It's been three weeks since I got the Enterprise edition from our friendly help desk (those guys rock!) and I installed it on my work computer, and aging Dell Optiplex GX620, which runs on a 3.4Ghz P4, 2GB of RAM built-in graphics and 500MB of hard drive space.

Yes, I know, you must be wondering how I can get work done.  The truth is that this is my backup machine where I undertake specific tasks, like departmental email on Outlook, admissions and where I manage departmental records. So, mostly file system types of things and emails.  For these things the machine rocks. The daily driver is my 27" iMac ;-)

In any case, I decided to use my GX620 as the guinea pig machine o test out Windows 8. My Samsung Slate does not have a DVD drive (which I am waiting for) to install the upgrade on it.  I really wish Windows had something like Apple's Time Machine, so if an installation borked the machine, I could reinstall the factory restore image, and then restore from time machine.  Anyway, here are some observations of 3 weeks of work usage, on a non-touch screen computer:

The Good:

• I am still living in the desktop! Despite all the doom and gloom about getting rid of the desktop, it's still there and I use it almost exclusively
• As a launcher, Metro is nice! The start menu was really nice in Windows 95 because it wasn't cluttered. 17 years later, with the increase in storage capacity, the start menu became a dump, and it's nice to have a clean application launcher again!
• I love the lock screen! It's sort of like this notion of "side show" that Windows 7 had, that few PC manufacturers implemented, where you had notifications of important things. Now I just wish more applications took advantage of it.
• I keep wanting to touch my screen. I know this can get annoying, but I think it's a good step forward to enabling touch screen computing on the desktop.

The M'eh:

• Despite the cluttered mess that was the start menu, the bottom left of the screen isn't the same! I really would like a windows button there with access to control panels, documents, disks and so on.
• Metro apps really need rethinking. Even is a 17" screen, I don't want my IM to take up the whole screen, and I don't want to jump out of one app to jump into another one. It should be the case that apps share the screen, at least on a desktop computer!
• It seems that Metro apps, and legacy apps don't have the same data storage. So, I can have a desktop version of Evernote, and a Metro version, and the data storage is separate for both. This is a bit of a fail.
• While in this line of thought, It would be nice to have "fat" apps that contain both interfaces, a metro interface and a legacy interface. There are some apps that I would use the desktop version for when I had a mouse and keyboard; and I would use the Metro version for when I was on my slate (undocked and mobile).
• It's been 10 years already (if not more).  If I have localized my OS to Greek, contextual menu items (native and third party applications) should either be in English, or Greek, not some gibberish like "???e?/a???"
• Strangely enough, I miss Aero (I liked the transparency) and the 3D switcher. Bring it back ;-)

That's all for now.