Windows 8: Consumer Preview Start Menu

[Corrine]

Give Metro a chance before you disable it. There is an excellent tutorial on navigating Windows 8, whether you use the keyboard, mouse, or touch screen by Derick Campbell, MSFT (Microsoft Research).

Dude, Where’s My Windows 8 Start Menu?

Also available is an online Word Document which includes a comprehensive list of keyboard shortcuts with the corresponding touch and mouse actions. Consider downloading the file and annotating it with your own notes: Win8 Shortcuts.

 

[AceInfinity]

I like the Metro visual, but the tileview for it's deceiving appearance of being easier to use, for me on a desktop PC using a mouse and keyboard, I can only see it as wasting valuable time rather than having a nice start menu like they did have before. Really! bugs me... I hope they bring the start menu back.

They went for simplicity, which I like, but overdid it in my opinion, making navigation even harder than before, and probably more time consuming, now that they have things packed into less "places". Less categories for the same # of items just makes things confusing to me. I enjoyed the Task Manager they had in the developer's preview, but that apprarently is gone now in the consumer's preview last time I checked... :confused2:

Not a clue why they removed that, but the explorer view is way too cluttered for me now. It looks like a Microsoft Office layout now for everything, where before it was just a simple view for navigation of the filesystem.

 

[Dave76]

Task manager is the same as in the DP for me.
All the Ribbon functions can be hidden with the little arrow in the upper right corner, next to the help button.

Took me a little while to get use to it but, I like the Win8 interface now.
Spend 95%+ in the desktop, so I don't even see it much.

 

[AceInfinity]

I'll have to revisit the Consumer's Preview another day to see more about it. I didn't like it much at first, it was like being placed in a new environment outside of my comfort zone, so I gave up and didn't use it much longer than about 1-2 hours.

 

[Dave76]

For me it's like all the Windows releases, just takes a little while to find where they moved things and learn the changes.
I always try to spend at least a couple of weeks of learning/using before making my secondary opinion.
The first look put me off, but it started to become more usable as I learned my way around and found ways to tune it to my preferences.

 

[zigzag3143]

Metro is much more appealing after you use it for a while. WCP has become my main (and only) OS.