It's supposed to have the same requirements as win7 did.

Looks kind of nice. I am happy that IE will be faster, because on computers that you are not allowed to install stuff on (school...), not having firefox/chrome drives me mad.

Any ability of a duel boot between windows 7 then adding windows 8?

If you partition your hard disk, then I would imagine you can install Windows 8 along side 7. I'll be doing this.

This is the first version of Windows I've ever been looking forward to. I loved Vista, and now 7, but only after upgrading. The new metro theme looks beautiful, and I love how it's so HTML5 oriented. HTML applications should also now use IE 10, meaning it should be easy to build very pretty non-metro HTML5 desktop applications; i.e. something like Steam.

It also seems to be a huge overhaul of the whole OS, even down to the new file system, which is hopefully the result of all their WinFS work.

I've installed Windows 8 on a second partition on my PC. I love the Metro IE layout; I'd love to have a copy of FireFox or Chrome with the same UI. Even on a desktop I think it works great, and is one of the few fullscreen browsers I like.

Otherwise I'm not massively impressed. I think if I had it on a tablet then I'd love it, but on a desktop it feels really dumbed down. For example the new Start menu is practically useless. Although Metro works surprisingly well with a mouse and keyboard, it's much more work. Like you have to drag the login screen up to sign in. I'm also finding it _very_ unstable; lots of the Metro apps randomly freeze once I have opened more then 2 or 3, and it has blue screened literally about 15 times.

I have a dual screen setup with my main monitor flipped to be vertical. As a result boot loaders and the BIOS are normally shown rotated by 90 degrees on the smaller monitor. But in the new boot loader that comes with Windows 8 it syncs with Windows to get your monitor layout, and so displays it correctly on my bigger, secondary monitor. It's a really nice touch.

I think I'll just stick to my windows 8 xp themes for now...

You can hit alt+f4 on them and it'll close them. There's a bug right now where it just spits you out to a green screen, but you can hit your win key to get back to the start menu.

And, yea, you can dualboot 7 and 8. I have that set up right now.

Quick question: is it impossible to close out of programs? I mean, you're just going back to the Start menu instead of actually closing the program, it's still running in the background, eating RAM...

Metro apps are closed on the fly, the moment you run out of resources. A bit like on iOS. As a result you don't need to worry if it's using up ram.

There isn't any advantage in having empty ram, as otherwise it would be in use. Windows 7 will even fill up your empty ram with applications you might want to use, based on previous usage. As a result you should find an application starts up faster, after you've been using it for a few days.

Although it does feel a little strange, having one set of applications you do need to shut, and another that you don't.