Windows 8 Preview: A Million Copies Downloaded in First 20 Hours
If you saw any news last week you are probably aware that Microsoft released their consumer preview version of Windows 8 late last week. For those not paying attention Windows 8 is the latest version of Microsoft’s Windows operating system for computers.
Microsoft are saying that Windows 8 is the most important new release of their Windows operating system in 15 years—since the ground-breaking release of Windows 95.
As popular and as amazingly successful as Windows 7 has been it was really little more than a fixed up and sped up version of Windows Vista; whereas Windows 8 is a re-engineered version of Windows targeted at what Microsoft sees as the future of computing for the next ten years. Because of this Windows 8:
- supports a touch-screen interface;
- leverages Internet cloud initiatives (that have really taken off in the last 18 months);
- is much more media (pictures and videos) focussed;
- comes with a Windows Store where you can download Apps (including many ‘free’ Aps); and
- it even supports the ARM processor family—which means it can be run as the operating system on most tablet PCs (this last point is huge).
One of the main tricks that Windows 8 has is that it is really two operating systems in one—sort of. There is the new tile-based Metro operating system and then underneath that is your regular ‘classic’ Windows operation system. When you first boot Windows 8 up—which only takes about five seconds (even on a slow computer) because of its new boot-up method—you get the Metro part of Windows.
For those that have not seen what Windows 8 looks like when it boots here is a picture.
[The above image links to the Windows 8 section of Paul Thurrott’s “Supersite for Windows” (www.winsupersite.com)]
This is the initial ‘face’ of Windows 8; a window that scrolls left and right, and contains Metro-style application tiles that can be downloaded from the Windows store. As on a Windows Phone these Metro tiles are ‘live’. They can contain updating information. For example a tile on this start screen could be assigned to you image library in which case it would keep updating with a new picture.
As far as I know the Metro screen is the only way you can boot into Windows 8—although there is talk that a configuration setting might be coming that will allow Windows to boot directly into the ‘classic’ interface; however this may only be available in the business editions. It is likely that all home-use (consumer) editions will only allow you to boot up into the Metro interface.
Clicking on, or touching (if you are working with a touch-screen), that bottom left tile called Desktop (with the fish in it) will flick you over to the classic Windows interface that we are all used to. I think you can also swap over to the classic Windows interface by swiping up on the screen, or using a shortcut key combination.
Anyway the point of this post was not to go into how Windows 8 works or what it does. The point is that one million copies of the free three gigabyte Consumer Preview version were downloaded in 20 hours. That is 50,000 per hour or 833 copies every minute.
One of those downloads was me and I plan to set up a second partition on my Toshiba i7-based Windows 7 notebook computer and install Windows 8 in the new partition sometime over the weekend.
One of the first things I plan to play with in Windows 8 is Internet Explorer 10. Just to totally confuse the issue there are two Internet Explorer 10s in Windows 8 and they are very different from each other. One is the Metro version of IE10 and the other is the classic version of IE10. After I get Windows 8 going on my notebook I will let you know what I can work out about the two new IE10s.
