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The whole point of the 'modern' interface isn't just to make the most of the Metro design language Microsoft came up with for Windows Phone and is rolling out across all the Microsoft interfaces, from Xbox to Office. In almost all cases, it's the WinRT apps that use the new Windows Runtime, run in a sandbox for safety
In the past Microsoft referred to these as Metro style apps; that name is out of fashion and they're variously known as Modern UI apps, Windows Store apps (even though there are desktop apps in the Windows Store) and (also confusingly) Windows 8 apps, but whatever they end up being called, they're apps written in WinRT that run in the new user interface rather than the desktop and work with contracts like Search and Share. Some are installed automatically, others you download from the Windows Store.
Essentials
Until you have the bundled apps set up, the Start screen can look flat and rather childish. Once you connect it to your online accounts, pin some friends, choose your city for weather and start seeing your photos scroll by, you'll find having your email, photos, appointments and friends pinned to the Start screen livens it up considerably. Live tiles paint in instantly and there is none of the lag or clumsiness we complained of in the preview apps. They've been significantly updated even since Release Preview; they're faster, far more reliable and have more features too. Plus there's a new Bing search app.
The apps you get automatically are in three groups; the ones with content from Bing like Sport, Weather and Finance, Music, Video and games from Xbox and those that come from what used to be the Windows Live team – Mail, Calendar, Photos, Messaging, People and SkyDrive, plus a couple of extra like an excellent PDF Reader app. So that's some essentials, some Microsoft services and some showcases for the features and interfaces 'modern' apps can have, like semantic zoom, photo galleries and the app bar. All of these are being updated regularly, with performance improvements and extra features.
Modern style apps put features on the app bar you see when you swipe or right click
The People hub goes from being a rather pedestrian address book with social network connections for all the services you link Windows to (through your Live account or by adding specific accounts for email and calendar) to a way to stay up to date with your friends.
Read the stream of social updates (it works well snapped to the side of the desktop), see replies all in one place or see all the contact details from friends. (A good address book is useful, after all). Pinch zoom and you go straight from tiles with photos on to an alphabet you can navigate with; you can also just stat typing a name to jump to it.
Compared to the earlier versions, the People app is snappy and responsive and makes much better use of the space to show you lots of updates without looking crowded. The last thing we'd say is missing is the ability to post to more than one social network at once, but the People app turns into a great way to stay in touch.
The Messaging app is still purple and it still makes good use of the screen to show you multiple conversations on Facebook and Windows Live, with details about your contacts so you can see what they're talking about on other services.
Snap it into the smaller window, next to the desktop or another app, and you see your most recent conversation, so you can chat while you work (or play) You can also send group messages, but it's just text chat; no voice or video. The latest update lets you search for contacts; vital when you have lots of people on your list.
Snap Messaging to the side of another app and you get the most recent conversation
Mail still isn't an Outlook replacement; you don't get categories, you can't flag messages for follow up or mark them as spam - but it's fast, simple and easy to navigate and the latest update finally adds threading and conversations.
You see your tree of folders without having to swipe back and forth between panes, you can tap on attachments in a message, download them and tap to open them without delving into the app bar. You can also pin any folder to the Start menu as a secondary tile to see message subjects as they arrive.
And you can now connect to IMAP and POP email accounts as well as Hotmail, Gmail and Exchange (now called Outlook as it includes Outlook.com) accounts, and choose which accounts you see email notifications for.
The Calendar app aggregates calendar feeds from multiple accounts (Hotmail, Exchange/Outlook and Google, all of which use EAS to sync calendar and in some cases to do items). There are nice month, week and day views (actually two days at a time unless you're in portrait on a tablet when you only see one).
You can now turn individual calendars on and off and pick the colours the way you can on Windows Phone. And you get on-screen notifications for meetings and alerts that you've set. It's a shame that you can't pinch to zoom in and out from month to week to day view and you have to get used to the way tapping on a day in week or month view creates a new event rather than zooming in to that day.
