Only a couple of days to go until the Consumer Preview of Windows 8......

Lots of snow up there...

 

Like the dog said when it got its tail caught in the screen door, "It won't be long now!" - Just  a couple of days until the big event, or what Microsoft fervently hopes is going to be a 'big event' - the public unveiling of Windows 8.

 

Having played with this Developer's Preview for about a week now, I'm not going to be a total stranger to this operating system's 'new look'. But I can't say that it really grabs me in quite the same way that Windows 7's first test version did. That's just possibly because Windows 7 fulfilled a burning desire to get to an operating system not plagued by a myriad of exceedingly frustrating problems seemingly carefully calculated to prevent one from doing anything productive with Windows Vista. How a company with the numbers and the reputation and the talents of Microsoft could have screwed up so magnificently has to be one of the great mysteries of the 21st century. Thank God (and their programmers!) it was all fixed up and then some with the advent of Windows 7, and Microsoft's new-found appreciation for its paying customer base. We, of the great and faceless unwashed masses, often barely literate with computers, but quite opinionated about what we like and don't like and will or won't buy.

 

Just for the hell of it, (and to fix a glitch with all the desktop windows closing when I only wanted to close the top one of the bunch) I re-installed this Win-8 Developer's Preview again yesterday. The good news is, it did that whole operation in just over 23 minutes from start to finish. Practically a new record. The bad news is, it only saved some of my 'personal files'. It parked all that in its usual location of 'Windows.old' which meant that most of my installed programs got neutered, their exe files becoming just useless ex-exes, requiring me to spend a lot of time re-visiting websites of third-party programs, downloading those freshly again, and re-installing all those to re-activate their executables. While this may be the price one pays for experimental software, it's still a rather unnecessary waste of time which could be mercifully avoided by a little more programming from the folks in the back rooms of Redmond, Washington. Not, mind you, that I'm "looking a gift horse in the mouth" (I'm trying not to!) but this is one of the lesser joys of playing with pre-release software. In its defense I must say it does a hell of a nice job of installing itself quickly, even if it doesn't include the stuff I fluffed it up with beforehand.