[Arpe]

Nice to see that Microsoft are finally going to issue a Windows version in English rather than American. Now we can have proper colour and dialogue boxes!!

[SteveM]

To each his own, but I have doubts that Metro will survive the general release for desktop/laptop distributions. The corporate community will most certainly shun it even more harshly than it did Vista.

I would go further and I put 8 into "Microsoft Bob" territory.

I was looking forward to a new version and loaded it last night. I am quite frankly stunned.......I am stunned that they haven't put the brakes on replicating their Phone GUI into their OS after receiving a bloody nose this past year.

"There’s a little positive news for Microsoft in the stats too – in the final quarter of last year, 1.4-percent of new US smartphone buyers opted for a Windows Phone device"

Microsoft’s Windows Phone Sales Silence Speaks Volumes - SlashGear

To be fair, Microsoft has been working on this for a while and they can't change their direction overnight, but come on. The rest of the OS seems OK for a preview, albeit from what I am seeing so far, much being change for the sake of change's sake. If they can can eventually allow us to disable "Metro", then there might be hope. I think this version creates a huge opportunity for others to gain access to the OS market.

[ChrisPlatt]

As they keep telling us the future is handheld devices and away from the conventional PC I suppose this is inevitable.
If true I can see myself finally going over to Linux in the not too distant future.

Chris

[Venturi]

I would go further and I put 8 into "Microsoft Bob" territory.

And now I need brain bleach. Thanks for the memories.

[Raffwal]

How long is this Preview version supposed to work? I didn't find the info on the FAQ page. Will it go dead the day the 8 gets its official release?

[jogiba]

Expires: January 15th, 2013 at 6:59 PM
Also note that the final release of Windows 8 will not support upgrading from any prior Windows 8 "Preview" release, though the migrate option will still be supported. In any upgrade scenario, you can run the Disk Cleanup Wizard to remove the previous installation in order to free up disk space. The download will also support boot from USB for a completely clean installation as well.

Hi, how long is the Windows 8 Consumer Preview valid for? - Microsoft Answers

It's set to end at the same time world wide, so each time zone has a different expiration. This is also how the Developer Preview expires.

For simplicity I'm replying to questions with the final day as "January 15, 2013" even though some parts of the world have the morning of January 16 as an expiration time.

[SteveM]

As they keep telling us the future is handheld devices and away from the conventional PC I suppose this is inevitable.
If true I can see myself finally going over to Linux in the not too distant future.

Chris

As I have had a few days to play with it, I came to the same conclusion. The gui makes no sense when used with a mouse but it makes perfect sense with a touch screen. I'm starting to wonder if Microsoft is gambling on touch screens expanding beyond handheld, to include traditional desktops and laptops. Everyone ran out to replace their tube monitors with flat screens and once again everyone will run out to replace those with touch screen flat screens (or a new laptop). I still have some concern over the graphics chosen....but they have time to change this.

On a side note, the OS tries to dynamically run chkdsk /f in the background. I attached another drive to copy some items over and a windows 8 message popped up to let me know it was "fixing a problem" with the drive and then happily corrupted it (I do not believe the drive was bad). To be fair, the preview warns of this sort of thing, so it's probably a known issue. There also isn't a safe mode unless you go in and add the entries before hand to the boot menu, something most people won't know how to do. I would do this if you decide to use the preview. I managed to get data off the corrupted drive via safe mode.

Chris...checkout Ubuntu. You can load it as a windows program right into Windows 8 and it will make the necessary changes so you can choose it from the boot menu. I'm using it as Windows 8 so far does not have my Nvidia graphics drivers.