Windows 8.1 Preview Download

[cheatos]

For those who didn't notice it, Microsoft has released it officially.

Click to download:
Windows 8.1 Preview ISO files - Microsoft Windows

Multilingual, Expires obviously.

Opinion (notices):

1. Spoiler Game of thrones ending:

   Windows 8.1: The return of the Start button, yes folks, it's back but it's lost it's true self, now it's only a ghost of it's glorious past
2. Tiling Metro apps is one of the iconic changes in this release. It's pretty useful
3. Spoiler Game of thrones alternate ending:

   My Computer -> Computer -> This PC, Microsoft should fire the new hipster behind this name change, it makes no sense, also ugly, and takes two words to read, thus brain intensive
4. Skydrive is in your face now and is expanded by default instead of My Documents (or Libraries things), something MS expects people to deal with since we are in the 'Cloud' era, something I'm totally against.
5. While the start menu is more customizable now, I'd prefer the right click -> show all programs instead of aiming onto that small arrow
6. Recent documents aren't back, this is very counter productive for me, an 'enthusiast' Notepad user
7. Start screen background isn't customizable, perhaps this is only a Preview regression? screw them, it changed location and now Personalization is better and has more options.
8. Boot to desktop, clicking 'Desktop' wasn't a big deal anyway

That's all I noticed, because I don't use 'Apps', I'll try them later and maybe speak my opinion about them.

[hellman]

Ghost of glorious past? lol
good to know start button is back .. i'll download n see how it is

[anon]

Do you still get the ugly and irremovable font smoothing in the UI and IE 10? That's the only thing preventing me from updating. Apparently that looks nice on tablets, but that's not where I'll run the OS. I tried using MacType to turn all antialiasing and hinting off, but it didn't work.

[cheatos]

Do you still get the ugly and irremovable font smoothing in the UI and IE 10? That's the only thing preventing me from updating. Apparently that looks nice on tablets, but that's not where I'll run the OS. I tried using MacType to turn all antialiasing and hinting off, but it didn't work.

The font is fine for me . Almost as good as on Windows 7.
Maybe because I have a 22' monitor?
or maybe my eyes weren't as good as I thought they were?!

Anyway you shouldn't really expect much change in that area.

[piratemeister]

Do you think is time to change my Win7 ? :\

[hellman]

Do you think is time to change my Win7 ? :\

well u'll have to try it for yourself.. see if it satisfies your needs.. if not stick to 7.. i'm gonna stick to 7 for a while .. when i'll buy touch laptop next year then i'll switch to 8

[anon]

The font is fine for me . Almost as good as on Windows 7.
Maybe because I have a 22' monitor?
or maybe my eyes weren't as good as I thought they were?!

Anyway you shouldn't really expect much change in that area.

In Windows 7, if you disable font smoothing everywhere, UI text will use sharp, aliased fonts (which is the expected behavior). IE9 still smooths font edges, but there's a DWrite hack to solve that.

In contrast, titlebars and many parts of the Windows 8 UI remain antialiased even if you turn that off, and IE10 forcibly renders text using DirectWrite which makes it appear blurry and condensed.

I've tried all registry tweaks, programs and such available, nothing worked - which is a shame because I like everything else about 8 (except the lack of a Start menu, but that's easily fixed).

[piratemeister]

People still using IE ? :|

Guys, do you know if there will be enough difference before the final version or this preview is enough to decide if stay with win7 or is time to change for 8 ?

I have already tried normal win8 and I dislike it totally...

[cheatos]

In Windows 7, if you disable font smoothing everywhere, UI text will use sharp, aliased fonts (which is the expected behavior). IE9 still smooths font edges, but there's a DWrite hack to solve that.

In contrast, titlebars and many parts of the Windows 8 UI remain antialiased even if you turn that off, and IE10 forcibly renders text using DirectWrite which makes it appear blurry and condensed.

I've tried all registry tweaks, programs and such available, nothing worked - which is a shame because I like everything else about 8 (except the lack of a Start menu, but that's easily fixed).

I have read that it appears very blurry on netbooks so that's why it's a problem.
well it looks like you are out of luck

People still using IE ? :|

IE9 and 10 are pretty awesome, you should try them and forget about older versions.

Guys, do you know if there will be enough difference before the final version or this preview is enough to decide if stay with win7 or is time to change for 8 ?

I'm confident that you'll not see the Start Menu back nor the the whole metro apps removed.
So the changes should be minimal.

[anon]

I use IE when I'm too lazy to enable JavaScript. It's awesome

[piratemeister]

I tried latest IE and they just sucks like any older version, Firefox and Chrome (I prefer this last one after years of firefox) are the best browsers avaible.

[bernardosgr]

Is there still the UEFI dual-booting issues for people who want Windows8 and Ubuntu with all that configuration stuff you have to go through?

[cheatos]

Is there still the UEFI dual-booting issues for people who want Windows8 and Ubuntu with all that configuration stuff you have to go through?

Testing was done in a Virtual Machine, so I don't know.
Also I don't have UEFI, I'm on a 2009 BIOS motherboard.

[hellman]

I use IE

U're like a early man from stone-age life

[Master Razor]

I honestly don't actually care about browsers. I just go with whatever is fast and ,in my case, I chose chromium.
Times change and so does browsers, in time.