Review Of Windows 8 Customer Preview

Finally I decided to install Windows 8 Customer Preview version on my laptop. I have been a beta tester for all the previous versions of Windows, so I decided to give it a spin. Although I did not participate technical beta for Windows 8, I finally downloaded the operating system and see what all the craze is about tiles like interface and all. By the way, I am writing this blog post using Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 8.

Download and Install

This part went very smooth. I decided to download 64 bit ISO image of operating system. It took about 25 minutes to download about 3.3GB of file. That was not bad. And another 5 minutes to extract. Since Microsoft has been talking about how they have improved speed of installation and boot up, this was going to be a good test. I was impressed that whole installation was complete in less than one hour. That is a great improvement over previous versions of Windows.

Boot time

After installation was complete, the system boot up took the same time it takes for Windows 7. So I did not see much of improvement in that area.

Tiles and stuff

Now was the time to give Windows 8 real spin. Well, things fell apart for me.

• My screen went dark after 10-15 seconds. For a moment I thought I burnt my video card. It turned out that Windows 8 could not keep my laptop display up for more than 10-15s. Every few seconds, brightness will go down to zero. I will bring it back up
• Switching to full list of application is a total mess. It looked more like some novice programmer did some display of grid view. Not too impressive.
• Then I lost title display for good. And now I and now I am wondering what do I need to do to get it back.
and then it will go dark. That was very frustrating.

Only thing I can say about this customer preview release is that it is far from customer preview. If a regular user ran into all the issues I ran into, then customer is not going to have a good impression. Yes, I know its preview release. But still you have to have some satisfaction and be able to see stuff on screen. I will play some more and keep you guys posted.