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Windows 8: A First Look

We pry open a copy of Microsoft's first public release of Windows 8.
Windows 8: A First Look
Comments | Serdar Yegulalp | September 19, 2011 01:17 PM

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Two UIs and Two Displays?

The Devices side menu typically looks like this, at left. It will vary depending on the hardware you have installed. Click Display and you see what's on the right, a list of choices for how Windows 8 should handle a second display. I tried to hook up a second monitor to see if I could run both Metro and the legacy Windows UI. It didn't behave as I expected. Once you connect them up, I tried letting one display run the legacy desktop and the other run Metro apps. You swap them by clicking Start – if two displays are on, the Start button turns into a Swap Displays button. But when I did it, I found the hover menu no longer would appear. That means anything you normally would invoke through hover has to be available through other means.

Also, when I tried to invoke legacy apps by, for instance, launching something from the Launchbar, the Metro Start menu vanished. An extended version of the desktop replaced it. So far, anyway, I couldn't easily lock the Metro view on one display and have the legacy view on another.

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