Folks, I've downloaded and installed Win8 preview and I've only been using it for 20 minutes or so.
So I get a big candy coloured Start screen and there is absolutely nothing I want on that patronising childish screen, so I go to the desktop and find there are no menus or buttons anywhere to actually do anything. The Start button is conspicuously absent. I couldn't get back to the Start screen, so I just pressed buttons randomly until I think the Windows key took me back. Phew! Then I had to run 5 minutes of web searches to find out how to get into Control Panel to change the region formats. Hell they've clever in tricking me, I had to just start typing "Control Pa...." and it appears in a search results. I would never, ever have thought of that. It turns I can right click the Start screen and click All Apps to get a mutated Start menu, which isn't so bad, but I wouldn't have quickly thought of that either. My first impression is that Windows 8 has turned my PC into a gigantic mobile phone with one app filling the screen and running at a time. I'm not impressed, I have to do many things at once and get to them quickly and switch between them. It's not obvious yet how this is possible in Win8. I know that each new Windows usually creates some sort of usability change, shock or paradigm shift, but this is ridiculous, it's barely even Windows any more. Was that the marketing decision? I will have to read tutorials like a newbie to even figure out how to do anything in Win8 because absolutely nothing is obvious, how embarrassing. Perhaps in a few days I'll learn more and feel better, but I'm just shocked by how much it has changed. Greg
