Windows 8: At least it's better than ‘not very good’ By the pricking of my thumbs, and by the noisy crowd booking out half the pub, the wickedness of office party season has kicked in big time. Certainly, 'tis the season to be jolly and to suffer the indignities of itinerant workers debasing themselves in order to get invited. Another year at the Cheshire Cheese The importance …
So it was the worst out of 2?
In the summer of 1994, I was involved with selecting the web browser to install on my University's PCs. We tested at least five: Mosaic, Netscape, Opera, Lynx, and a DOS-based graphical browser whose name escapes me. When I did first try Internet Explorer a year later, it was worse than those five had been.
"I’m reminded of a demo soon after the launch of Windows 95 at which a slick presenter opened three video files (postage-stamp size, admittedly) in separate windows and ran all three simultaneously. It was a striking example but quite useless when you think about it."
Err.... porn?
First off, yes I am using win 8. 2nd off, I think it's great. I can use apps instead of web browsing so with either 1 or 2 clicks at most I am getting my tech news, BBC news or whatever else I choose.
It is easy to use and fast, the search feature is sooo much better than W7. Everything is at your fingertips very quickly.
For the "power user" who was comparing boot time...your not a power user if you turn off your PC on a regular basis, hibernate or leave on. I could care less when I only reboot my PC once every couple of weeks how long it takes.
Sad that Reg writers and a lot of you bloggers can't appreciate something good and lol @ anyone still using windows XP on a home computer...what r u doing here!!!!
Vista would force restart your computer every so often, to install updates, wiping unsaved documents (avoidable) and killing any long tasks like batch rendering or downloading (unavoidable). This behaviour couldn't be turned off in the Home versions. Personally, I consider that to be more annoying that having to bat some coloured squares out of the way on start up.
"I could care less when I only reboot my PC once every couple of weeks how long it takes."
At the usual per-KWh electricity prices, enjoy your expenses. Also some of us like having a clean environment that hasn't been toggled between standby/smart hibernate/whatever theyr'e calling it these days, and had the chance to build up enough entropy to truly bugger things up.
Also it's "couldn't care less". "Could care less" means you at least care a little bit, in order that you could care less. Here, allow David Mitchell to explain in nice, simple terms that you might understand.
I didn't know we were attending a grammar 101 class and clean environment wtf are you talking about, my computer environment is the same whether I have been running my pc for 5 minutes or 5 days......
If you are gonna come with something at least have something better than David Mitchell for me!!!
It doesn't matter how well-coded your OS is (and being Microsoft, it won't be THAT well coded). Keep starting programs, ending programs, saving state, reloading state, starting more programs, ending more programs, shuffling data into and out of memory, day after day after day...
It'll happen. Slowly perhaps, but out of those gazillions of operations you're asking the OS to do, SOME of them will bugger up. Sure, you might not notice it at first.. it'll just be having to click on an icon twice instead of once. However, slowly but surely, entropy will build up. Things will break. Stuff will slow down. Eventually, and I've seen it happen so many times on so many Windows machines of every version, you'll be flying along in some application or game, and *CRASH*. It's not a virus, it's not malware outside of maybe Microsoft's shitty DRM being tripped, it's just a simple consequence of thinking you can keep going forever on an OS that is not totally and utterly bug-free.
That's why it's nice to reboot every now and then. But hey, it's your machine. You do what you like with it. Go ahead and waste electricity by leaving the thing on. After all, it's your electricity bill. But don't accuse me, or anybody else, of being somehow inferior because we like to cold-reboot sometimes and make sure the OS has started up cleanly. Or perhaps we just don't want to burn through the MTBF of the various components for no good reason other than not being bothered with a power switch. Or, maybe, we don't want to die in a fire caused by an exploding power supply?
Of course, you can do all of the above if you like. I could care less.
Now there's a couple of possibilities here.
The first, of course, is that you are actually happy with W8. Fair enough. If it does what you want it to do when you want to do it, then that's fine and dandy. Chalk one up to Microsoft and all is fine with the world. (Just don't expect me to join you any time soon).
The second possibility, however, came to mind because of the throwaway line at the end. "Sad that Reg writers and a lot of you bloggers can't appreciate something good and lol @ anyone still using windows XP on a home computer...what r u doing here!!!!" The thought that came to mind doesn't bear repeating, but I really hope that I'm wrong on that count. Let's just go with the "fanboi" label.
As for defining a "power user", you have a weird idea of what constitutes a power user if you gauge them by how often they switch their computer off. Generally, a power user is defined by what they do when the computer is switched on, not just by the use or otherwise of the shutdown command.
The running 3 video's at once trick I saw on an SGI in either 96 or 97 - Still not seen it work as well on a pc ever since. (Important part being no tearing and smooth).
