A brief look at Windows 8.

Now, it's been on my radar for a while, and it's something I've wanted to do. But I never had the time to give Windows 8 the quality look over it deserves until a few days ago. This is not going to be a definitive review, this is just my take on how Windows 8 looks.

The first thing you notice is that you have to give Microsoft two ways of contacting you and confirming it's you. When I saw this, I said that they were doing the same thing as Google nowadays, you have to register with a phone number. So I just put in my area code and then random numbers. I also had to pick a security question which included options such as "best childhood friend." I chose this option and put in my first name.

Once I had gotten everything with setup squared away, I went to the new Start menu. My first thought was that it had a nice tile interface. I opened Internet Explorer and went to YouTube. I found that I did not even have to install flash player, which I think they are including now.

Once I was done browsing, I looked for the charm bar, that new sidebar where you have to move your mouse to the top right corner to open it. I really did not like the charm bar that much because of the fact that making it easier to open the charm bar with a touchscreen made it harder to open it with a mouse.

I went to the start menu and opened up the Windows Store which was labeled "The Store." It's the only store, there are no other stores now, Microsoft owns everything. :)

Now, when I went to the desktop and opened Task Manager, I saw "Antimalware Service Executable." This is Microsoft's new version of Windows Defender which is meant to protect against all kinds of malware now. So what I did was download the EICAR test file, and Windows Defender raised alarms at the file. Not bad, it works and Microsoft is actually including antimalware with Windows 8. From my viewpoint, this is a good thing. Because even though Windows Defender can't beat a few third party antivirus software, it's still good.

I would give you the rest of my findings, but this should be brief. In my opinion, with Windows 8: Some things changed for the better, some things changed for the worse. Windows 8 seems like a good, solid operating system that I think has unfairly found a bad reputation in some groups.