Windows 8 - First Impressions
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I guess some might to hear my experience as well. I recently bought a new laptop to use on talks and on travel and I installed Win7 Home Edition, Office 2010 and VS2010 on it. After VS2012 RTM got released to MSDN I installed it on this machine as well. Then last friday I thought a good idea to upgrade this to Win8 - after all not much to lose - right? Well install was rather fast (got a SSD in there) and the system seemed to boot right - BTW a strange thing is that you can only upgrade your installed apps if you upgrade to the same language (wanted to switch language there - but then you can only take your files and settings and not your programs with you). As was mentioned: the anti-virus had to go ... well feels kinda unsafe ... Ok - played around a bit and the first think that crased was the Mail-App - yeah I could add my Hotmail/Windows Live ID account but the apps just showed a blank screen (and still does). Well who needs Email right? After all there should be Outlook hanging around - but I did not come this far. Next thing I wanted to try (because this is my main thing) is to run VS2012 ... but well this crashed on startup ... WTF? Ok I thought - maybe it's a bad idea to upgrade this from Win7 so let's run the setup on VS2012 again and choose repair - but behold: setup crashed as well (as did *EVERY* normal application) ... so do the windows-solves-it-all-thing (aka restart) ... so I ended frying the hole installation by simply rebooting ... yes that's right I see the ugly metro-window-picture but then the screen blanks and the system hangs... So insert the Win8 disk again and try the various *repair* routes (there are a lot - seems trouble is expected) and yeah in the end one worked ... the one that uninstalls all your old apps and brings you to basically to a first-install OS (well there is a page with all your old applications so you can see what you have to reinstall again - thank you very much). And BTW: Mail is still not showing a damn thing. End of the story: I shut the laptop down and put it somewhere I did not have to see it all weekend. In the next days I will format the HDDs and make a new clean Win7 install (or maybe a Ubuntu / Win7 dual installation) and that will be all I will ever see of Win8 if I have any say in it (ok maybe I might buy a surface just to see if this systems can show any email - 199$ right?).
Interesting: mine worked perfectly. I also did it to an Alienware M17X (figured it would have problems with some of the more esoteric hardware) and found that this, too, worked pretty well, except for the ATI video card (had to download something from ATI for that) and some of the Alienware system-level stuff (for things like the keyboard lighting effects). One hopes that most of the manufacturers will have updated drivers by the "real" release date; for now, the Windows 7 drivers work most of the time, and I was able to "convince" a few of them to install by hacking the MSI file with Orca, and removing the operating system version check from it. The Mail app isn't perfect: mine works, but I've noticed a few problems with it. Using it against an IMAP server, while, at the same time, running Outlook on the desktop, I noticed that Outlook keeps up much faster with what's happening; the mail app is also a bit crashy at the moment and occasionally exits spontaneously; hopefully, they'll fix it up a bit by the final release. VS2012 works perfectly for me. I can only assume you're having some driver issues: if I were you I'd download the latest Windows 7 drivers and install them, even if the system thinks it's just fine: I've noticed a few instances where (a) reinstalling a driver over the top of itself fixes problems (especially true with the Alienware stuff I mentioned above) and (b) ATI (AMD) now has Windows 8 drivers for its screens. Also, remember to re-run the Windows Performance Index thing: that does tell Windows a few things about how to keep the hardware going, and I noticed that after I re-ran mine, the numbers changed, and Windows performed more seamlessly.