Report: Public Windows 8 Beta Coming in February

I sure it will be leaked long before February.

Windows 7 was good, Windows 8 will be an improved version if Windows 7. Will be using the beta most likely.

I'm not holding my breath. Vista was soooo bad... 7 finally fixed it. But there's a ton of major changes to 8 that I'm very concerned about and not a simple way to make it differently... At least not unless they have a bunch of differences between the current developer's preview and the released beta. But right now, I'm not even considering 8... But we'll see. It'll likely take a year or more to see release anyhow but...

I disagree. Ignoring the metor UI and assuming that at release it will be able to be completely disabled. Window 8 will be an improvement on 7. Its got a lot of new features and tweaks, like the file transfer manager and multi-core boot, that will make it better. I am looking forward to its release.

Everyone always hates Vista but I loved it. The biggest reason was the searchbar in the start menu. I also liked the introduction of gadgets. Stickynotes and cpu meter were great. The only program I ever had problems with was KOTOR II and with one download that problem was fixed.

Vista wasn't nearly as bad as people made it seem. Initially it had very little support from the industry, Microsoft has learned the lesson to keep the industry close especially when you plan to do a radical overhaul. They're working very close with the right people both hardware and software based, to keep that from happening again.

As far as whatever problems are currently wrong with Windows 8, well that's what a Public Beta is for. To get as many willing participants to test out the software, use it in thousands of different ways and run into and report any problems, bugs, or issues they have. You can't knock Windows 8 before it's technically even in Beta.

Just seems too early... I love Win7 so much.

Vista was fine if you had the right hardware. Yeah it was new but i bought it day 2 of release and never had 1 problem. Its funny my whole family and friends are "techies", but I always asked whats so bad about vista to them. They all said "well I heard", not very good especailly coming from from people who should know whats going on. But I always said try it then criticise. They ALL said they were wrong. Vista was good as long as you had the right hardware. Windows 8 will be different too, but im so looking forward to the ecosystem that windows has coming together. It will be a big relief from the segmented system that is going on now.

Vista was perfectly fine if you weren't running 1 gb of ram and a P4, I see no difference with Windows 8. It just got bashed so badly mainly because of under powered hardware and Apple commercials.

I agree that Windows Vista was good as well. The problem was that it required so much more from PCs, and buying the cheapest out there (like so many do) didn't cut it. People with 1 GB of RAM in their PCs and poor GPUs just couldn't do very much. And also, the average consumer keeps their PC looking like trash with all the bloatware that they install which didn't help the problem. Microsoft could have averted problems if they had worked with the industry better, streamlined the OS hardware consumption a bit more, and bumbed up the requirements (like 2 GB instead of 1 and a 1.5 GHz processor instead of 1.0)

Vista ran all right with a 2.8GHz HT Pentium 4 northwood, 2GB DDR 400MHz, and a Geforce 6200, but not great, and it was enough that I ended up downgrading to XP. The thing is, with the right hardware, it wasn't at all bad. I think Windows 8 has good improvements behind-the-scenes, but the metro ui SUCKS unless you have a tablet, and even then, it's just okay. Windows 7, as it is, is quite good and I see no real reason to make major changes to the UI. I think Windows 8's explorer is a bit more convoluted than before, and that's not necessary. However, I definitely like the new task manager in all aspects, easier to use, the graphs are easier to read (bright green lines on a dim green background with green lines in there just isn't very good), and now when you ask it to kill a program it actually ends the program rather than asking it to end politely, taking forever (it might be good to have a 'Are you sure?' warning incase someone accidentally clicks the wrong thing though). A few other things - get rid of the little 'click' navigation noise in IE and Explorer, and speed up MenuShowDelay by default to 100ms or so (like a lot of linux distros and Mac OS X).

As for vista, another thing - keep in mind that by the time Windows 7 was released hardware had improved quite a bit, so make the OS a little lighter, and new PCs are MUCH faster. I mean, wtf, why were vista PCs made with only 1GB RAM? No wonder why they were slow.

I think Windows 8 may be even better there. For instance, you don't need GPU support for aero transparency now. I've got aero even though I'm running Windows 8 in virtualbox, and it won't accept vbox's windows 7 video driver (code 37).

I can't wait to see it, and Kinect for PC! I sure hope they're integrated.

I don't like Metro... And by the looks of it, I don't like the "underlying" desktop either...

My greatest problems with vista were always the ridiculous overhead it had compared to XP. On a machine with 2GiB RAM (very common computers until after windows 7 came out) I usually had less than 1GiB of free RAM when I had nothing running. Windows 7 improved on that somewhat but windows 8 is improving on that even more. Considering the difference in RAM usage between windows 7 and server 2008r2 I would really like a copy of windows 8 server but Microsoft isn't giving it out for free to everyone right now like the desktop version.