See your Facebook photos in the Photos app
The Photos app's tile shuffles through your images from both your PC and cloud services where you store photos, like Flickr, Facebook and SkyDrive, plus other PCs in the same homegroup. These all show as different albums inside the app, along with any PCs you're running the SkyDrive app on. If they're turned on, you can browse photos remotely so it doesn't matters which PC your baby photos are on – you can sit on the sofa and show them to the family on a tablet.
This is a nice app that's ideal for touch; you can swipe through images, zoom out to see thumbnails, play a slide show or pick an image for the Lock screen, simply and elegantly. You can also import images from a USB stick or camera card directly. The backdrop to the app is a lovely professional photograph of a Ferris wheel; or you can choose your own favourite image to see here.
The Photos app background
The photo layout of your SkyDrive photos looks like SkyDrive's own gallery
Handy new features in the latest update include being able to crop and rotate pictures from the app bar, so you don't have to flip your screen round or zoom in. This saves a copy in case you don't like the result and is very easy to use on a touch screen.
Crop out the background right from the Photos app
If you enjoy the random slideshow view of photos that Media Center uses as a screen saver, you'll love the new collage slideshow view in the Photos app. This selects a handful of photos that work well together and arranges them beautifully on screen, switching them in and out of different positions and then gradually switching to a new batch of images.
Every now and then it pops up a label, which might be the folder name or the month the pictures are from (or Shuffle if you're getting a mix of images from different folders and sources). This is an absolutely delightful way to enjoy your photos.
Sit back and enjoy your photos as an ever-updating collage
The Metro SkyDrive app still doesn't sync files the way the desktop SkyDrive app does; it's for viewing files when you're online in a clean and simple interface with tiles for folders and thumbnails for images that looks just like the redesigned SkyDrive website, with the same detailed view if you prefer, and tools are similar. Select a file and you can open, download or delete it from the app bar.
It's a great way to work with your online files; documents on your SkyDrive open in either the Office apps on the desktop if you have them installed or the Office web apps in Metro IE. And PDFs open in Windows Reader, which is an excellent and simple PDF tool. Large files open quickly and scrolling through documents is equally fast.
There are no confusing toolbars floating over the page like the irritating Adobe Reader; you can pinch to zoom in and out or double tap to zoom into a page, and the commands on the app bar enable you to search, switch views, rotate a page or see what you have permission to do with a password-protected PDF. This is far more pleasant to use than Acrobat Reader - and noticeably faster.
The latest update lets you search inside your files on SkyDrive (the contents as well as the file names), rename and move files as well as deleting them and check the new SkyDrive recycle bin for files you didn't mean to delete. That's particularly handy if you share files and someone else deletes one of your files without warning. The only missing feature is that you can't use it to preview PDFs in File Explorer on the desktop.
Search inside the files you keep on SkyDrive
Bringing Bing to you
The News, Sports, Travel, Finance and Weather apps are great examples of what a rich, content-filled 'modern' app can look like; the images and typography are gorgeous, the layout is great for a widescreen tablet and the intention is that you swipe, tap and flick your way through the screens. You can browse through stories, watch videos or pick a topic, team or destination and pin it to the Start screen to see updates.
There's enough content to keep you busy for a while, especially in the News app where you can pick individual topics like Kinect , linear equations or Lindsey Lohan. This gets as specialist as you want (linear equations got us stories about Olympic performance, the Higgs Boson and the Babylonians and education as well as more traditional mathematics). You can read quite a bit of that offline as well.
Beautiful eye candy in the Bing Travel app
The Travel app combines guides from recent Google purchase Frommers with 360 degree panoramas, photo albums, maps, currency, restaurant, hotel and flight tools, so you can browse or book a trip.
The Maps app is a joy to use on a touchscreen (and as functional as the Bing Maps website with a mouse). Turn on aerial views and spend some time flying round the world; it's the kind of fun Google Earth was when it first came out, but at your fingertips and with high resolution photography (you can see a glacier in Greenland from 20 yards or a sheep farm in Scotland from seven yards).
