594th post - Windows 8 Consumer Preview

Got my hands on the Windows 8 consumer preview. Download time is smoother than expected. Besides opening the Weather app and installing the two apps at the bottom right, this is what you see right after installing. Background colour could be changed from the green seen in the consumer preview.

Like before, you can create an account with a Windows Live account. If you have an Xbox or Hotmail account, you can use that to sign in.

App
All most of the apps you see in the Developer Preview are mostly gone, but it does make up with being able to use the app store that was unavalable in the Developer Preview. Of course, the screenshots you see here are for the Japanese version, so it may be different from what you see here.

Animation, and simentanously viewing weather of other cities, seems to be missing here compared to the Developer preview. It looks weird with that blank area at the far right. My only real complaint here is the units the tempreatures and distances are in. No country outside the US uses those units anymore.

Control Panel and Settings

Apart from some fine-tuning since the Developer Preview, and beign able to pick a different colour scheme, the settings page seem very much the same. Accessing it, however, has changed: it's located at the bottom of the settings panel where you adjust the volume and stuff.

Language Settings

You can add emoticons too

Sad to say, the option to switch between display languages is not there: just the keyboard layout. This was avalable in Windows 7 Ultimate Edition (the full-featured and most expensive version). However, I hear that there are plans to do that.

Being the Japanese version and having the Japanese keyboard, the Japanese input should be there too. Although there's a different UI in the metro version, it looks the same as Windows 7 for the desktop mode.

As a test, I installed Google's IME thing, which I primarily use in Windows 7. Sad to say that it doesn't work in the metro interface, though it does work in the desktop mode. (It crashed cmd.exe when I tried to use it.)

Other Pre-installed apps
Well, I don't know if it's because of the location settings somewhere, or if the server is not working, but these apps don't work well. Maybe I just don't have an Xbox to begin with.

What on earth is this?

Conclusion

Well, this isn't the finalized version, so there do tend to be some bugs and crashes here and there. Some things work on the Desktop mode, but not in the metro version. Although, I haven't restarted the PC since installing the updates you saw in one of the screenshots above. (@^^)/~~~

From the very start of writing this post to the end, this was written on a computer that was running on battery, and I see that it could run for longer. That does tell you about how energy consumption (which directly affects how long a battery lasts before it needs to be recharged) has been imroved a lot by having apps that are not in use to be in a "frozen" state. It's like the program has been closed in terms of usage of PC resources, except that it's not closed.

I'll use it again at a later time to see if there are hidden things that are yet to be found.