Gave W8 DP a quick try out this weekend...

I tried it on a 5 yr old Acer notebook that currently runs Vista and so armed to the teeth with full Acronis images I installed W8.

Installation was quick-ish at around 30 minutes all in. Essentially an identical procedure and installation screens to Vista.

Some quick observations. Devices such as wireless mouse worked OK (obviously recognised) but there was no user notification or sound that it has been detected and installed. While I was wondering and looking in device manager it just started working. Device manager had a fair number of yellow triangles against such things as web cam etc. Nothing has changed there since Vista.

Same for external HDD... it worked and was recognised but no notification of "installing drivers etc".

As expected my NVidia 6100 graphics had only a default driver installed and wanting full resolution I installed my Vista/W7 driver. That seemed to go well... more on that later.

As to the W8 experience.

Apart from the Metro interface (I know it's different and I wanted to like it but ultimately didn't as I don't want what look like adverts plastered over the desktop) W8 seems little different to W7 which in turn is little different to Vista.

The familiar desktop is still there and all the screens and menus and personalisation... well you could be looking at W7 or Vista. The initial set up was easy and straightforward. During initial installation it asked me if I wanted to connect to my wireless network which it found and showed with no user input.

IE10... I couldn't get to my Yahoo email with that. Yahoo kept saying I needed IE (lol) or Firefox. Other sites seemed OK though.

Updates... 8 installed and one failed :) Windows Defender of all things. It had another go and it worked. Checking "installed updates" and the failed one doesn't show. That screen seemed different with less detail and info.

The labeling of devices in "computer" seemed confusing. I wanted to "safely remove hardware" and found my external drive was called "USB to SATA serial drive bridge". The familiar "safely remove hardware" icon in the tray also called it this weird name.

Had to use Google to find where the on/off and power buttons were ;-)

And that's where what I presume is an NVidia driver issue appeared. It wouldn't power down but just hung on the logging off screen forcing me to do a hard shut down.

Would I upgrade to W8 ? No. Buying a new PC and I guess we'll have no choice. Wonder if there will be a free "upgrade DVD" offered with new PC's as W8 release nears. Having a means of a "clean install" without all the usual bloatware is worth it weight in gold.

So there we go... I'm pleased I tried it... and I might even do the same again if a full Beta version is made available.