Windows 8

I've spent the last while testing Windows 8 Developer Preview and I thought I would share a few thoughts with you.
I'm sure you have seen some screenshots of the new Windows Metro look.  That look is a leftover from the Windows Phone software which was a miserable failure to begin with.  I guess MS didn't want to waste the investment so they carried it over to Windows 8.  Among the first thing I did was remove the Metro look.  At first I left in the Ribbon Bars that are used extensively in W8.  I have found then quite convenient in some of the other Software like MS Office.  Microsoft over-used them this time and they are now gone as well or at least gone in the sense that I had to do a lot of hacking to get a standard menu bar back and just not use the Ribbons at all.  I also had to do a lot of work with IE 10 which is used in W8 and I must say that no matter how much you do to IE 10 it is still fraught with problems; but more on that in a later post.
Of course when you are modifying an operating system to get it working the way you want; you are bound to mess up and have to restore once in a while.  The first tendency is to go to good old System Restore.  It's bailed me out in the past.  Alas MS manged to turn that into utter crap as well.  The onlt recorded restore points are from the Windows updates.  Whats the next step?  Well we now have a new one called System Refresh so lets give that a try and see what happens.  I got suspicious at the first step when it asked for the install disk and sure enough my suspicions were well founded.  Any 3rd party software you have installed will be gone.  That is of course if it came from someplace other than the MS Apps Store.  Oh yes; I forgot to mention that MS decided that Apple had a better plan and they have adopted the store approach.  I've avoided Apple products primarily because of that thought process and that may also be on the agenda for Windows apps as well.  Now after the System Refresh was completed they were at least kind enough to leave an HTML page on my desktop that listed everything that had been removed.  Anything saved on your computer will be removed unless you have saved it in a personal folder.  Never save to your desktop as it is not considered to be a personal folder by Windows.  Put the files safely away someplace like your Documents folder.  Of course after everything was redone I discovered that it was a Windows Driver update that had broken the system to begin with and a simple Driver rollback would have solved the issue or at least the part where it was throwing erros at shutdown.  The actual driver involved was the audio driver and of course the system still has no sound.  I'm used to that since that has been a consistant issue with every new Windows release.  Before you ask; the Windows 7 drivers will not work for the AC97 audio and I'm doing all my testing on a notebook computer so I don't have the option of playing with other audio cards to see if anything will work.
One thing my Windows 8 Experience has given me is a lot of practice at cloning drives.  I do that after every shutdown as long as everything is working at that point.  Then all I stand to lose is whatever I have done since the machine was started.  See my post about Active Boot Disk; it is the best way I've seen yet to be sure I have the system properly backed up.
Forget about having a Start Menu as you have come to know it since Windows 95.  That is gone unless you disable Metro and even then it's not as functional as it was in Vista and Windows 7.
After making several changes to W8 I have ended up with what resembles a very fast Windows 7.  That in itself is good but I don't understand why MS thinks people prefer eye-candy over performance.  Was there something wrong with the concept of leaving the UI alone and just improving system performance?
If I was asked right now to rate Windows 8 on a 10 point basis then I would give it about a 2.

This is just the first of what I hope will be several installments about Windows 8.  I will continue to post these topics as long as I am able to stand working with an operating system that drives me crazy everytime I try to do anything with it.
As for the Windows App Store, I've written it off as just another money grab and I will not use it now or at anytime in the future.  Since I also do some of my own software development I'll continue to use those apps that I've written and I will continue to do it whether or not Microsoft objects.  I really suspect that after all my testing on that machine is finished I will be installing Linux on it;  I've used it before and did get used to it's idiosyncracies as well.  I've always been a Windows fan but there comes a time when you have to consider changes and this is the time as far as I'm concerned.  Too bad since I've been using Windows since 3.0 which is also the time when I switched all of our systems from the old Apple 2* series machines to PCs.