If there was a free adblock plus thing that worked as well then I would use ie10.
(The Metro version being so locked down is something I would like to use for such as online banking).
You should try the video thing on OS X.
Even on an old Dell Latitude D610 with the crappy GMA900 graphics, a very particular build of OS X works well on it - and videos scale smoothly, without stuttering, as you resize and so on - something I can't seem to do well on Windows, but that's mainly because most apps still call for GDI+, which has pathetic acceleration these days.
I think they were trying to emulate Acorn's Replay.
That was launched in 1992. I'm not sure if it was that year or later when I saw it running 4 simultaneous windows of the Space Shuttle take off. I seem to remember that was on an A5000 (25MHz ARM3 4MB RAM), but it could have been an early RiscPC (30MHz ARM6 8MB RAM 2MB VRAM), which probably meant it was 1994.
I've actaully used win8, unlike presumably several of the people that have replied here. I like it. It's quicker, boots fast, shutsdown fast too. I dont quite understand the problem others have with the start menu. I hit "start" then I begin to type the name of the thing i want, then hit enter. Same as I did in 7. Who *really* navigated through the start menu? Don't lke the fullscreen apps? Don't use them then.
I hated it when I tried the W8 consumer preview. I swore I'd never use it. As I've bought my kid a shiny laptop for Christmas I thought I'd better be able to use it when he asks questions so decided to put it on my laptop (not desktop) for the cheap as chips upgrade price.
I am ashamed to admit I am warming to it. I still wouldn't want metro ^H ^H ^H whatever its called on my desktop but I've found myself using it for casual things on my laptop. Email. The web. Apps I've downloaded. General non-worky stuff. I could see my Mum using it, or people that generally do one thing simply and then do another. Yes, not people that use a computer day in day out and run up multiple spreadsheets and stuff, but the iphone, tablet generation who are really consumers.
I've put back the start button for when I'm in "desktop" mode so I launch all my full apps from that. I use tiles for quick updates, quick emails, browsing, casual stuff and it feels nice and clean. Maybe it's because since the preview I bought a tablet so am used to the tablet way of "this is taking my full attention". I'd love it to have an "official" start menu to allow for the fact that yes we do work two different ways, but its not as awful as I thought, and its quite painless when my brain isn't in techie mode.
"At least it wasn’t as bad as Windows 3. What a pile of shite that was. In a way, the concept of Windows 8’s Metro is reminiscent of that arse-wipe of an interface known as Program Manager"
..this reads like Obviously!, after some remedial English lessons, and the forcible application of a spell checker.
(That probably isn't a compliment, by the way, even on a Friday)
I can tell you this much: if I ever find myself in the unfortunate position of having to use W8 then one of two things will happen. Either I'll rip out TIFKAM and replace it with a UI actually designed for a keyboard and a mouse just like I've done with Aero and Explorer before it, or, if that proves impossible of prohibitively difficult, the first tile on my screen will take me to Powershell and I'll run my computer from the command line.
Even a brand new computer has three pages of tiles already. I can just imagine how many pages it'll have by the time I get all my stuff installed, and I'd rather not deal with a desktop full of icons so that I have to minimize everything to open anything either.
It's ok, I guess,
multi monitor support is nicer something I would like to have seen on earlier versions
storage stuff is a lot better and it mounts ISO's natively with drive letters and everything.
windows key and typing is ok, like 7 but it is too invasive, I might not want/need a whole screen to switch when searching for an app, if I am videoconferencing I might need to launch something ( not on my taskbar or in the formerly start menu start bar - I do not like having a cluttered taskbar so nothing is pinned there - the start menu was great for pinned stuff to launch, and less overall movement of the mouse if you have a screen full of icons)
the whole shutdown thing is not good, nor is getting to system settings and such, very unintuitive, the menues up the sides (which is also a tad annoying on multi monitors since it is on the sides of all monitors not just the far left/right sides) I ended up making a command prompt shortcut for faster reboots ( another darn icon) i know i do not have to reboot all the time i have not rebooted in over a week so far, but when i do i want it to be simple ( I know intuitive - go to START and select SHUTDOWN :-/ probably why it was called the windows button later not start)
i do have a lot more icons than I used to on the desktop, just quicker than windows key + typing, i fast high res mouse speeds across the screen with ease and it is often more muscle memory then observance will take a bit more getting used to with 8.
ctrl+scroll wheel zooms the app windows both tiles and all apps, useful, sort of not used much
the big thing is more keyboard use, before there may have been a time when i never needed to touch a keyboard (and vice versa with the mouse) but now it seems a lot harder to do - quickly, I do find searching through the all apps screen more difficult then the start menu, i am sure with use it will come easier, however this leads to my biggest issue:
The company i work with are going to deploy 8, we already have it and a using it, a lot of the people in my dept use 3rd party for start menu, which to me defeats the purpose, of the out of box experience, namely i should not have to install a 3rd party app to give me oem functionality even though it was the oem that changed it.
