Windows 8 rocks!

I'm writing this on an old HP530 laptop. Until yesterday, it was an unusably slow machine with it's 1GB of RAM and Windows Vista installed. Now that I've installed Windows 8 Developer Preview it simply rocks.

Installation
You can download the Windows 8 developer preview from the Microsoft website. After you download it, be sure to check the file for download errors. My first copy was damaged, so I had to reload the file. To check for download errors, you need to calculate the SHA-1 checksum of the file and compare it to the SHA-1 given on the download website. To calculate the SHA-1 checksum you will have to download the FCIV tool from Microsoft. When you're certain your copy is OK, you can burn the iso to a CD or create a bootable USB stick with the Windows 7 USB download tool from Microsoft.

Metro Interface
The default interface you see in Windows 8 has nothing to do with the classic desktop. You will be presented with the beautiful Metro interface designed for tablets. It provides a simplified computing experience that will suffice for 90% of users, whether they are on a tablet of laptop device. I showed it to my children and they started playing with the different tiles just by relying on their intuition. The tiles are also 'live', in the sense that they behave like widgets, showing e.g. the weather forecast on the weather application tile.
Also things like 'settings' have been incorporated in a very nice interface, both visually pleasing and with good usability. Power users can switch to the old desktop-with-taskbar interface to be able to run tradional Windows applications like Word and Photoshop.

Internet Explorer 10
Actually there are 2 versions of this browser installed. The desktop version is nothing special, but the version you get in the Metro interface really surprised me.
When you're browsing you don't see any browser chrome. You're just interacting with the website in fullscreen. Once you click the right mousebutton on a non-clickable area in the website, the chrome pops up. At the bottom you see an address bar, at the top you get an overview of your open tabs by showing large thumbnails of the tabs. Very nice and much clearer than the small favicon-with-text tabs you get in a normal desktop browser. When you start typing in the address bar, the main screen of the browser shows you suggestions based on what you previously visited and what Microsoft's search engine Bing is guessing. This is a very nice form of autocomplete.

Compatibility
Windows has a rich past, which means it supports a wide selection of hardware. In my case, the videocard of my HP530 wasn't supported by Windows 8, resulting in a screen resolution of only 800x600. But after downloading the Windows 7 driver, it just installed and worked immediately, even without rebooting. If this means earlier windows drivers will be compatible with Windows 8, a lot of hardware and accessories like webcams and game controllers will still be usable. With the small footprint of the OS (it runs perfectly fine on 1GB RAM with a 5 year old CPU) this backwards compatibility will further drive down prices of computer hardware like tablets and mini laptops. This will let Windows 8 based devices take the market by storm.

Flash
It seems like Adobe Flash is really on it's way out. The Metro version of Internet Explorer no longer includes Flash but relies on HTML 5 to display video's in websites. This is done to ensure that the Metro interface will run nicely even on low-end devices like cheap tablets. Now that browser implementations of HTML 5 are getting better and development tools are starting to mature, it won't be long before the proprietary Flash platform is (finally) replaced with the open technology of HTML 5.

Conclusion
This is a serious competitor to IOS and Android. The fact that you can have 2 computers in one (tablet UI and desktop UI) will prove to be really valuable for users that don't want to invest in 2 devices. Combine that with the developer ecosystem of Microsoft and Metro applications will soon be conquering the world.