The IT Nerd

What is Windows 8 you ask? It’s Microsoft’s next generation OS that will run on Intel and ARM processors. It also combines desktop, laptop and tablet OSes into one package. It has a new user interface called Metro. If you’ve seen a Windows Phone 7 recently, it will look familiar. The Start menu is replaced with the new Start Screen, where there are tiles that contain shortcuts to applications. You can expect this interface to evolve with multi-touch features as it comes closer to release. Right now, it’s not all that cool without multi-touch and that is clearly the direction that Microsoft is going towards. You do still have access to the desktop which looks like pretty much every version of Windows you’ve used. I’m still getting used to the interface, but I like it.

The OS is going to be very reliant on “The Cloud” as you’re required to enter an Microsoft Live ID after the install is complete. This allows you to link your Windows 8 install to Microsoft’s cloud based services. This seems to be a similar strategy to what Apple is doing with the Lion OS with iCloud. I’ll have to really test out these services in a later build as the build I had didn’t allow syncing with Windows Live SkyDrive for example.

Now I’m not going to comment on things like performance as these developer previews tend to not be performance tuned. But you can expect support for USB 3.0, the ability to run on from a flash drive among other features. My impression of Windows 8 is a good one. As this OS evolves and takes shape, we’ll get a better idea of what Microsoft has in mind for this OS. We’ll also get a sense of how this OS will compete with its main competition: Apple OS X.