A few thoughts on Windows 8
I've been running the Windows 8 Consumer Preview on my Asus EEE PC T91MT, in part because it was getting more and more sluggish on Windows 7. There's a lot to like about it (the new Task Manager is wonderful), and since I started using an application launcher (Executor, though Launchy's nice, too), the lack of a normal start menu doesn't bother me much. It's got a few bugs, as you'd expect from an early release - the most significant, for me, is that if I get my cursor too close to the hot corners on the right-hand side of the screen (say, if I want to open the time and date info or close my current application window), it wants to open the Charms Bar, and sometimes it doesn't want to close it again. Oh, and I currently have no way to search my file system, though the Googles suggest that's not a common problem.
Anyway, the thing that irritated me enough this morning that I thought I'd say something about it is that Windows 8 isn't just optimized for a screen size of 1024*768 or more, there are things that won't even work at a smaller resolution. The T91MT runs at 1024*600 natively, and at 1024*768, the screen is unpleasantly stretched.
Like this.
It looks fine in that screenshot, doesn't it? Trust me, it's awful. And because it is awful, and because I rarely need the functions that require that resolution, I leave the display at 1024*600 and only bounce it up when Windows demands a higher res. This morning, it insisted it needed more space to open the Windows SmartScreen, which "can help keep your PC safer by warning you before running an unrecognized app from the Internet." Since it wouldn't allow me to open the installer, I changed my resolution, installed the app (minus any warnings from SmartScreen - apparently it didn't have anything to say to me, it just wanted to stretch its legs), and turned off SmartScreen (which the Action Center yelled at me about).
One of the selling points of Windows 8 is that it's optimized for touchscreens. (In fact, it's going to force you to have a touchscreen interface whether or not you're using touchscreen hardware. There are already third-party tools to disable the Metro-style start screen, but I'm not sure Microsoft will add native support for that option.) It's also designed to run well on lower-power hardware than Windows 7, which was one of my primary reasons for installing it. The T91MT was the first multitouch PC tablet. Its graphics card (a GMA 500 that I believe to be the source of most of its woes) is very limited in the resolutions it supports. That card was common in the first generation of tablet PCs, so I'm sure I'm not the only person running into these problems. I don't mind if Windows warns me that programs won't look good at my machine's preferred resolution, but I have a little trouble with the idea that they just won't run at all - especially when they're not making full (or any!) use of the screen space they're insisting they must have.
