It’s time to get excited again… a new version of Windows is on its way. Microsoft have released a developer’s preview of Windows 8 to the public and of course I have had to play with it. If you’d like to play then you’ll need to start by downloading it from here, then you’ll need a machine to install it on.

Windows 8 is designed as a catch-all operating system, meaning that to start with it will run on ordinary PCs and laptops, probably very much like the one you are using now. Chances are if you are running Windows 7, your computer will be able to run Windows 8. The new selling point however is that it’s been designed with an interface suitable for touch-screen devices which includes tablet PCs. Once Windows 8 is launched next year, expect to see a whole raft of devices appearing to rival the currently unbeatable iPad running Windows 8. Check out the first screen shot I took showing the Start screen. This Start screen completely replaces the normal start menu, so when you press the Windows button on the screen or keyboard, you get this screen instead. In truth, this takes a bit of getting used to, especially if you’re not used to using Windows Phone 7 upon which the interface is based. You can search for apps just by typing as you could in Windows 7, or using your mouse scroll wheel to scroll horizontally across the screen. Using a mouse on this screen is not ideal – it is very much optimised for touch. Luckily, there’s a Desktop button on the start screen so I pressed that.

Yay! It took me to something far more familiar, a desktop. You can open Windows Explorer, Internet Explorer and install normal Windows apps like the Windows Live suite. In fact, to test this out properly I installed Windows Live Writer and am composing this blog entry using Windows 8. Sadly, it has disabled the fancy ribbon interface of the live apps and they all therefore look a bit dated, but I’m sure this is because they aren’t actually intended to run on Windows 8. I installed Microsoft Office 2010 with no issues too, and that’s when I discovered a really neat feature – it’s the simple things in life that impress they say, and the copy dialog now includes a bandwidth monitor! I know, it’s a very geeky thing to get excited about.

So, Office works fine, but it of course not optimised for touch, which is fine as I don’t think people will really want to use Office on a tablet for content creation. Tablet’s a generally useful when it comes to content consumption so I’m sure there’ll be Office file viewers included in the final version. Anyway, time to leave the familiar territory and wander across to the new ‘Metro’ interface and see what it has to offer.

First up, Internet Explorer 10 is the default web browser. You can access it through the Desktop interface and it appears and operates just like IE9, but if you access it via the Start page it opens up in a special touch-based mode. This took a bit of getting used to because once you load a web site, the address/search box disappears. I figured out a right-click will eventually open it back up as long as you’re not over any text otherwise it’ll offer to copy the text to the clipboard. There’s also a number of pre-installed applications suitable for touch input. Socialite is an interface to Facebook, giving you quick access to all your news feeds, photos and friends’ profiles from one simple page. It also includes a Twitter application called Tweet@rama which looks very similar to Tweetdeck with columns for your feed, mentions, trends, etc.

Under the surface, Windows 8 is almost the same as Windows 7 which is good news for systems administrators. You can open up MMC and add all the usual management snap-ins for computer management etc, and the control panel and administrative tools are in the usual places and local policy is operational even on this development preview.

If you decide to have a play yourself, don’t do it on your main PC unless you know what you’re doing. I freed up some space on my laptop, created a 40GB partition on it and installed Windows 8 there, dual-booting with Windows 7. If you’ve never done that before, I’d suggest installing on a separate spare machine! It won’t run in VM Ware or Virtual PC (as far as I can tell… I didn’t try very hard though).

My overall opinion is that I will of course upgrade when the time comes. I may even get a tablet device, but I also hope there’s some way of disabling the touch specific features for non-touch machines like a normal laptop because they just get in the way.

And for my final test, I let The Wife have a go. She managed to unlock the log-on screen and log in okay, she even found Internet Explorer and got on to Facebook. She did however struggle with typing a new URL due to the automatic hiding of the address bar – a right-click resolves this by the way. The final hurdle was opening Outlook. I’d installed Office 2010, but opening it from the Start page involves scrolling (swiping?) right and choosing the correct icon, and scrolling across the start menu on a laptop isn’t intuitive. The verdict – it needs a bit more work before the WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor) is reached on a normal laptop… let’s see what the new year brings.