Win 8 developer preview

So, I had some free time today and I thought of giving Windows 8 a try. It was in my task list since October when we got a short demo in one of the office workshops but looking at the below post in my Facebook timeline actually prioritized it. The post is from 2009 when I initially used Facebook as well as Win7 and predicted that Windows 7 will succeed.

Today I think I was correct. I downloaded the Win 8 developer preview and installed on my laptop directly after initially struggling to shrink the hard disk space to make it a dual boot machine. My Win7 had become pregnant with issues and I was expecting blue screen anytime.  The installation was smooth on the lines of Windows 7 and I was able to quickly set it up. I gave me a little bit of Mac feel asking Windows live ID etc.

I directly found myself on the new metro UI. After moving around it for some time I liked it and hope that MS can build some ecosystem around it which will ultimately decide weather it will be successful or fail. The UI was quick interactive and has excellent Facebook and twitter integration but the socialite app was not able to connect to my Facebook irrespective of what i did. Same goes for twitterama. Anyways the feed app did give some idea about the performance of the UI.

I then went on to work related stuff - for me remote desktop is a big instrument to work and unfortunately the juniper vpn didn't install, not sure what was the reason but I couldn't use rdp and test it. One more point work highlighting is the IE 10 dependency on flash. I was expecting much more HTML 5 integration specially after adobes strategy on flash.

One more annoying thing was that app store for the developer editions is not open and when I tried downloading any new application I got message the the apps are not available in the developer preview edition, Not sure what is the logic behind it specially when you look that the mobile sibling has the app store open from quite some time.

Anyways, I most anticipated feature for IT pros like me was Hyper V 3.0. The kid has turned 3 but requires SLAT support from your processor to work and for the folks like me who have old model of processors in company laptop Hyper v is as good as not being there. SLAT is more likely to be there in i3 onwards processors.I have Core 2 duo and spend most of the time on it while travelling or otherwise because it is difficult to carry two laptops all the time.

So, this bought halt to my further experimenting with the OS, I will keep posting my experiences with Win 8 bit for the time being looks like the try was not worth it. Hope MS is listening....