This will be interesting.

Could we be watching the death struggle of an old dinosaur?
Don't get me wrong, I'm an MS fan above the rivals, but slowly after getting an ipod touch a while back, then an iphone, I find myself eyeing up the ipad and asking myself if I really need a PC at home...

And they really have dropped the ball when it comes to the tablet market, let's be fair.

I'm wondering when the 'home user' will drop off MS' radar alltogether.

That's pretty much my feeling. Over the last 2 years I've got myself an iPhone, iMac and now an iPad. I've literally just sold my PC as it just sat there collecting dust. Any lab work is done in VMware.

I'm slightly worried for MS future, they seem so slow to interest home users.

I'm finally getting Win8 to install thanks to Dale for a couple of tips my plan is to see how it is when I rdp from the iPad tbf it does have potential

Developer Preview* available for download:

Windows Metro Style Apps Developer Downloads


*The Windows Developer Preview is a pre-beta version of Windows 8 for developers. These downloads include prerelease software that may change without notice. The software is provided as is, and you bear the risk of using it. It may not be stable, operate correctly or work the way the final version of the software will. It should not be used in a production environment. The features and functionality in the prerelease software may not appear in the final version. Some product features and functionality may require advanced or additional hardware, or installation of other software.

Well this idea seems to be on hold, tried pocketcloud, 2x and about 3 other iPad rdp clients and all of seem to crash or display a black screen

it took < 20 mins to install to a VHD on my laptop and boots in 5 seconds and i dont even have an SSD
hullo!

Finally got pocket cloud and VNC to work but performance is pretty poor.

It's looking interesting, gonna have to go buy a Win7 tablet to test out the metro stuff now ;)

But we're techies and we want more, so how about some news on the Windows 8 'Server' to whet our voracious appetites?

Here you go
Tech Broiler Archive: December, wind | ZDNet
&
Newsletter #91:  Server 8's New Features, In Brief

- MMC's to use a Metro interface
- DAC let's you replace ACL's by using AD attributes to grant access
- Hyper-V can support 32 core, 512GB RAM VM's
- DirectAccess can be enabled and configured with a single click
- Several thousand new Powershell cmdlet's
- and much more...

This could end up being the most significant Windows Client AND Server release since Windows 2000 (well, as an employee of Microsoft, I do very much hope it is and wish it to succeed... in any case, I am very anxious to see more and get my hands dirty with the tech)

Don't they supply you with the tablets so you can 'dog food' the system?

Thanks for the mention, I've not had much time to have a play with it yet but maybe will spend a bit of time with it this weekend. I wonder how long it will be before I switch to classic view (if there is one).

Oh -just downloaded the ISO for this - will try it out later today!
Thanks Dale for the heads-up

just installed it on virtualbox without any probs (under the win 7 64b template). and going through the first run wizard, for some reason I really fancy a packet of salt and vinegar crisps now.....

Got to take a look at it today at work and not keen i'm afraid, certainly not from a desktop or server point of view, it may work well on tablets or touchscreen pc's but I would probably keep the look of 7 on 8 which you have the option of doing for things like IE.

Its all very square looking and the browser for example is not good, very basic and not good to look at!

Server looks weird, the management panel, the only thing that was interesting was task manager, that was kind of cool, performance graphs look nice.

Other than that I think it might be another Vista turkey!

your referencing the start page, the replacement to the start bar basically
not how the whole windows system feels, and while i dont think it will even be in the server piece, i can deffo imagine a time where i can have live tiles of server metrics and applications ticking away in front of me, that is going to be nice

on another note
if you want to turn things on like hyper-v and bitlocker
do the usual DISM /online /get-features | more
then DISM /online /enable-feature /featurename:<PUTSTUFFHERE>

I'm not part of the team dogfooding Win8, and I don't think the company will give tablets to all 90k employees. We can now play around with it since the dev preview is released, but then I believe it's up to us to install it on what we can, say under Hyper-V or on some home PC or spare laptop.

As I'll be going to the US for a vacation in a month or so, I might take a look if there's a tablet I can buy for cheap since the Swiss Franc is so strong. Maybe a Beta is out in a few months as well...

Where are you headed to Shin?
I'm moving to Redmond in two weeks

Vacation in Orlando.