The Windows 8 experiment. Part 1: Setting it up

Love it or hate it, those of us who work in IT will have to face Windows 8 sooner rather than later. I decided to give the RTM version a chance as secondary OS on my trusty old ThinkPad T61.
The hardware specs:

• Core2Duo T7100, 1.80 GHz
• 2 GB of RAM
• 250 GB SATA hard drive
• Mobile Intel 965 Express GPU
• Display resolution: 1440x900

Anything but modern hardware in other words.

Over the course of the next days I plan on posting a series of posts about my experiences with Microsoft's latest and greatest operating system. Note: I am not going to install Classic Shell or other tools of the kind to get the start menu back. Instead I want to use the system as designed. Start screen and all.

After transferring the DVD image onto a USB drive using the Windows 7 USB/DVD download tool I rebooted and started the installation process. It is very similar to the Windows 7 installation process at first (down to the Aero Glass window decoration), with one major difference: You cannot bypass entering the license key any more like you could with Windows Vista and Windows 7. The Windows 8 installer asks for the key before you can select which hard drive to install to.

Later in the set up you're asked to enter your Microsoft account details. You can use a local account as well, but to make use of the full Windows 8 experience a Microsoft account is recommended. Wanting to start from a clean slate I decided to use a recently created @outlook.com account.

There is a brief tutorial during the final part of the installation - a couple of screens showing you in which corner of the screen to move the mouse to bring up the Charms bar etc.

The first thing I noticed after the first log-in is a regression compared to Windows 7: Windows 8 did not recognise the native resolution of the ThinkPad display, something Windows 7 did out of the box. It took downloading the Intel Graphics driver via Windows Update to have the correct resolution. Not a big issue, just a small annoyance. More annoying: Windows Update offered four additional driver updates - all of which failed to install. After the next reboot they weren't to be found. Weird.
Another annoyance: I installed the English version of Windows with German regional settings. As a result the desktop is in English, the Start screen itself is in English... but the modern UI apps are in German. So far I have not found where to correct this; if anyone has an idea let me know. Admitted, this is due to my personal configuration and won't be the norm. Still annoying.

As a next step I decided to install the desktop applications I need. Since this is about using the latest and greatest I went with the MS Office 2013 preview, Visual Studio 2012 Express plus a few assorted programs - Firefox, HexChat as IRC client, Pidgin, Skype. All this worked without a hitch.

But first, the desktop experience had to be sanitised. Those of you who've seen screenshots of Windows 8 will have noticed the humongous title bars. I can't stand them. Fortunately there is a workaround: On a Windows 7 installation with title bars, border padding and the like set up to your preferences, open regedit and export HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\WindowMetrics to a .reg file. This can be imported in Windows 8. As a result you get this:

… instead of this: 

Looks a whole lot saner, doesn't it?
This concludes the first post about the Windows 8 experiment. Coming up next: Using the Windows Store and 'modern UI' applications.