Well today I finally managed to free-up 30 minutes and reinstall my daily working laptop to Windows 8.
I have been working with windows 8 in lab environments since day one but I never managed to shift my working laptop.
So today I started my day thinking I would spend the better part of the day installing my laptop. Nothing however was less right. I flipped the win8 binaries on a bootable USB stick and believe it or not within less than 20 minutes the laptop was installed and I had added it to our corp domain.
After adding it to the domain I decided to move the pc object and my user out of our default OU structure to avoid pushing win7 lockdown GPO’s on it so I could fully enjoy win8.
The hardware I’m using is Dell Latitude E6410 and all the critical drivers where right there out of the box so I didn’t have to worry about drivers and I could jump right in and start installing some initial critical business apps.
1) My first app was office 2010 of course nothing to note there except maybe after the install I went back to the metro interface and removed a whole load of default tiles office install created. It seems like every single icon the office install put’s in your win7’s start menu get’s a tile by default, this does give some clutter but easy enough the fix. Just right click the tile you want to remove and hit the button UnPin in the bottom left corner.
2) The second thing I did was give win8 a real run for it’s money. I have a livescribe smart ben and I really use it a lot so I thought I would try installing the bespoke application that links to the smart pen. If there was one thing I would expect win8 to fail on it would have been this sync hardware application. But sure enough it installed just fine and the smartpen connected and synced all it’s data just fine.
Overall my main worry was the metro screen. During my demo’s I liked the idea but of course you never know how it’s going to work in real live until you start using it.
Turns out it’s absolutely not as intrusive as I thought in effect it replace the start menu on a keyboard driven system just fine up until now. You have to compare it with the amount of time you spend on the start menu in win7 not the time you spend on the desktop. I don’t know how the metro front will stack up when I start installing more and more app’s but till now it’s been working great and I’m starting to wonder what would happen if I go back to win7 in 5 weeks time. I might just miss the tile look and feel.
Well all this just to say that my first production day on win8 went just great and I’ll keep you all posted as I gain more experience with the platform in production.