Win8 Pains 'n' Gains- The Last Parts

By Jan Fagerholm

Today and tomorrow will be the last in the Windows 8 reports. Windows 8 has gone gold, and the RTM (Release To Manufacturing) was released on Microsoft TechNet and MSDN (Microsft Developers Network) August 1st. This gives time for the OEMs to work out their installations and have machines ready to sell by the announced October 26th “official” release date.

Those brave enough (or foolish enough)to go ahead and download it can burn it to DVD and install it. Count me in that camp, though I'm not ready to move my Windows work applications to Windows 8 yet, as so far I haven't found any Windows 8 activation servers online yet.

Installation is simple enough, and if you install it on a machine with a working version of Windows 7. it will put that in the boot manager and give you the option of booting either Windows 7 or Windows 8 at startup. Once again, they have changed the boot screen colors and wallpaper at the login screen, and when you log in, you are presented with a new color scheme for Metro.

Oops, we have to stop calling it “Metro”. According to an internal memo that leaked to the Internet, somebody in the legal department didn't do due diligence in their name research. a German company, Metro A.G., presently holds the international trademark on the Metro name and has given Microsoft a cease and desist order to stop using the name Metro. So Microsoft held a big press conference and told everybody to stop calling Windows 8 “Metro”. They now bill the product as “Windows 8” and refer to the interface as “Modern UI” Oh, well, I suppose that's the best they can come up with on only two weeks notice.

Final changes in Windows 8: Say goodbye to Aero, the semitransparent window frame technology that has been with us since Vista. My take is that it is simply too hardware intensive for Windows 8 target hardware, tablets and the like. They lack the fancy graphics hardware because it uses too much power. After all, Microsoft's target audience is tablets and smartphones, and they have simpler graphics hardware that uses less power. Also gone is any sort of traditional menus. When you go where the Start button used to be, you are sent to to the Tiles screen (can't call it Metro anymore). Navigation is fairly simple on both multi-touch screens and with conventional keyboard and mouse. I use a mouse with a ball in place of a scroll wheel (this allows both vertical and horizontal scrolling with the ball) but the Tile interface does not recognize the mouse's horizontal scroll command, so I have to resort to the scrollbar on the bottom of the screen. This is just a mouse driver problem, so I am sure that this will be fixed soon. While the Tile screen works well with a multi-touch screen, the surprise is how well it is thought out for the mouse. If you don't have a multi-touch screen, try setting up mouse gestures. This will get you most of the same effects.