Windows 8 Consumer preview

Soooo.
Lots of stuff happening whilst I have been busy finishing an SOE project and being forced to work fixing some odd Citrix printing problems
MDT2012, SCCM beta2, Windows 8 Consumer preview......
Today I took the brave/stupid/dangerous? step of 'upgrading' my personal laptop to Win8 CP.
The jury is still out for me with Windows 8 but chances are we are going to have to get used to it. So what the hey
So far so good. A quick high level overview...
The upgrade went very smoothly, I took the option of keeping all my settings, apps etc rather than a clean install just to see how it went. It took about 1.5 hours on an i7(not SB) with 16GB of ram and a 7200rpm laptop drive. The source distribution was on the same physical disk (different partition) as the install. All hardware is working properly as it seems are most of the apps and my settings. This is good news for IT departments and bad news for consultants like me.... Still I am sure there will be no shortage of money making opportunities here.
It did take a further 1 hour for the disk to stop being accessed before I logged in, presumably anti-virus/defender/indexing etc activity but there was no reason to wait I could have logged straight in.
Only real problem I have had so far is that this

happened when I logged in with my domain admin account.  Now as far as I know this account has never been used in Japan, never had Japanese settings put on it or had anything Japanese related done to it. So how I ended up with this I do not know.

All of your existing apps will not appear in the start screen but they are easy to get to by typing a couple of letters of the name of the app in question and selecting from the list. I think people will get used to this idea pretty quickly, its arguably quicker and easier than navigating menus looking for a utility or app. Where its not good obviously is if you don't know the name of the app or if you are looking for something on a system,

There is also a high level overview available if you do get to the stage, which is likely, of having a lot of apps on your metro start page. You can select and zoom into any of the 'blocks' of apps on this screen or scroll along with the bars at the bottom if you get to that stage

I would still like to see pages on the metro screen so you can have a page of games, one of business apps, one of utilities etc etc.

I like this idea, could be great for native Win8 Apps in a locked down environment or even possibly so you can watch an IM whilst playing an online game. These 2 are the native remote desktop and the native mail app.

One thing I am really not too sure about though is the number of things that require an MS account of one kind or another to access, ignoring for a minute the ability to link your domain account to a personal Microsoft account (please take this away for the pro versions Microsoft, pretty please) and the fact that you can actually use a personal web account to log on altogether - you deserve everything that happens if you do that to an account you care about.... There are 22 apps on the initial screen 11 of them which is half, require a web account of some kind.

And I am really not sure about this.... I would assume that you can switch all this stuff off for professional deployments. Will find out later on when I have played with the latest MDT and SCCM releases.

Australia at the forefront of the Microsoft world as per normal  **sigh** (this was the 'Finance' app)