By Burton Craig

So in spite of the developer’s previews and the less than stellar reviews I decided to give Windows 8 a try. I had fooled around with the developer previews and agreed that I didn’t like the fact that the Start menu was gone but other than that it was Windows. It was about time to refresh my box anyway. I decided to jump in and see what kind of pain Windows 8 would dish up. I was pleasantly surprised that the installation went smoothly and within an hour I had the thing up and running. Now what? Nothing. It’s an operating system. I loaded my standard batch of programs, Office 2010, Chrome, Utilities, VSphere (whoops that’s not working), TrueCrypt (works fine – whew) and I’m off and running.

If I had to say one thing about Windows 8 it would be that the Modern Interface (Metro) doesn’t get out of the way easy enough and without the Start menu the desktop version is inadequate (ok painful). I can only pin so many apps in the task bar.

Other than that, it’s an operating system. I don’t expect anything magical from it. Just run my programs, connect to my network and not crash. So far so good. I’m not going to get too worked up about the Modern Interface too much, I spend 99% of my time in the desktop and even without the Start Menu I’m doing OK. I’m going to see how long I can hold out installing one of the third party Start menu replacements.

I see a lot of promise with Windows 8. As I go through it more I’ll post my thoughts here. In the meantime it’s time to switch the KVM back to System #1 – my trusty Windows 7 machine. You didn’t think I was crazy enough to fly without a safety net, did you?