The latest update adds bird's eye views with a simple button that you can tap or grab hold of to swing your view around (with zoom buttons if you're using a mouse). Want to see the other side of that building to check where the entrance is? Just zoom in until the bird's eye view appears and tap the button that appears on the side of the screen – or even put two fingers on screen and twist to change the angle.
Or you can check traffic and get turn by turn directions to addresses and towns, or anything else you can find through Bing. That's a big improvement in the latest update; before we couldn't find any businesses and now even obscure locations are easy to find; often you get opening hours and contact details as well as directions. There are some indoor maps as well, mostly for US locations.
Search with Bing the way you would on Windows Phone
The Bing Search app is new for RTM, with more features in the latest update, and will look familiar to Windows Phone users (although it doesn't have the audio and video search (yet). Again, it's very finger friendly; suggested topics appear in large boxes as you type.
The results show up with large previews so you might see what you need to know immediately and you're likely to see exactly which page has the details you want. Zoom out and you get suggestions for related search terms. Image results are particularly nice; you can zoom in and out and browse through the like an impromptu photo album.
You can search Bing using the File Picker in other apps to get images and work with them as if they were any other file (and you can restrict that to Creative Commons images so you're respecting copyright). If you like the Bing background of the day you can swipe up the app bar and turn it into your lock screen. And the Bing Search tile flips between the (often stunning) daily image and trendy search topics. It's eye candy, but it's useful eye candy.
Apps in the Store
The few thousand apps in the Windows Store (2,825 for the UK when we last counted and over twice that for the US) already include a handful of desktop apps like WinZip and some pay-for apps. Expect lots more once Windows 8 is on sale. The New Releases tile shows the latest 100 titles, you can browse by category or search for specific apps.
And if you change PC, there's the Your Apps option on the app bar, which shows you a list of all the apps you've downloaded previously, which you can sort by whether they're currently installed and filter to show which apps you have on which PC. We were able to reinstall the vast majority of apps we'd tried during the different previews; of course it's up to developers whether they want to carry on making free apps available.
If the 'modern' app idea is going to take off, the Windows Store is going to need lots of great apps. But if Windows RT tablets sell anything like as well as the iPad, there's every incentive for developers to create them, especially as Microsoft has powerful development tools.
Windows 8 lacks the Windows 7-style Start button or the Start menu on the desktop. Instead, it moves a little further still from the Windows 7 look towards the flatter Modern UI look of the Start screen that started with square corners to windows and square, flat edges to tabs in the ribbon interface of desktop apps rather than curves.
The most obvious difference is that Aero Glass is all but gone - the title bars and borders of windows are no longer translucent, so you don't see a blurred version of the window underneath.
The taskbar has the last vestige of Aero Glass transparency
It's an open question as to whether this was ever more of a useful feature than a gimmick - it made it easier to see what window was behind the one you were working in, but it could also be distracting. And it certainly chewed up battery life and graphics power that can be put to better use in hardware accelerating applications.
If you're used to it, the difference can feel just a little jarring at first, but remember that the Office 2013 applications will have solid title bars to make the small icons of the Quick Access Toolbar easier to spot.
The taskbar retains a certain amount of transparency; you can still see hints of the darker elements in your desktop background image under the taskbar, but it picks up a hint of the window colour rather than having the background show through as completely as in Windows 7. The effect is to blend the look of the desktop and Start screen a little more; they remain different experiences, but without glassy edges to windows, the contrast between desktop programs, the Settings bar and the Start screen is much less dramatic.
The new-look desktop and modern apps look more similar
The default wallpaper is a simple flower photograph (meant to make you think 'fresh as a daisy', perhaps) and there are two new themes - earth and flowers - neither as quirky as the Start screen designs.
Of course you can still choose from a multitude of free themes on the Microsoft site, including the panoramic Nightfall and Starlight theme that stretches across multiple monitors
There's no denying that Windows 8 is a different way of working; press the Start key on your keyboard and yes, you get the Modern UI Start screen. But if you roll your mouse into the familiar left-hand corner you get a thumbnail of the Start screen.
