail to open the app or drag it to choose where on screen it appears.
You can get the switching pane using a mouse by leaving the mouse pointer in the top or bottom left corner of the screen until a thumbnail appears (the next app at the top, the Start menu preview at the bottom). Drag down with the mouse and the thumbnails appear. If you want to see all current desktop apps and recent Metro apps, use Alt+Tab instead. Win+Tab makes the switching pane appear.
You can close Metro apps without restoring to the task manager. Drag down from the top of the screen until the app you're looking at shrinks down to a thumbnail and keep dragging that off the screen to close it (it's a longer swipe than when you use a quick finger swipe down from the top or up from the bottom of the screen to get the menu bar inside an app).
That works with a mouse as well. Or you can use Alt+F4, just like with a desktop app.
You can type quite well on screen. The large touch keyboard is a little better laid out now, and has predictive text and spelling corrections.
The thumb keyboard layout still has the alphabet split between the two sides of the screen where it's all in reach of your thumbs, but there's now a numeric keyboard in the middle to make it faster to type passwords (or indeed, numbers) and you can resize the keyboard.
The new notifications in Metro work well; they pop up in the top right corner of the screen where they're not likely to be in the way and you can tap for options. So the first time you put a USB stick in, you can choose whether to open Explorer or do something else, and that will happen automatically next time you insert it.
Popular and polished as Windows 7 is, there are irritations like Explorer jumping the view back as you explore deep nested folders, and the intrusive language toolbar. The Windows 8 desktop addresses all of our complaints, but it also takes away the familiar Start menu. Does that make it hard to use, with or without touch?
There's no denying that this is a different way of working; press the Start key on your keyboard and yes, you get the Metro Start screen.
But if you roll your mouse into the familiar left-hand corner you get a thumbnail of the Start screen and you can roll up to get the list of Metro apps running as thumbnails (or use Win+Tab), so you can jump directly to another running app without the disruption of the full-screen tile layout. Or you can use Alt+Tab to switch between all running apps, Metro or desktop.
If there's a Metro app pinned at the side - which you can easily do by dragging the thumbnail that appears when you mouse into the top left corner - Alt+Tab respects that and switches the app in the pane you were working in last.
Windows plus the '.' key swaps apps between the different window positions on screen at top speed.
There are far more ways of switching between apps than before, so you can pick the ones you prefer and ignore the others.
If you want quick access to desktop tools without going back to the Start screen at all, right-click in the very farthest point of the left-hand corner to get a handy menu with just about everything you could want: Search, Run, open Explorer, Task Manager or Control Panel, run tools such as Disk Management, Device Manager, Event Viewer or Power Options.
You can also jump to the control panel settings for Network Connections, System or Programs and Features and open the command prompt, as admin or a normal user. Windows+X opens this and you can navigate it with the keyboard, so if you want the Event Viewer in a hurry and you haven't already pinned it to the task bar, press Windows+X+E.
And there's still Windows+R to run any app directly. Frankly, this addresses any complaints we had about losing the old Start menu; there are neat and efficient ways to get to everything you want in the desktop without ever taking your hands off the desktop or having to see Metro.
The charm bar works far better in the desktop in Consumer Preview as well. Throw your mouse over in the corner and the charms ghost in, in case you didn't really want them. Like the hints of app thumbnails in the switching pane, this hints at what you can do without getting in the way of working with windows and controls on the edge of the screen.
Start is there for systems with no hardware Windows button, Search is there for consistency but Devices and Settings both give you the desktop tools rather than the Metro ones. The Settings pane has icons for network connections, volume, screen brightness, switching language, turning popup notifications on and off plus Sleep, Shutdown and Restart.
There are links to Help, System Information, personalising the desktop and the full control panel at the top; if you want the friendly Metro PC settings, that's a link at the bottom.
Compared to the jumble of ways you could navigate to key tools, control panels and utilities in Windows 7, this is a streamlined and efficient interface - and again, you never leave the desktop unless you want to.
That irritating language bar? Replaced by an option to switch language from the Settings charm (or you can use Windows+spacebar to flip between installed languages).
There are a couple of points where Windows 8 sacrifices convenience for improved security. If you have two accounts on one PC, even if they're both signed in, you have to unlock the PC with the account that was in use last.
Unlike Windows 7, there's no way to choose which of the accounts to log in with from the lock screen. This will be unpopular in multi-user households.
Also, when you log into a Wi-Fi access point, instead of the password dialog showing what you type by default, Windows 8 hides your wireless password and only reveals what you've typed when you press and hold the cryptic icon next to the field (which might or might not be an eye for visibility).