I have gotten used to 8, nearly, the 500 plus employees however is going to be a nightmare, vista was a nightmare, 7 they sort of took too, 8 is a radical change, and while adaptation is possible i feel it will result initiall in lost productivity, and, if Microsoft change the ui back or more in a future release, it will result in more frustration, remember this is not all "professional IT people" using this many people are only comfortable enough with a computer for work, some set things up in a specific way for their workflow, they will have to totally reorganize themselves when this is deployed, a situation that is frustrating for them, and us since we will have to spend out time helping them get back to at least a partial level of functionality they are used to.
yes things change, however there should simply have been an option for the "legacy" start application get people used to the new UI without ramming it on them and giving no option (and no buying the 3rd party app for every user is silly and should not have needed to be an option)
My wife, who was in level 1 support for a cable company, already has had numerous confused callers who got new pc's with 8 on them and cannot do the most basic things, even her support team were slow at helping since they had to find out how to do it too something that took 3 minutes in 7 now takes 5 plus in 8 with a lot more clicking and keyboarding, which is frustrating to none power users.
That is my biggest gripe, ok if you are new to windows/computers like say a young kid great! i think 8 will be good for them and they will do awesome ( and equally be frustrated with the "legacy" interfaces, however we are not all new to computers, and relearning how to walk again can really take the wind out of your sails, not to mention waste time for all the IT staff trying to help the users do their jobs!
for the moment I am not recommending 8 to anyone who is not overly familiar with using them, for new users I do and for IT people, whatever, you are in IT stuff changes quicker than the postman hearing the husbands key in the front door. (however change is still frustrating and the change to 8 has made my job less satisfying for now).
I've only seen the Start screen after boot, and then I click on the desktop tile and forget about it - I haven't even been back to tidy up all the junk on the Start screen. If I sleep or hibernate with the desktop open then that's where it wakes up to.
My laptop screen and separate monitor have different backgrounds and both desktops have a task bar, which I like. Another laptop syncs to the same settings, which is kind of potentially useful but I'm not sure about that yet.
Keyboard shortcuts like Win-X for a bunch of important stuff like Control Panel, Task Manager, Event Viewer and even an administrator version of Command Prompt is handy. In fact the Windows key gets much more use now for a variety of shortcuts.
Overall I'm finding it an improvement over 7, except for the stupid TIFKAM screen which I just don't use. Neither am I interested in the new full-screen apps, I use real hairy-chested programs like Photoshop, Hugin, AfterShot Pro and so on. So 7 did all that, but 8 seems faster and seems to have done away with a few glitches.
Give it a week or two and you will begin to see that actually Windows 8 is quite good.
On of my last gripe with it is that it was really designed with one screen in mind: it doesn't work well with multimonitor setups, I hope Microsoft will improve the situation in the xnext few months.
Also I like some standard apps a lot (mostly news apps) but other standard apps are still borderline crap, such as the Music / video apps.
As expected, the double IE + limited flash support in IE Metro is a pain and cause a lot of confusion for new users.
There are many positives though, Win + X completely negated my need for a start menu, the 2-app on a screen window is surprisingly useful, Windows 8 is really fast and stable, hardware support is outstanding, and anytime I can get my hands on a touch device the experience is fantastic.
In the same way I won't go back to a non-touch smartphone, there is no way my next notebook won't have touch. Which is a pain presently with most systems not delivered before mid-end of january 2013.
Windows 8 is a schizophrenic piece of crap, forever stuck trying to satisfy both desktop and tablet users and not even coming close to achieving either.
Without a touch screen, Metro is useless... if you like it, good for you but you are the exception so stop assuming you're better than everyone else by telling people to "grow up", "accept change" etc etc... . Don't fscking act like everyone who hates is just isn't as cool as you... that just makes you an ass.
Metro doesn't even come close to filling any parts of what I NEED to be able to do on a computer.
Classic desktop... yes, it could be great... IF I could set it, forget it, and never EVER have to go back to metro ever again... EXCEPT maybe on a tablet. but NOOOOO.... half the time I need to do anything, like the Net, or a metro app, of system tools... WHAM! I am violently yanked out of my environment and into the Metro one... which I do NOT want to see on my desktop.
It just plain sucks.
If you love it... good for you. But please stop trying to convince me that I do too....
I recreated a start 'button' on 8 without using any addons.
Just create a folder somewhere on your computer. I named mine 'Start' for easy identification.
Right click on the task bar and go to Toolbars > New Toolbar
Choose your 'Start' folder.
If you set your 'start' folder to have as little room as possible it has a >> symbol on it, clicking that works like the start button.