Enjoy beautiful photos on the desktop background, or your own photo
Right-click there and you get a handy menu of most of the admin tools you need in Windows, from Task Manager to Event Viewer to the Run dialog. You can Search, open Explorer or Control Panel, run tools such as Disk Management, Device Manager or Power Options (it works in the Start screen as well).
It includes Mobility Centre - the handy collection of shortcuts that the Win-X keyboard used to bring up in Windows 7. Frankly, this addresses any complaints we had about losing the old Start menu; there are neat and efficient ways to get to everything you want in the desktop without ever taking your hands off the desktop or having to see the Start screen unless you want to.
On the other hand, you need to get used to the charm bar in the Windows 8 desktop as well as in the Start screen and Modern UI apps. Again it ghosts in to view when you put your mouse into the right corners of the screen. Like the app thumbnails in the switching pane, this hints at what you can do without getting in the way of working with windows and controls on the edge of the screen.
The Share charm doesn't work in the desktop, though it appears for consistency. Search takes you to the same full-screen search as it does from the Start screen.
Settings is especially useful on the desktop; you can jump to the control panel, personalisation, PC info and help or get the finger-friendly PC Settings screen.
That's the same whatever programs are running, because desktop programs can't link their options to the Settings bar, so you do have to do things different ways depending on whether you're using a Modern UI or desktop application.
But compared to the jumble of ways you could navigate to key tools, control panels and utilities in Windows 7, this is a streamlined and efficient interface - and once you pin your key apps to the taskbar the same way you would in Windows 7, you never leave the desktop unless you want to.
One welcome feature from Windows 7 survives, but it's hidden; although it's no longer marked specifically as a button until you hover your mouse over it, when you press or click on the very end of the taskbar you get the full Aero Peek behaviour of minimising all open programs and showing you the desktop. Click again to get all your windows back.
Once you activate Windows 8 you can personalise the Start and Lock screens. You can choose from what looks like the same 25 colour schemes as in the Release Preview. Some of these are extremely bright - the vivid pink background is quite the eye-opener - while others have grey or black backgrounds with an accent colour.
You can choose from numerous so-called tatoos. Some are very odd
If you didn't like any of the six abstract backgrounds for the Start screen in the Windows 8 Release Preview, there's a much wider selection of 20 different designs, ranging from plain to detailed to some quite strange and quirky images with floating mountains and swimming birds.
Some of the Start screen designs are wild and whacky
Pick an animal, mechanical or musical theme or choose from the more abstract designs. Some of the designs have a mix of related shades, while others have a range of colours that change to match and contrast with the colour scheme you pick.
Some of the combinations of these are gorgeous artworks that wouldn't be out of place on clothes or furniture, and we're hoping to see tablet sleeves, notebook cases or Artist Edition mice to match. Spend a little time here and you get something far more stylish than the original primary school feel of the preview releases.
A nice touch is that as you scroll the Start screen, and the design you choose scrolls along - especially on a touchscreen tablet, we reckon you'd probably get a bit of motion sickness if it didn't.
Pick a colour scheme and the Start screen designs change to match and contrast nicely
The designs are so carefully put together that they scale smoothly to the size of the screen, and you never see an ugly join where it wraps. That's another reason you can't use one of your photos for the Start screen; it's unlikely it would scale, stretch, scroll and wrap around these screen anything like as neatly.
There are plenty of other places you can use your own images, such as the Lock screen, the picture password and the desktop.
There are six new images to choose from for the Lock screen, including a stylised Seattle skyline that blends photographic mountains with painted and sketched hills and clouds in what could easily be an attempt to say that familiar desktop apps and the flatModern UI interface can look just fine next to each other.
The whole point of Windows 8's Modern UI interface is to make the most of the Metro design language Microsoft came up with for Windows Phoneand is rolling out across all the Microsoft interfaces, from Xbox to Office. It's the WinRT apps that use the new Windows Runtime, run in a sandbox for safety.
