Agreed, 2 GB RAM, typo... Thanks for the catch! :-)
I didn't see a way to activate the beta without a live ID, could have been a function of the running in a VM with an obvious nonroutable IP address and a display adapter that identified itself as VMware. :-))
The same VM makes it impossible to compare boot times to W7 -- though I'm running W7 in a VM now (as I type) with Linux as the host OS and W7 isn't really that slow in the VM, soooo.....
I refuse to use 3rd party tools (or even Microsoft tools/settings) to set any part of the user interface to look like an older or previous version. That doesn't help me get a feel for what's new.
Even without the tool W8 included a desktop tile so, no additional tools needed. It took a little digging to figure out how to get back to the tile (aka though now deprecated name Metro) UI.
There are a lot of things to like with W8 in a multi-core world. Better resource management, better scheduler, better display of the cores and there use, etc. Given that I've got a quad-core TABLET (Google Nexus 7), and many laptops come with at least dual core plus hyperthreading to simulate quad core... the additional management in W8 will be appreciated by very knowledgeable/tech-skilled users and up.
Minus the user interface, basically W8 is what I thought should have been included in W7 -- but that wasn't possible given the the horrible OS that was Windows Vista. Total PoS (and that's not point of sale :-)).
David