Had the pleasure of installing our first Fibre To The Cabinet (FTTC) line yesterday for a client in St Ives.

Very quick and easy installation, and the client now has 4 times their previous download and nearly 10 times the upstream.

The only problem with FTTC is availability. Although exchanges are getting switched on the this new technology at a good rate, BT seem to be taking forever to install it in the cabinets.

We’ve taken our first look at Windows 8 here, with one of the Consumer Previews.

First thoughts are that people are either going to love or hate the new start menu, which looks like this:

That is the Start Menu, and to access it you have to hover the mouse on the bottom left of the screen until it pops up and takes over your entire screen. When running Windows 8 full screen (we have it running on a Virtual PC) that works fine, but when you are running it in a window, as if you were controlling it remotely it is very fiddly. Getting the Settings menu in the bottom right is even trickier.

The new Metro interface may be great – if you set it up properly. But so far with the applications we’ve installed it gets messy very fast, and isn’t as easy to use as a ‘normal’ start menu.

It is quite obvious looking at this preview how Microsoft have aimed 8 at both the tablet/touchscreen market as well as for normal PCs. Have the apps for example are missing the all important close cross to get rid of them, and run full screen. It feels like we are missing a back button of some finger gesture to get them to do what you want them to do.