Starting up Windows 8 for the first time was not so much a shock, as I’ve seen the user interface on the Xbox and friends phones. It was more of a departure though, than I was expecting.
As a long term advanced user if Windows, you do expect certain things to be in certain places and Microsoft do seem to have decided to mix things up.
First thing, they’ve got rid of the start button. What replaced it is the start screen and on there are commonly used programs represented by tiles, not icons, and in some of those icons is data that is coming off the Internet. Things like weather, calendar, emails all have live data once connected to their respective services. Didn’t
Take long for my calendar, contacts and emails to be sync’ed up with their respective services.
If you want to get back to a classic desktop, there’s a tile for that too and the default toolbar just has an explorer and Internet explorer to get you going.
You can get to a very cut down start menu by going to the very bottom left corner and right clicking.
If you hover over the very top left corner you get a quick view of the last window opened so you can switch easily.
Bottom right opens up the Charms bar on the right with search, settings, share and xxxxxx.
You find settings for each of the metro style apps in the charms bar and not the app.
A lot of the connected services aren’t allowed to login in the uk so video and music are empty and I can’t connect to Xbox live yet.
I did connect up to my media server share to see what the videos menu comes out like, but that involved opening up media player (currently same version as Windows 7) and added the share to the library.
So that’s a quick whizz through for now. There will be more as i mess about, it got to something past midnight and had work in the morning…..