First Impressions: Windows 8 Consumer Preview

I was a bit surprised when I looked at the system requirements, my old laptop was robust enough to run the Windows 8 consumer preview. So, with a fresh install of this public beta; what worked, what didn't?
First, the specs for my test machine. It's an Acer Travelmate 2420, a 5+ year old machine running a 32-bit 1.5 GHz Celeron M processor with 2 GB of RAM. I guess I really shouldn't be surprised that I can get Win8 to run, since the Windows 7 tester said it would run that as well, just without Aero.
The Atheros wireless chipset worked out of the box, even prompting me to choose my network and supply the password during setup. With the public emphasis being placed on providing a seamless experience among traditional PCs/laptops, phones, and tablets; it should really only be a shock when an wireless chipset does not work as expected.
Sound worked no problem, even installing the AC97 audio control panel without my intervention. The monitor was detected, and a reasonable 1024x768 resolution was chosen. I probably could have gotten better results (and more options) from something other than the generic VGA driver, but either Win8 didn't recognize the earlier Intel graphics chip, or just didn't ship with a driver for it. I'm not going to complain about the available 1280x800 resolution.
The only thing that didn't go off without a hitch on the initial install was the Synaptic touchpad. Win8 identified it as a PS/2-Compatable mouse, and that was all she wrote; so no edge scrolling or tapping tricks for me, I guess.
Leave it to my mother-in-law, though. While Win8 was starting up for the first time, I wondered aloud what a fish had to do with Windows. And she mentioned that it looked like one of those "fighting fish", and I facepalmed at the pun.
When I boot up, I'm immediately reminded that this OS is designed with touch-screen interfaces in mind. The "lock" screen requires* a click and drag like a smart phone screen saver before I can log in. Really not that big of a deal, though a keyboard shortcut would have been nice.
After logging in, I come to the now-infamous Start screen. For the most part -- minus some "could not connect to service at this time" hiccups you're going to have to expect from working "in the cloud" -- everything that came with a live tile started up. The Pinball game didn't; but I'd wager that was more because of my lack of graphics horsepower (or even lack of a specific driver) than a problem with the game itself.
The Mail app also disappointed, both failing to connect to my GMail account and not having an option to use a standard POP3 account. When it finally did show that I had a Gmail account, it failed to show any inbox messages; though the send functionality worked perfectly. The Calendar app also seems to derp out a bit when syncing Google Calendar, especially when dealing with custom recurring events (i.e. every 2 weeks instead of every week). Both worked fine in Thunderbird on XP and Evolution on Ubuntu Linux, so I'm thinking its a glitch with how the Calendar app reads the recurrence data.
The Messaging app is a bit hard to test for me, since I don't use Live Messenger, I'll have to test out the Facebook functionality later on. The Map app worked fine, though it was a little slow; that may be my graphics again. The two things I noticed were lack of a "favorites" for locations; and no way to change the default "My Location" from inside Maps. You can add and remove locations from Weather, but from what I can tell, after the initial place look-up, Maps never double-checks the current My Location. (And yes, it's not using my IP address, that would put it 200 miles away instead of the 35.)
The People app is a nice little stand-in for a Facebook & Twitter timeline; though very basic in appearance; I prefer the originals (and no, I never thought I'd say that about facebook). Finance is nice for what it does, but it stopped working for me about halfway though my first test session; just crashed and would not reopen.
I'm also not a fan of the Internet Explorer Metro interface.** The large black bar that pops up at the bottom of the screen is annoying; it's a pain to get anything done in the tabbed browsers; and its just an all-around unpleasant experience. The one thing I will give credit (where it is due) are the Next/Previous Page buttons that pop in when you change pages.

As for quirks... the majority of my laptop special function buttons work as you think they should; the ones that don't are the numeric keypad. For some reason, Windows 8 (unlike both Ubuntu and Windows XP on the same machine) treats my virtual "numeric keypad"*** as having Number Lock off... moving the cursor instead of typing numbers. Also, even though the screen Brightness setting on the settings widget says unavailable, the brightness control keys work. Go figure.

Overall, I would have to say I am mildly impressed. Win8 acts like it would be a great on a tablet or a phone screen. However, as a desktop machine I'm having serious doubts. Despite trying to focus on using the Metro Apps, I find myself drifting back to the Aero versions (or whatever you want to call the Win7 style). Part of it is because the hardware I'm using is showing its age, and the pretty of the Metro apps seem to take longer both to load and to respond to input than the Aero counterparts. But part of it is from a consumer standpoint as well. Will the Mail, Calendar and People apps be able to replace Outlook, or even Windows Live Mail (Outlook Express)? Are the Music and Video apps really a better front end to your media files than iTunes or even Windows Media Player? Because that's what adoption is really going to hinge on; having better interfaces to do the stuff we want to do.

*I say "requires". I should probably say "seems to require" instead. Remember, these are first impressions, and I haven't had time to figure out how to do things in an "other" way yet. So whenever I say "requires", just assume I mean "seems to require" or "I haven't found an obvious way to do it differently yet."
** Writing this from the (Aero?) traditional interface.
*** i.e. the calculator tacked on to the right side of standard keyboards.