I wonder if we will get to try it out as long as the Win 7 RC1. Would be nice.

biggest reason for windows 8: bulldozer scheduler fix. that will stop a lot of whining.
anyway, win 8 looks quite lightweight but stronger than previous versions. i am skeptical about a few things:
how ms will juggle two versions (tablet and pc)
how important the metro ui would be. the start menu in win 8 didn't seem as effective as 7.
with ms trying to steer two very different os optimization-wise, arm and x86, (although they're the same outside) how much secure will they be. ms is notorious for os vulnurability.
will it let us play crysis?

Vista was a dog. Compared to XP it was much harder to use and had some senseless changes that just made it frustrating to use, the original version was also full of bugs. Even after two service packs it still leaves a lot to be desired. Windows 7 is a big improvement on Vista but still lacks some of XP's features and useability. Windows 8 so far while having some good points such as the task manager, at the moment falls far behind even Vista in useability and bugs. However it is to early to decide if Windows 8 will be better than Windows 7 or worse than Vista as things are still in a state of change. On the desktop Metro sucks, so one of the changes that needs to be made is to make it easy to turn it off.

cmon microsoft!! try and get it out sooner, i'l slap a spare drive in here and give it a few testruns, from what i saw before im not interested, but this will be your chance to change that.

just the other day i bought my first copy of windows7. yea on sale at newegg. i hesitated to purchase it so long because for the longest time it was still around $200 for professional 64bit..
win8 is going to have to be pretty damn special to make me move from the 7 thats in delivery right now to my doorstep to a new OS.
"Cmon Microsoft do something special"

As long as i can test out Bulldozer with the scheduler fix and Run Crysis than I will be impressed. I also don't want the minimum computer specs raised again, if anything they should stay the same with win7.
my wish list:
- They also need native format options for Hard drives in FAT32 a la winXP.
- They need to allow legacy start bar options like "classic start menu"
- If they introduce winXP virtual machine, they better provide it with GPU hardware acceleration, none of that software emulated nonsense in win 7.
- For the love of god please bring back support for creating batch files like in winXP.
- I want affinity settings to be remembered for any application, for example through the shortcut.
- I want an end to defragging or scan disk when the computer is idle by default. I should have clear control of that.
- I want the old classic Logo.sys file so I can customize my start screen like in Win98 days.
- I want a free copy of microsoft flight bundled with the win 8 beta !
- I want soundcard hardware acceleration reactivated like it used to until Vista
- I want the bootloader to accept multiple OS on one hard disk, and recognize win98 and Ubuntu versions, not just winXP.
- I want Crysis to run on maximum setting using a 4+ core Intel or 4+ core AMD CPU at 30 Frames per second with a $200 GPU, no excuses.

Ok that is all my ranting:

Happy Hollidays

you are right! you mean i need a intel core i7 2600k, 16GB ram and geforce gtx 580, or windows sucks?
A new windows should not be a reason to buy new HW, that's ridiculous. that's the reason why i'm still using xp and the latest linux con my core 2 quad, 4 gb of ram and geforce 8600 gt.
windows vista and 7 are the same s***.. but if you are happy.. good 4 you!

I didn't mind Vista 8. Yeah it required more ram. I bought 4 gigs of ram for around 100 bucks. I am not sure why some people couldn't buy ram. To me it says something about them.

But anyway, yes Vista was not great. Win 7 was much better.

I think we will have to see about Win 8. Its obviously going to have some things which cause people to complain, but hopefully it will be a step forward.

Dang just as I was getting used to my bootlegged copy of 7 ultimate 64 bit now they go and come out with 8 so soon...

I know how you feel soldier37, i was doing the same for a moment there, every few months though it would tell me its not legitimate. so i just decided to go back to XP. finally bought a real copy because i want DX10. and i dont want to have to read the description of my windows updates.

I wish networking in win7 wasn't all messed up, i cant get them to network properly for the life of me. problems no matter what guide i follow,, with xp it was simple.. WTF Microsoft.

anyone else find it funny that windows gets a lot better at managing memory when memory is hitting dirt cheap?
seriously, 8GB is around 50 bucks now days.

Hope they release good drivers. I have Windows 8 developer edition in a virtual machine and could never get the network to work because there is no driver for it.

Dear Microsoft,

Please, Please, Please have Classic (Win 7) mode. Along with all the new architectural changes, as well as nailing mobility, it will be killer....but please don't take away my win 7 interface. I like it way too much.

Even though there are a lot of improvements... I'm using Win7 and I don't feel like migrating to Win8. Maybe other feel the same way, too. But Vista/XP user might finally upgrade to Win8. XP is still great... for netbooks even if it's a decade old

Any news on ARMx86-64 compatibility? Need emulators to work for different processors? VS will have patch for ARM platform.. or they'll release VS2011 for that (ouch)?

I used Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 on a Intel DG31PR motherboard with celeron(conroe-L) 430 @ 1.8GHz & 1GB DDR2 800MHz RAM. It ran quite well on $110 hardware. So the upgrade was not much costly.
Of course Windows 7 is better & I expect Windows 8 to be more superior.