Windows 8 Consumer Beta Review

Rick Backus is our Guest Blogger for this month. Rick's been a verteran in the industry for years and consults for Office Equipment Dealers on how to improve their business technology industry experience and enable increased productivity, profitability, customer satisfaction and competitive advantage for our clients by helping them get the most out of technology with Cybercon Services.

Windows 8 Beta

So I finally abandoned the developer preview of Windows 8 and installed 64 bit Windows 8 Consumer Beta on my 64 Windows 7 notebook using Oracles VirtualBox. Unfortunately Windows 7 Virtual PC will not host 64 bit OS virtual machines and I always prefer 64 bit to 32 bit in an OS. The additional setup is 2GB RAM, 50GB Hard Disk, Optical Drive, Sound, etc. This runs on a 64 bit Windows 7 system with 6GB RAM with a 500GB Hard Disk.

Clearly most of you aware by now that the most prominent, new feature of Windows 8 Is the Metro Start screen. This will provide the touch screen interface necessary for mobile devices while maintaining useful functionality on a laptop/desktop system. Apple is already moving in this direction by morphing iOS features in to the latest iteration of the Mac OS. Windows 8 may help remedy Microsoft’s tardy arrival to the tablet dance courtesy of the Metro screen.

Understanding that the "Start" button we have grown used to from Windows 7 and Vista (ugh) is now replaced with an entire screen that replaces the old start button. All the application short cuts you would normally pin to your start menu now are placed on the Metro screen. For desktops and tablets this will allow you to customize the Metro screen for the way you work. All your most utilized apps will be in a single display.

Apps that are able to run independent of the original desktop will run in their own window. I have set up the Mail, People, SkyDrive, News and Weather. A simple Crtl-Esc will return to the Metro screen. Alt-Tab and Windows-Tab will page you through the open apps and the Metro screen. It is also very simple to add short-cut tiles to the Metro screen for shutdown, restart, command window, etc. After installing Office 2010 I found that all of the icons were now short-cut tiles in Metro as well. Very convenient.

For Desktop dependent apps like Office (I am writing this in Word 2010 installed on my Windows 8 virtual machine) will continue to run on the standard desktop. Even though Windows 8 is still in beta I have not had any "hiccups" as yet. I will continue testing and pushing this as much as I can.

Networking and other infrastructure setup was as expected. I joined my Active directory domain without incident. Since I am running this as a VirtualBox VM

There are numerous other enhancements to Windows 8 but they will have to wait for another article. If you have any questions I would be happy to speak with you. I can be contacted at rick@cybecon1.com . Visit the Cybercon Blog at www.cybercon1.com/blog for additional articles and technology news.


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Windows 8 Developer Preview

Rick Backus is our Guest Blogger for this month.  Rick's been a verteran in the industry for years and consults for Office Equipment Dealers on how to improve their business technology industry experience and enable increased productivity, profitability, customer satisfaction and competitive advantage for our clients by helping them get the most out of technology with Cybercon Services.

 

So I took the plunge and created a VM using the developers preview downloaded from http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/br229516 .  Keep in mind this is a pre-beta release and I am sure a lot is going to change before a production version is available. Even the name Windows 8 is not a certainty.  None the less it is quite obvious that Microsoft is trying to address the huge influence tablets are having on the computing world by drawing from the Windows 7 mobile screen layout.  There is a lot to cover here so I will have several articles over the coming weeks to discuss various aspects of this release of Windows 8.  

 



Metro Screen



My first thought was to install as a VM on my Windows 7, x64 laptop so I would have it with me out of the office.  However since virtual PC will not support 64 bit guests I opted for a VM on one of my Hyper-V servers.

You immediately notice the new “Metro” style start screen that is specifically designed for touchpad capable devices.  You can use some keyboard short-cuts (Home, End, Page Up/Down) to navigate through the tiles and Esc to toggle between the Metro and Desktop views. 



Metro Start "toggle"



To toggle the start screen, explorer and running apps I used full-screen mode in the VM viewer and the Windows-Tab or Alt-Tab key combos to scroll through your open windows.





IE 10



I first went to Internet Explorer 10 which is very different from the current IE 9 release.  Not much to configure here unless you revert to the desktop view. 

Right click will bring up the tab choice bar across the top of the screen.  The page button at the bottom of the screen pops up a menu to search pages or change to the desktop view in Explorer with all the usual features we are used to from IE9.



Metro Screen

There are numerous tiles on the startup screen for widgets like News, Tweet@rama (Twitter client), Weather, Socialite (Facebook client).  All these widgets give you a continually updating, start-up screen summary of all your social networking and content connections.



You can add tiles to the Metro screen by creating shortcutsin C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs.  They will then display in the startup screen and you can drag them where you want. Right clicking on tiles will display a task bar menu to adjust tile size, go to file location, run as administrator, etc.

So those are some of the basic features in this pre-beta preview of Windows 8.  More on this in the coming weeks. 

About Cybercon Services

Cybercon Services is a business technology consultancy integrating application, information and content management with business process and network infrastructure. Utilizing a broad array of tools and services developed over 25 years of IT, consulting and business technology industry experience we enable increased productivity, profitability, customer satisfaction and competitive advantage for our clients by helping them get the most out of technology.

Cybercon Services can assist in guiding your organization towards greater success. Whether your needs are implementing tablet mobility in your enterprise, automating or retooling your business processes, managed network services and support, technology management planning or leveraging best practices to improve your core operations, Cybercon Services is uniquely positioned to assist your organization.

To take the next step, Contact Cybercon Services to schedule a free review of your company’s current status and strategic goals to tailor a plan for continued growth and success.

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