The new Lock screen images
And if you don't like the piano, train, honeycomb, nautilus shell or abstract art, you can pick any of your own pictures instead.
Navigating the Modern UI interface is no more puzzling than any other new interface (and has no substantial changes from the preview releases, so if you didn't like the interface then, RTM may not change your mind).
Swipe up from the Lock screen, press the right arrow or right-click to get started. If you've added your Microsoft account or set a password you can type it in, or add a Picture Password so you can tap or swipe rather than typing on a touchscreen.
The Lock screen isn't just a prettier way of getting started; you get the same kind of status information as on a phone - date and time, battery life and connectivity, unread messages plus your next appointment.
You can pick which apps can put notifications here, which becomes much more important when we get PCs with Connected Standby (all Windows RTdevices plus all Windows 8 System on Chip models), since these will be the apps that stay connected when the screen is off.
That's why a Modern UI WinRT version of Outlook would be such a big deal (and why it's a disappointment it's not in Office 2013) - the Mail and Calendar apps will stay up to date overnight on a Connected Standby system, but Outlook won't get mail until you turn your PC on.
Start screen
Press the Windows Start key (or turn on your PC) and you get the new-look Start screen instead of a Start menu. It's bigger, brighter, bolder, much more personal and much more controversial, even though you can go for hours or days at a time without seeing it.
This shows tiles for key apps, desktop programs and settings, but not everything that's installed. For that you right-click or swipe up from the bottom of the screen and pick All Apps, or you can just start typing the name of an app or setting to search for it (remember, you have to specifically select Settings to see those results).
As you install new apps and desktop programs, they're added to the Start screen as tiles.
Not everything is on the Start screen
Drag to move tiles around, from group to group or to make a new group. As you drag a tile into the gap between two groups, when you position it between them a vertical grey bar appears to show that you're creating a new group to put it in.
Working with tiles is a little faster and more responsive, but otherwise much the same. The Semantic zoom enables you to pinch to shrink the tiles on the Start screen to tiny thumbnails so you can see everything at once or move an entire group. Select a group and drag it down to get the option of naming it.
Zoom out to scroll fast, manage groups or move tiles quickly
If you drag a tile to the top or bottom of the screen, Semantic Zoom turns on automatically to make it easier to move an item a long way across the screen without disturbing the arrangement of all your tiles and groups.
The charm bar
Swipe from the right edge of the screen and you get the charm bar, with Search, Share, Start, Devices and Settings. If you don't want to learn keyboard shortcuts, you can do the same thing by leaving your mouse pointer in the top or bottom-right corner.
First the charms appear as white outlines, then if you don't move your mouse they disappear, because Windows assumes you didn't want to trigger them, since you might be moving the mouse to scroll or close a window at the side of the screen instead. If you are, you don't have to wait for the charms to vanish to do so.
Move the mouse towards the charms and the black bar and charm titles draw in on the screen.
Use the charm bar on the left screen…
…or on the right. You can see the switching pane on either screen as well
Swipe from the left side of the screen and you switch to the next app in the stack (which might be the desktop); throw your mouse into the top-left corner and you get an icon showing you what app you can click to switch.
Putting your mouse pointer in the bottom-left corner shows an icon to click for the Start screen, which feels more like a rectangular Start button than an unwelcome reminder of the Modern UI (unless you're on the Start screen already, when it gets you the icon for the next app on the stack), plus hints for the thumbnails in the switching pane.
Drag the mouse up or down from the top or bottom-left corner and you get the switching pane with a list of apps with labels under each thumbnail that look so much like TechRadar's new caption style that we're flattered.
Switch quickly between the apps that are open including the desktop
On a touchscreen you do that by pausing as you drag from the left and then drag back. If you only drag back a little, you snap the next app into a window taking up a third of the screen. If you drag further back, you get the switching pane, where the desktop and any desktop apps show up as a single thumbnail.
If you snap the desktop next to a Modern UI app you can have a desktop slightly smaller than full screen, or a thumbnail list of running desktop apps, depending on whether you snap it into the smaller or larger tile.