With touch, the desktop is a bit of a hybrid. You can use gestures at the sides of the screen for task switching and working with charms, and you can swipe to switch to Metro apps. You can even swipe down from the top of the screen and drag the thumbnail off screen to close the desktop like any other Metro app. You can also touch anything you'd click with a mouse.
This works extremely well with ribbon controls (and makes it initially annoying that Microsoft has bowed to complaints from people who've never used a ribbon interface with touch and made it minimised by default).
Smaller controls work surprisingly well too, because Microsoft has used machine learning to predict where you're really trying to tap for the desktop and built-in apps. We found this made accurately selecting tiny drop-downs and menu items in Office and third party applications easy (on a Samsung Slate 7, which has a good touchscreen to start with).
It can get fiddly; multi-selecting files in Explorer didn't always give us all the files we wanted, but Windows 8 does an excellent job of making an interface that was never designed for touch work with your fingers.
The Consumer Preview is a huge improvement over the Developer Preview; it's more polished, more pleasant to use and has far fewer rough edges.
Performance is good, there are none of the frequent crashes we saw before, and our initial testing suggests the battery life issues from Developer Preview have been fixed too.
The interface is far more usable, whether you have a touchscreen or a mouse, and you should quickly master the gestures for switching and closing apps.
Consumer Preview also proves that Windows 8 isn't all about touch. The improvements to the desktop are very welcome, although we'd call them evolution rather than revolution. And if you want to spend most of your time in the desktop you can pin apps to the taskbar and stay there until you want to explore the Start screen.
This is the version of Windows 8 that will enable you to decide what you think of Windows 8, and if you approach it with an open mind, you may be surprised by how usable Metro can be.
On the other hand, Microsoft clearly has more work to do, both on Windows 8 itself and on the Windows Live apps that showcase Metro, and there are many key features such as sharing and search contacts that will only be useful when there are far more apps to work with them.
Windows 8 has to both deliver worthwhile improvements in the way you use your PC today - which it mostly does - and take a major leap forward for tablets and other upcoming PC form factors.
Until we see WOA tablets, it's going to be an open question how well Windows 8 can compete with the iPad.
Consumer Preview is far and away the most touch-friendly version of Windows ever (and it no longer treats mouse and keyboard users like second class citizens). That won't be enough, but it's a very promising start.
DOWNLOAD WINDOWS 8
Windows 8 Editions
|
Size
|
Download
|
| Windows 8 Developer Preview English, 64-bit (x64), ISO |
3.6 GB
| |
| Windows 8 Developer Preview English, 32-bit (x86), ISO |
2.8 GB
| |
| Windows 8 Consumer Preview Online Install |
5.00 MB
| |
| Windows 8 Consumer Preview English, 64-bit (x64), ISO Product Key: DNJXJ-7XBW8-2378T-X22TX-BKG7J |
3.3 GB
| |
| Windows 8 Consumer Preview English, 32-bit (x86), ISO Product Key: DNJXJ-7XBW8-2378T-X22TX-BKG7J |
2.5 GB
| |
| Windows 8 Consumer Preview Chinese, 64-bit (x64), ISO Product Key: DNJXJ-7XBW8-2378T-X22TX-BKG7J |
3.4 GB
| |
| Windows 8 Consumer Preview Chinese, 32-bit (x86), ISO Product Key: DNJXJ-7XBW8-2378T-X22TX-BKG7J |
2.6 GB
| |
| Windows 8 Consumer Preview German, 64-bit (x64), ISO Product Key: DNJXJ-7XBW8-2378T-X22TX-BKG7J |
3.3 GB
| |
| Windows 8 Consumer Preview Germen, 32-bit (x86), ISO Product Key: DNJXJ-7XBW8-2378T-X22TX-BKG7J |
2.6 GB
| |
| Windows 8 Consumer Preview French, 64-bit (x64), ISO Product Key: DNJXJ-7XBW8-2378T-X22TX-BKG7J |
3.3 GB
| |
| Windows 8 Consumer Preview French, 32-bit (x86), ISO Product Key: DNJXJ-7XBW8-2378T-X22TX-BKG7J |
2.5 GB
| |
| Windows 8 Consumer Preview Japanese, 64-bit (x64), ISO Product Key: DNJXJ-7XBW8-2378T-X22TX-BKG7J |
3.3 GB
| |
| Windows 8 Consumer Preview Japanese, 32-bit (x86), ISO Product Key: DNJXJ-7XBW8-2378T-X22TX-BKG7J |
2.5 GB
|
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