Thursday, September 22, 2011

Windows 8 Preview on the Y560

I finally managed to download the Windows Developer preview from MSDN. After waiting for 13hours for the download to complete, and two failed attempts due to power cuts. Before looking out for the new bits and pieces which the alpha version was providing I had read all about it at Zdnet Blogs and Neowin  during the BUILD conference. I wanted to see how the Metro UI based apps would look like on a full screen system as the Ideapad Y560.Some of them just look beautiful.With the powerful GPU under its belt ,I wanted to see how smooth the UI would perform on the system

[caption id="attachment_1161" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="Weather App running on the Metro Shell"][/caption]

While the installation itself took about the same time as of the Windows 7 client, the Metro UI seems to be everywhere from the boot screen to the  Setup process itself. I will be sharing only about the things I liked so far in this iteration and not the general features as explained by others

[caption id="attachment_1149" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="Tweet@Rama - Twitter client for the Desktop"][/caption]

The Social apps on the Metro GUI are very eye candy and absolute delight I must say.   While we don't know how many of these apps will stay till the RTM release, the concept in essence looks very promising. Among other things on Metro the one which I like was the IE10. You have to experience both the normal way and the Metro look  to see what the difference is all about in the full screen IE10 Metro Avatar. Perhaps I can check it out again on a tablet PC very soon.

[caption id="attachment_1155" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="IE10 in Metro running Hotmail"][/caption]



While most of the emphasis seems to be the new shell,I wanted to check how the system would perform on two other aspects one is the boot time and the other one is hardware acceleration in IE

The boot process does not have any windows logo splash as with the previous OS . Microsoft says the boot process is quite fast and may not need a boot logo.I tried it on the system,it did not have a UEFI based Bios but the speed at which at system booted was quite noticeable







The second aspect is hardware acceleration in the IE browser. While IE9 already has this feature I did not think of testing it till now.The results are different for both IE9 and IE10. While IE9 gave a test score of 7 seconds on Win7, IE10 gave a score or 17 seconds on this notebook. The scores may vary if the build changes from Alpha quality to RC or RTM in the future.