Well, well, I had no idea that Run uses autocomplete to list the folders' contents. Thanks!

True, unless you have the directory in your favorites.
I personally don't use the run dialog very much, I just type things in the Start menu text box. That's another wonderful feature added to Windows 7 as well.

I'm not a fan of the office-style ribbons. They're way too big and take up much more space than necessary. There doesn't need to be (huge) pictures, a small one and some text is enough. Otherwise it looks fine.

Honestly, the look is the least of the problems. The fact that MS continues to think that good UI design is the result of hiding things is the real problem. I can't use any of their recent office versions because they've hidden everything in counter intuitive places without any particular justification.

I'll have to find a link, but I saw an article a while back about their research into explorer and they themselves ignored it to change windows explorer. Ignoring the fact that most people were actually using portions of the UI that they decided to remove.

I disagree. After I got over the initial awkwardness of using the ribbon, I now struggle mightily when I have to ocassionally use pre 2007 version of office or outlook.

I wouldn't recommend it for everything but for office, outlook and paint, I have no complaints.

I can't agree with that, hiding user options is something that only very rarely works. The only time I can remember seeing it work was Vuescan and that's because they only disappeared the options that didn't apply to the current operation.

In the case of MS it's actively harmful to their business as you may as well just switch to something else if you're going to have to retrain your employees every time a new version pops up.

This is true as well. While I do find that most things are in a fairly intuitive place, there are things that has taken me minutes to find just because they're not where you'd think they would be. That, and everything takes so many more clicks than necessary with the ribbon system.

10 years to be accurate

It's not useless but there very well may be superior implementations.

orcishgamer please correct me with this statement since you always make me feel better:

I am terrified of windows 8 I fear it will bring the end of true PC gaming
hell even using a PC for work imo. microsoft does not know how important Windows is to the world when you go to offices with computers you see them using windows not macs and definantly not tablets also most people who makes games today uses microsoft windows to make games we love right now you don't see people making a game from a IOS tablet no they make it from windows then they port it to a tablet.

all this is pretty much confirmed when microsoft said use your PC like a device not a computer and that sad we still need computers not consumer electronics.

I do not want to see myself working in an office working with a Windows 8 computer being bombarded with fucking ads of games and movies and music.

Reread what you posted, seriously.

On the topic of the ribbon in Office, my father is a lawyer and there are a wide variety of commands that he uses on a regular basis that aren't commonly used, and a wide variety of extremely common commands that he never uses... like Save. He always uses Save As, always, because you need to have copies of all the intermediate forms of the document. With all of the previous versions of Word, it was super-easy to customize everything, adding and removing icons and bars as needed. However, with 2007+, all of your customization has to fit onto ONE little bar, which makes life substantially more difficult for him.

It may be easier for regular joes who don't do lots of technical word processing all the time, but for folks like my dad, it was a huge step backwards. But because the 2007+ doc format isn't compatible with previous versions, he had no choice but to change. (Even though most folks do the important stuff in .rtf anyway.)

Exec one: "Oh shit guys, they really liked Windows 8, If we don't do something now, they will just stick to that OS like everyone did with XP, and we will lose a fortune!"

Exec Two: "I know, let's pawn them off on a new terrible interface every second iteration or so, to make them upgrade constantly. Just have the mobile OS team program the straw man OS versions, and add the old programming budget to marketing! People will *have* to buy and support it because it's new! Anyone that demands we leave things well enough alone will be seen as a dinosaur, and outcast!"

Exec One: "Ship it!"

Your fears are overblown. MS has no reason to want this and gaming on PC has no reason to disappear. You may see a lot of work happen on Windows PCs in offices, but most of that work could happen on any platform, hell, most people really could do the computer portion of their job on an iPad. Office use does partially drive Windows sales, but it's not the only thing. At any rate, the way people interact with these devices will change for 2 reasons:
1) Our input devices are changing, even the camera that comes in the average laptop these days bears more resemblance to a Kinect than to the webcams of yore.

2) UI in the software realm is really bad, it also evolves as generations grow up with different "idioms" (for lack of a better term) for interacting with everything around them (this is why my parents were intimidated by their VCR while younger people have gone through several evolutions of the same type of technology without confusion), BUT software also simply evolves as we iterate through different ideas. Some iterations are bigger than others and some are a bust, but overall it moves in the right direction.

If you're worried about video gaming on PC, don't worry. If you're worried you'll have to do something different from before, well, that's going to happen regardless of platform, get used to change, change is a good thing overall.

As for Metro, it won't prevent any work from being done in any realm, from video gaming to the most mind numbing accounting you can imagine.