Feel free to post any news, gossip or questions relating to the upcoming release of Windows 8.

I need a CPU upgrade before I can install it in VirtualBox

Some early opinions on Windows 8 here - Fly Or Die: Premature Opinions On Windows 8? We Got ‘Em Here! | TechCrunch

I'm definitely interested to see what they can do on the tablet side. I still curse the iPad every time I try to view something with Flash content and it doesn't work. Apple definitely have the upper hand in with their brand and the sexy factor but how long will people put up with major defects like that? HTML5 might be brining more flexible ways to deliver video content without plugins but right now a huge amount of sites use Flash Video.

I really need to find a spare 64bit system... preferably with a touch screen

First impression.. They have taken the Windows out of Windows

what I note is it is surprisingly stable and responsive for something that is still in alpha... perhaps contrary to the //Build/ comments.. this is more likely Beta-1

I use Windows 7 on my main machine and I really don't think the menu system is efficient. For example if I have 10 emails open in outlook, I hover over the main outlook icon, wait for all ten thumbnails to popup then try to see which one I need from a tiny image. In some ways previously by having the larger bar on the toolbar I could see the subject line instantly of that email.

Little things that I think can be drastically improved once you have a human touch. Using a mouse to navigate an operating system is seriously slow in comparison to what we should be doing and that's voice and touch so I am really glad there appears to be some momentum here. Once you need more control then break out into a pen tool such as Livescribe :: Never Miss A Word for details like drawing and note taking.

I just put together a long overdue new build based on Black Friday deals, and I put Windows 8 Developer on a partition just to see if the 32-bit flavor of it would support anything that Win 7 64-bit wasn't.

In the brief time I had it installed, I took a really short look around in it. My first impression was that it was trying to "smartphone" (new verb) my desktop PC. I'm all for change when it's for the better, but Windows 8 was as radical a departure from a "typical" Windows interface as Microsoft Bob was. It did look like the standard desktop could be a set as a startup interface, but I didn't test it out.

One thing that struck me was how most of the tweaks and customizations I like access to were even further removed from the standard interface than they had been shuffled to in Windows 7. Once I managed to get into the right areas, though, I was impressed that custom settings seemed a little more robust.

Another thing that got my attention was that there was no longer a close window button at the top right of any opened window - it made it difficult to tell if you had ever really closed it or if it had just moved out of view/focus.