Windows 8 Consumer Preview in Review: Introduction

Microsoft has released the Consumer Preview of Windows 8 and it has many new features. Let’s dive in.

While not all of these features are complete, this is not RTM and Microsoft will likely/hopefully be filling in the gaps.

To start off, you need to get Windows 8 Consumer Preview and install it. The process is straight forward and the same as with the Developer Preview – just have that product key handy.

So to start off, boot is much faster. To put things into perspective, Windows 7 took 45 seconds to boot and Windows 8 only takes 10 on the same machine. Shut down is slightly faster but nothing like the instantaneous shut down of Mac OS X.

Once you get into your Windows 8 computer, you will notice a whole new outlook. It doesn’t land you to a desktop, it instead lands you to a launch page which will have all of your apps and updates on hand in a clean and usable way.

The next big thing to note is apps and an app store.

The app store for the moment is lacking and doesn’t contain much but with a Visual Studio Beta program and knowledge of a combo of either Java and Html or C# and XAML, you can easily write apps for the program.

By clicking on the top right corner, you can get updates for installed apps when available. Installation of apps is easy, it’s literally a one-click install process.

Windows comes with some apps pre-installed. Let’s take a look at them.