Windows 8.1 Preview Initial Thoughts

I finally got around to installing Windows 8.1 Public Preview.  I am definitely liking the new digs.  However, I already started to look into how to uninstall due to the following items that I’ve now gotten sorted out (hopefully helps someone else):

  1. I couldn’t connect to any of my local network resources: iSCSI targets, NAS shares, NAS website.  However, I could ping them and SSH just fine.  I thought it was something to do with the iSCSI targets because whenever I tried to enable/disable task manager showed 5MB+ sustained traffic flowing over the network.  Obviously not a good thing.  Well, it turns out it was the “Microsoft LLDP Protocol Driver” on the network connection.  The picture below is what I unchecked to make everything start working again including being able to restart the machine.  And yes, while this is a Hyper-V virtual adapter, similar problems were happening when I wasn’t using Hyper-V (trust me, I tried everything!).Microsoft LLDP Protocol Driver
  2. Windows + S no longer works for OneNote screen clipping!!!!11one  I get that it makes sense for it to go to Search now, but dammit Microsoft, stop messing with my shortcuts!  First it was Windows + Q moving from lync to search (which also brings up search in 8.1 Preview), and now Windows + S is taken from me too!  Grrr

Oh well, with the bad comes the good:

  1. Love the desktop wallpaper being in metro
  2. Love the auto-complete for when I launch an app
  3. Love the minimalistic Start button
  4. I am enjoying IE 11, but we’ll see how long that lasts
  5. One I get the RT tab updated, the labelling of groups will be nice

Overall, seems to be good now that I’ve surpassed the biggest hurdle.