Mine still crash, fail to load, fail to update, fail to actually load the updater etc... This is common with all Windows 8 and 8.1 preview. If people have had a 'perfect' experience then good for them, its not the norm and certainly Microsoft is hard at work fixing these 'known' issues. So you are not alone mtalinm, in fact if anyone is alone its the people in this forum. Most of the experiences out there with windows8 so far are not what you call, sustainable, in a business sense. I remain hopeful that MS will pull this one off, but one is forced to wonder what happened with Windows 8 originally, how could one company get it SO wrong this many times?! I am certain that 8.1 will not go far enough to repair windows 8 badly damaged reputation though. It is a bummer because 8 is SO light and nimble and really is better than 7 in a host of critical ways... Then throw in Metro which most people HATE and ruin it all. My neighbors father, who used to run hospital systems, now retired and drops in to see the her children frequently, ran out and upgraded 5 machines in his house with windows 8 the moment it was available and got so angry he downgraded to 7. This may have lead to his MacBook purchase, ( I don't know him well enough to know this for sure) but I do know he was a PC guy owning 5 who told me that even windows 9 might not be enough to get him to try another Microsoft product. That is a visceral reaction to an operating system. And we hear similar stories all the time.. All the time..
As for metro itself, and this is not the place for this debate, but I must say the whole thing feels like Microsoft is not sure where to go with it. It feels (to me) incomplete and so basic as to be meh. Square cells arranged in groups with live tiles! YAY?! I am not excited. Why does the desktop not now auto bias your icons to stay out of the middle of the screen but instead default to arranging your icons automatically like it has forever in the past, before touch? If I am going to be swiping in from the left to switch between all these glorious apps, and lets face it the desktop is here for a while weather they want it or not, why doesn't the desktop behave in a manner that is also touch friendly? Its all just so badly thought out and badly implemented. One wonders how this can be that one year into release windows 8 still feels in many ways like a beta product or an alpha pre release. I install 2010 Pro Plus and still must configure the built in windows mail client to use the share feature? The same is true if you install 2013's current offering. I mean its all just clunky and not connected, but as the Core apps go, they are not good and I don't think it speaks well for the "modern UI concept" as a whole.
My experience was that the RT, while less powerful and clunky, was a little more stable Core-App wise than the Windows 8 both on the Pro and the TPT2 though it had its share or random fails, quirks, burps and sputters too. With the Pro and the TPT2 (which I still use daily) the core apps remain flaky and subject to fail in any manner of ways at any given time they are loaded. They remain so bad that I mostly stay in the desktop. I just had to blank a directory the other day because my 26 apps were stuck at 'updating' but no apps progress bar would advance. I have already reset one device because this same issue became unresolvable and with no other choice to get the device back into production, I had to reset it. Try turning off UAC - good luck there.
For all those having 'no issues' all I can say is more power to you but your experiences are sadly far from the norm. For those having issues, I will tell what Microsoft will tell you after 30 minutes of Troubleshooting, Reset the Device. That's the new method for managing these devices, RESET. Ultimately Microsoft wants to be just like Apple, everything is an App, some documents can be put in places that are safe or moved to the cloud and then restored later. That's the new way things are heading. The problem is we are not there, or even close to there, yet.
