MS has a golden opportunity here. They are the only OS or mobile OS company that is not after the hardware revenues per se, or our information, personally identifiable or not. Most here so far are talking as if the preview is the finished product. I used the developer's preview last year and loved it but it was very much different from the more complete Consumers Preview I am using now. I loaded it on an Acer Aspire One AOA 150, the original XP 8.6" screen and 1GB of RAM. I had just disassembled it and upgraded the RAM to 1.5 GB and it ran both previews of Win 8 fine, ion fact very fast. However the new consumers preview has the resolution minimums so I could only use the desktop, no apps with it so I restored the XP image I saved before trying it.

Now I have Win 8 loaded on a two month old Toshiba laptop I upgraded to 8 GB of RAM and a 128 GB Crucial M4 SSD. Simply put, it screams. Everything is easy and ready when I am no waiting. The boot times are almost as fast as I can open the lid. It takes longer for me to type in the password than any part of boot. I think it is about time for e sea change again like when we went to Win 95 from windows for workgroups 3.1 and DOS before that. We all hated mice and any GUI because we had our DOS commands down pat. Kind of like the Linux folks now who feel superior because they can go to a command line and make inputs and system commands from there. So 80's.

Anyway folks how many of you are using the preview instead of just talking about it. It took me about a months to go from lost to liking the old developers preview, and be able to be productive in it. For example what programs have you tried on it. I have all my software I use in Win 7 and XP loaded and it all runs fine. I now have trouble when I switch back to my desktop with 7, or worse XP.

I think MS can break away from the pack without the locked in hard and soft ecosphere like Apple, or the very intrusive anti privacy Google. So many people are lost in the 80's and 90's in the computing world. Folks calling MS evil when they are too young to have been doing it in the 80s along with me and all the other Boomer Techies that wrote code before most here were born. If you like another OS then by golly use it and keep you own counsel. Do people really need to hate everything that is not their choice? I have news for you. If you use windows as an OS and talk bad about MS doesn't the contradiction even occur to you? We used the first Macs in the mid 80's as well. And programmed the first ISP software so you could talk trash online in Unix before Linus Torvalds.

I am not trying to talk trash here, just trying to say that if you are using it you already know the advantages of the fast boot, the new hybrid sleep/hibernate mode that id reliable and very fast, the secure boot and protected mode in IE 10 with a spell check finally!

The preview is free and available. You can image your computer free with Windows 7 and restore it reliably so no excuse not to try it. If you have XP or Vista use EaseUS Todo free imaging and cloning software. I haven't been able to find the image program in 8 so I downloaded EaseUS Todo and imaged my Windows 8 image to the same external drive and can switch back and forth in about 15 minutes for every image restore to each OS version.

Could you please comment on what you know and have tried? Because anything else is as we say in Texas, all hat and no cows.