Well, many have already snagged their developer preview copy of the new Windows 8.1 release. Microsoft has definitely gone in the right direction with this one with the re-introduction of the start button (albeit not the behavior that we are all familiar with). The new Windows 8.1 makes all of us who have seen and tried it think, “Why was this release not the release that came out first with Windows 8.” Microsoft seems to do a really good job of botching releases and then having to scramble and put together the actual build that is successful. We wanted to take a few minutes and screenshots to show you what the installation of Windows 8.1 looks like and a few things that we saw in the installation and in using it for the first few minutes.
- Normal Windows 8 installation screen
- New fish logo we have all come to “love”
- One of the weird things we noticed here and read about others seeing online is the lack of any ability here to go ahead and use a local account. The caveat to get that option however is to purposely enter an invalid account here.
Windows 8.1 is definitely an improvement. We would certainly like the ability though for desktop only configurations to have the ability to revert back from the Metro UI to the more familiar Desktop only configuration. You would think this would be an easy thing for Microsoft to pull off however we suspect that the Metro UI is so heavily baked into the UI that it may not be as easy as it looks. We highly doubt that many enterprise environments will warm up to the Metro only style look for applications as it is just rather clunky for the desktop.
The upside is that for “touch” hardware applications such as tablets, it is definitely superior to Windows 7 style Windows environments for the tablet arean.
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