I'm running it in a virtual machine at the moment. I quite like Windows 8 anyway so I guess it's not too much of a shock
Options are now available so that you can boot to the desktop if you want and turn off 'hot corners' You can also shut down pc from a right click on the start button.
IE 11 is fast and working well.
I'm not much of a metro tile user so not much to say in that department. I was able to sign in using a local user account.
The start button issue has never bothered me mta, there are many ways to do things instead of just relying on one button. Everyone does things differently though and I know the start button is important to many users.
Here are 3 screenshots.
One is what you see when you press the file explorer icon in the taskbar, note that by default 'Computer' is now called 'This PC' (ignore drive sizes as I am in a 50 gig virtual machine)
Another is what you get when you right-click on the start button.
And the last is the changes you can make by right-clicking on the taskbar, selecting properties and then the navigation tab.
i agree @hazelnut, it didn't take too long to get used to having no Start button, I simply used the keyboard at lot more.
but sadly, unlike us 'geeks', a lot of mum & dad users are really getting stuck at the lack of start button issue.
teaching old dogs new tricks and all that...
any chance you can show a shot of what Start looks like when just left-clicking on it?
and good to see you put 8.1 Preview in a VM, I read that if you install 8.1 Preview that you then can't install the real version without doing a fresh install.
You go to the metro screen if you left click on the start button but it is slightly different in that when you click on the arrow to move downscreen, it changes to something like this below.
Everything you have installed appears for you to click on and access. (if you want to access it that way)