Windows 8 – Worth the wait.
I have spent the last few days playing about with Microsoft’s new Windows 8 operating system and I have to say my initial thoughts are this is really good. Looking at early reports and release candidates of windows 8 there was a lot of reaction to the new Metro interface and the fact that it looked a bit clunky. Well imagine my surprise that even after a couple of hours I found it to be intuitive and easy to use.
The whole idea of windows 8 is to have everything you need at your finger tips and to tailor it to the way you work.
The new look and feel of the various wrappers to applications is far smoother than previous incarnations and is very pleasing to the eye. You will notice the lack of a start button but that is early remedied by bringing down various add-ons that are available. The one I have tended to use is classic shell which can be found here.
Windows 8 Tips – Corners
As this is very early days with using windows 8 I thought I would let you have a some tips that I have discovered that are really useful. The first one is to remember how important the corners of the screen are for you now. As the devices I have used so far are traditional laptops and desktops they do not have the “touch features” that will arrive with other devices. However dragging your mouse into the corners of the screen brings up side panels that you can then use.
Windows 8 Tips – Right Click on Start Screen
This is a really powerful tip. If you right click when you are on the start screen and select all apps it basically gives you access to all the settings for your machine. Here you can access the command line as well as others. If you select an item on the screen and right click on that you are then given even more options including being able to run things as administrator.
Windows 8 – Being able to go back to clean machine.
One tip I have found really usefull is the ability to take an image of your machine that you can use to take your machine back to its original state in case you have a major issue. This can be acheived by:
Go to the start screen and right click. Once you have done this select All apps, this will bring up the various options you have on your machine. Have a look and find Command Prompt, right click on that and select run as administrator. When you are in the prompt then enter the following
mkdir C:\RefreshImage
recimg -CreateImage C:\RefreshImage
This will take some time to create the image but it will be worth it as you now have an image to revert back to if you run into problems with your machine and need to take it back to it’s original settings.
Well finally so far so good. I intend playing around more over the next few weeks and will update more as I learn more.