Snap the desktop as a small pane to see thumbnails for running programs
You can also use the Start button to jump between the Start screen and the app you were just using. Or use Alt+Tab to switch between all running apps, Modern or desktop. If there's a Modern UI app pinned at the side of the screen, Alt+Tab respects that and switches the app in the pane you were working in last.
Windows plus the '.' key swaps apps between the different window positions on the screen at top speed, and on a touchscreen you do that by dragging. In fact, there are far more ways of switching between apps than in previous versions of Windows, so you can pick the ones you prefer and ignore the others.
This is all much easier and more natural to use, even with a mouse, than it is to describe. It feels more fluid and responsive than in the Release Preview, and if you've only tried the Developer or Consumer Preview, it's so much smoother that it's a very different experience.
Using the charms
Microsoft has continued tweaking the charms and the controls they bring up, such as the Settings bar. Where the Release Preview always favoured boring and obvious over cute but potentially confusing, RTM nails the interface with controls that are both cute and functional.
For example, the keyboard icon on the Settings bar has gone from an icon to an abbreviation for the keyboard language you're using, to an icon that opens a menu with two options - open the on-screen keyboard so you can type something, or change the keyboard language.
If you want Hibernate on the power menu, you have to go to the control panel to get it back
The speaker icon opens a volume slider with a mute button, the screen icon opens a slider for brightness with an icon to manually rotate the screen. Notifications enables you to turn off the sometimes intrusive 'toasts' that pop up for alarms and new messages for a set period.
The network icon shows you the current network connection and opens a pane with available networks and an airplane mode slider to turn off all the radios.
And the power icon produces a pop-up menu with Sleep, Shutdown and Restart (if you want to add Hibernation, that is hidden away in the advanced power options in the desktop control panel, because it will be much less relevant on new machines with Connected Standby).
The charm bar works in the modern and desktop interfaces
It's all remarkably clear and simple, once you relearn habits such as pressing Start to shutdown.
Search, Share and Settings are what Microsoft calls contracts; they're something apps can 'sign up' to use. Settings shows you the settings for the current app, but you can always choose Change PC settings at the bottom for a much simpler version of the key options from control panel.
There's one new feature here in RTM; under General you can see how much space all the Modern UI-style apps you have installed use up.
You can uninstall any Modern UI app, even one pre-loaded by an OEM, by right-clicking its icon on the Start screen and choosing Uninstall.
See how much space Modern UI apps take up on your drive
Whether you want a file, a program, an email message or a specific photograph, you can search for it wherever you are using the Search charm. The initial results are context-sensitive (unless you use the keyboard combination to start a file search).
If you're at the Start screen you get a list of apps, if you're in IE when you choose it, you get results from Bing first, but you can repeat the search in any app that has signed up to the search contract by clicking its icon in the Search pane.
When you search files, you can hover with the mouse to see more details; right-click (with mouse or finger) and you can open the file location in Explorer.
File search shows you plenty of details to help you find the right document
Similarly, a variety of Modern UI-style apps use the Share charm, and share is about more than sending tweets or emailing links to web pages; you pick Share to send a photo from a viewer to an image editing app or to print it, or to copy a figure from a web page into a calculator. Think of it as the new universal clipboard.
This could be one of the more exciting tools in Windows 8, and we're starting to see apps take advantage of it. In the end, the Modern UI interface is only going to be as useful and interesting as the apps that run in it.
When you buy Windows 8 online you'll get a step by step download and installation, complete with the Windows 8 Upgrade Assistant to warn you about program and hardware compatibility issues, or you can buy a DVD.
The RTM and RTM evaluation downloads are ISO files that you have to burn to an optical disk or build a bootable USB flash drive for, but that's not something consumers will have to deal with now.
As with the Windows 8 Consumer and Release Previews, how much of a previous Windows system you can keep when you install RTM depends on which version you're upgrading from.
