Like it or not, the beloved start button we all know and love is gone in Windows 8. In its place, we have the new metro U. I. start screen. With this new start screen, you gain the ability to have live tiles, where the program icon can display bits of program information within opening the program. If you press the windows key on Windows 8, it takes you to the start screen.
However, this means that things can get somewhat cluttered, especially if you have a bunch of programs installed. To solve this, I propose that Windows 8 should allow us to have groups. Groups allow you to put like tiles together I saving screen space in the process. It would also allow people to hide tiles which are used infrequently. Being able to put shortcuts on the desktop mode from the metro ui would be nice as well.
As far as keyboard shortcuts go, alt-F4 and Ctrl-Alt-Del and Alt-Tab still work under Windows 8. I am not sure about other keyboard shortcuts.
Finally, windows 8 requires a windows live id to login. If you use Hotmail or Xbox Live, you are covered and just use the same email address and password for Hotmail or Xbox Live. If you don't have one, you can easily get one. There is the possibility to have local users on the system which are not connected to Windows live, but those users cannot sync settings with other windows 8 computers.
I would like to invite you to try Windows 8 right now. You can do so by going to http://bit.ly/H04H05. In the windows 8 setup program, there is an option to upgrade a Windows 7 installation to Windows 8. I would advise against this (at least until windows 8 is officially released to the general market). In my next post, I will detail how to install windows 8 toa separate part of your hard drive so your important data is untouched. For now, just download the windows 8 setup, but don't install it unless you know what you are doing.
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I've played around with Windows 8 and I think what you recommend about groups is not a bad idea. But in some ways, wouldn't it almost seem like a regression to Windows 3.1?
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