Say hello to Windows 8 Developer Preview. I’ve installed it to my netbook (MSI Wind U100) last night. Yes, literally night… I think it was somewhere between two and three. lol

First having some problems, unrelated to windows. It seems, my external dvd drive refused to read the discs burned with my laptops internal dvd drive.

After fixing that problem… the installation dvd booted fine. I have installed the 32 bit version, since this model of the Atom CPU doesn’t support
64 bit. So… the installation program is quite similar to the Windows 7 installation, so I won’t spend much on that.

The first boot, took some time, saying things like building registery and preparing. Well… after some waiting… it was finished. So first thing to happen is asking for a computer name, and wifi setup. It worked immediately, so the driver for my wifi card was included on the installation media. Nice. After my connection worked, it asked for a Passport account, or… it’s called different nowadays, isn’t it? A Live account? Anyways, the thing you use to log in to MSN Messenger, (which nowadays is called Windows Live Messenger, isn’t it?) Whatever! Renaming the beast doesn’t make it a different animal! To me, it’s still MSN Messenger and a Passport account. Enough details. So… what it means, my windows login password is that of my passport account, and it also shows the name and photo I’ve used for my passport account on screen.

So, it shows the new start menu. So this is the Metro interface everyone is talking about? Well… First thing I tried was the control panel. So it lists a few options, and at the bottom it says for more setting use the desktop control panel, which refers to the control panel as it’s available on Windows 7.

This is where I shut my computer down yesterday, as it was getting late. Like I said, it was 3 or so, when I went to bed.

So, today I’ve booted the netbook… and it booted up really quick. This new boot process has been discussed on osnews a while ago. But I must point out, my WiFi connection wasn’t working. It showed as connected to wifi but no internet connection. I had to re-enable the wifi for it to work. I suppose some drivers haven’t been adjusted to the new boot process yet. But for being a developer preview, this was to be expected.

Anyways, a closer look at the control panel, shows, I can now enable and disable the support of 16 bit applications. With Microsoft pushing 64 bit versions, which do not support 16 bit applications at all (due cpu architecture) and by making the support of 16 bit applications in the 32 bit version of Windows 8 optional, I think this will be the end of the 16 bit windows application.

Something more interesting to observe is a look at the Device Manager, which shows that there is no driver installed for my video card. Yet, do I have the fancy GUI. This is something that has bothered me in Windows Vista/7, you know, how they handle older, pre-directx9, vga cards. I am no gamer, and I don’t see the point of buying a new graphics card just to see some fancy gui effects in my OS.

Well…. the metro start menu. It seems, only the control panel and the desktop button do something. all the other buttons, including the metro version of internet explorer, don’t seem to do anything at all. Well… it’s a preview after all… but I had expected to see something from the metro internet explorer.

Speaking of which… the desktop internet explorer 10 seems to be using the internet explorer dialect of the javascript xml handling. Still… the dialect. Microsoft seems to be heading towards HTML5, right? Wouldn’t it be nice they’d do certain things the same as the rest of the world? Ok, I admit this is a pre-html5 issue, being around since, well… the rise of AJAX. But still…

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