I tried an upgrade from Windows 7 to the Windows 8 preview understanding that the preferred approach is to do a clean install.
The installer is an improvement over previous versions and the process was without obvious problems. "User data and programs" are supposed to be preserved. This is true in that the data are stored in windows.old, but few of the programs were available for
execution from the new user interface. It was not obvious as to why some programs were "transferred" for execution from the tiles and others weren't.
A number of drivers and activations were lost in the upgrade and had to be re-installed and re-activated.
As others have pointed out, there were problems executing from the tiles. None of the new apps executed properly. Interestingly, the transferred applications did work properly except for WebMD which failed with IE, but worked properly with SeaMonkey. It
uses a Java run time which had to be re-installed but still didn't work with IE in spite of setting the security options correctly.
There is no obvious way of terminating a program that has been launched from a tile other than usage of control-alt-delete and killing the task.
One understands that "sleeping" an executable facilitates a fast re-start as compared with a re-load, but it probably wastes memory and some CPU cycles. Also, what happens when one wants an excutable not to "sleep", but to continue processing in the background
?
There is no easy way to add a program tile to the display. I understand the procedure of adding a .lnk file to the accessories directory, but this is very awkward. There is also no obvious way to edit the contents of tile.
One other apparent glitch is that some programs that are executed from a tile go through an intermediary step of briefly displaying the old Windows 7 user interface before the program's own interface is displayed.
Overall, Windows 8 looks quite interesting and the preview works remarkably well for a "pre-beta".