You get the most options with an upgrade from Windows 7
Upgrade from Windows 7 and you can keep programs, Windows settings and files; upgrade from Vista and keep settings and files. Upgrading from Windows XP only gives you your personal files.
Unlike Windows 7, you can't do a full upgrade from any of the preview versions of Windows 8; you'll need to either restore your previous version of Windows from a backup, do an upgrade that only keeps your files or do a clean installation.
This option only appears with Windows 8 and Windows 8 Pro; if you have the Enterprise version, you have to upgrade from another Enterprise edition of Windows, and the previews of Windows 8 were all Windows 8 Pro, so the only option is a clean install.
Even if you have Windows 7 on your PC, you can still choose a fresh start
A button asking if you want to upgrade and keep apps, settings and files does show up when you run the installer from Release Preview, with the warning that this only works on 'supported versions of Windows' but the installer then told us that indeed, it couldn't upgrade this version of Windows and we had to close it and start over.
Again, you won't see this if you buy Windows 8 normally, only if you're looking at the evaluation or MSDN version now.
If you're installing Windows 8 Enterprise, you activate it once it's installed (the system for that was still being set up when we started testing, so it wasn't seamless, but this is what you'll see as a normal user).
With Windows 8 Pro the installation is the same experience as you'll get if you buy a Windows 8 upgrade - it checks your system, tells you what you can keep and which programs won't be compatible (and helpfully removes them and then restarts the installation) and asks you to enter your product key as a normal part of the installation.
You don't have to restart the installation if there's an incompatible program installed
Scanning a fully loaded Windows 7 system with a lot of apps installed and many gigabytes of files takes around 10 minutes, then another hour (or on a really loaded system, two) to set up Windows 8 with all your compatible programs intact.
If you're doing a clean installation without keeping any applications, or an upgrade where you just keep files and settings, it's far faster.
On a variety of PCs it took 10-15 minutes from starting the installation and entering the licence key to get to picking the colour scheme and choosing whether to accept Express Settings or customise the setup.
One of the items under Express Settings is the controversial default of turning on the Do Not Track setting in Internet Explorer 10. Choose Customize and you can change that, but there's an ongoing argument about what Do Not Track means and how websites will treat the IE10 setting, because it is the default.
It's clearly marked and you can easily change it, but advertisers and some ad-funded organisations remain unhappy.
After this you can set up a local account or log in with a Microsoft account such as a Hotmail address, which synchronises settings with any other Windows 8 PCs you use and gives you access to the Windows Store.
While Windows 8 finishes the set up, which takes a couple more minutes, you get a brief on-screen tutorial showing you how to move your mouse into the corners of the screen to open the charm bar.
If you have a touchscreen, it also shows you how to swipe for the charm bar, but only if you have the right screen - so an older tablet PC with only an active digitiser just shows the mouse tutorial.
If you've picked a colour scheme, the tutorial uses that for the image of the screen - a little thing, but it's a subtle way of making it feel more like your PC.
Once the mini tutorial has played a few times, the set up screen starts switching between various different colours - presumably to show you the other colour choices as well as reassuring you that it's still working.
Everyone who has an account gets to see the tutorial when they first log in, making good use of the short time it takes to create the desktop the first time (they don't all get the colour show, though).
If you do an upgrade install starting with Windows running, you'll never see the option to set the language for your keyboard or settings for date and time formats. If you boot from USB to do a clean install, you're asked to choose these settings but that's it, apart from Express Settings.
In neither case do you get to choose the time zone; Windows 8 either keeps the current time zone if you do an upgrade or sets it up automatically based on the language of the installer for a clean installation.
A UK Windows 8 image kept the UK time even on a clean installation; a US image set the timezone to Pacific when we did a clean installation (you can change that quickly enough inside Windows without needing an admin account).
On a Sandy Bridge Core i5 PC with an SSD, 15 minutes after putting in the USB stick, we were running Windows 8 RTM, ready to activate and trust the PC to get settings synced from the Release Preview install setting showing up - such as SkyDrive photos and our Hotmail calendars.
