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Originally Posted by CWatkinsNash
I've had Win 8 RP installed on my Dell Duo since two days after release. For anyone not familiar, the Duo is a convertible netbook / tablet thingie. Mine is red. I did a clean reinstall of Win 7 at the same time I did the Win 8 DB install so I could compare.
I used to hate using the touchscreen on the Duo. With 8, it's soooo much better. Very responsive and accurate, despite the warnings that my screen is not "Win 8 optimized" or whatever. The Duo actually seems useful now. 8 is faster and more responsive all around, really. Start up, shut down, loading programs, etc. It's actually a joy to use the Metro interface in tablet mode. For "normal" use, the desktop works about as expected, once I found everything and got used to accessing the poorly named "search" screen. (I say poorly named because I don't ever use it to search, just to access the programs list.)
I put in the Media Center key and downloaded it. WMC8 is essentially the same as 7, which means they didn't make any of the buttons bigger or otherwise make it touch-friendly, but the only thing I've ever used the Duo for is basically a portable media device so naturally I had to give WMC a run. I set up my HDHomerun just as easily as always, no conflicts there. My main issue is that they changed the requirements for media center plugins (changed the required .NET version to 4.0) so Media Browser won't install on 8. Oh well.
The Metro video app works well also. I have my media drive shared in my homegroup, so I was able to navigate to it and watch any of my video files easily. It seems to have better format/container support out-of-the-box, because it played anything I tried to open and I certainly haven't added any codecs to this install yet.
I enjoy using Win 8 on the Duo. I really do. Would I upgrade? No, but that's nothing new - I get new OSes with new computers. The idea of just buying an OS is alien to me.
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I wonder if it would work as well on a non-red one?
I have an ExoPC tablet that came with Windows 7 installed. Terrible. Unusable. I installed the W8 consumer preview, and the experience is exponentially better. I admit, I have not put it through its full paces (because I got a shiny new iPad at about the same time), but it has me extremely optimistic. And it boots every bit as fast as the iPad from full-off. Actually, faster.