Now in your start folder put shortcuts to everything you Want to access easy. Subfolders work just like you'd expect them too on the old 'XP' style start menu.
I'm pretty sure this works on 7 and XP too, I've just never needed to do that on those operating systems.
That's the same hack you use to re-enable the Quicklaunch area.
Unfortunately it doesn't quite work to replace the Start menu in Windows 8. New program installs do not put their icons in the folder tree, instead spewing their guts all over TIFKAM. All you're left with is a virtually empty, gutted start menu with no commonly-used-programs section, and a stylish look straight out of 1991. It even looks like the awful kludge that it is.
Of my mother (94 this year!) telling me to eat my vegetables. My reply is: "but I don't like them", and life goes on. Sometimes my wife does the same thing and I respond (autotomically) "yes dear" and proceed to gulp them down with a glass of soda or milk.
W8 seems to be similar. We have all the sales people (or Microsoft) saying that it is going to be good for you, and people who actually USE their computers for productive purposes, saying "no thank you", or "yes dear" and doing it the old (W7/XP) way.
Unfortunately, at some time, the diet will only have the W8 vegetables and we will all need to subsist on them after the alternatives run out. My? I just grow my own food over here on this Linux tree that tastes just fine and keeps me alive quite well. Yum yum.
Life goes on (*SIGH*).
£25 for an ugly interface that is not intuitive; slow as smell and totally useless unless it's connected to the internet all the time. I'm glad I only ruined my laptop with it and reverting to Win 7 because it's going in the bin where it belongs. Even Vista is better than Win 8.
Why should you have to get another program just to add a proper start button? as in Start 8?
No DVD playback as standard. Sorry MS but you've lost the plot completely. I won't be upgrading from 7 as it's taken me 3 years just to get my existing software and hardware to work together properly.
Windows 8 = 0
Apple OS = 10
All the Apple-user Windows worry is becoming more evident as Surface Pro gets close to delivery. Apple better come out with a real computer in tablet form versus the IPad, otherwise they will eventually lose some of their market share as they did in the 80's and 90's. If it wasn't for the IPhone, Apple would still be sucking hind teat. IPhone and IPad users are more gadget oriented than high-demand computer users. Granted, Surface RT isn't what I want with the Pro around the corner. I've been using 8Pro for a couple of months and find it a good upgrade (the 3rd of my personal computers last week). Its faster than 7, with both OS for computer users and a tablet touch screen for gadget users. For those who think I don't know Apple, I was an Mac OS expert and users for over 10 years as an IT program manager providing mixed services (Unix servers, PCs, and Mac).
I had a painless and cheap (£25) move from Vista to Windows 8 and I'm very impressed with it. There were a couple of bugs I ran in to namely search/indexing seemed to get stuck and stop me being able to setup File History, plus after a sleep it wouldn't connect back to the internet (Hyper-V ethernet issue). But the rest has been plain sailing. Multi-monitor support is excellent as I was having constant screen rotation issues with the old nVidia drivers on Vista.
I do think it helped that I used Ninite to install most of my software in one go which including the wonderful Classic Shell Start Menu. Because of that I've only seen that dreadful Metro interface once or twice. And I've never run an 'app', just 'programs'. It boots up in 25 seconds into a lovely three-screen desktop.
But I suppose haters gotta hate.
I still don't get the "this operating system is fantastically, orgasmically wonderful... once you gut the whole point of the operating system and replace it with something that looks like the previous version" attitude.
As for Vista, well that was pretty universally panned as being shit. UAC was about the only semi-useful thing it brought over XP, and even that was soured by Microsoft's attempt to pretend they invented it and didn't just rip sudo/kdesu/gksu off wholesale.
Of course, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but then getting a patent on it and beating other companies around the head with it.. well that just stinks.
Or are these shortcuts being bandied around just new fangled command line prompts? Highly castrated command line prompts. No idea how you do pipes from one application to the other, or run a command in a loop … ksh makes that a doddle.
I'm not a fan of gestures for controlling computers. Yes, they have a place, but they're not the whole story.
As for magic corners… Android does something similar. I was recently faced with the task of setting up the boss' Asus Transformer tablet up for a business trip away. His laptop had faulty USB ports that needed seeing to, and so the tablet was a tie-me-over until we got that sorted. (This too was to be my task; except delhi belly kept me home the two days that was to happen. *sigh*)
I found it was a case of the blind leading the blind around the interface, as I knew roughly what needed to be achieved but no idea how to achieve it, he knew some of the basics but wasn't overly advanced in his usage. Adding a bookmark was one task that came to mind — I went looking for a menu, turns out you stick your finger on the left-side of the screen and a menu pops up. Not unlike the Windows 8 charms I suppose, but not exactly intuitive.
Some have bandied around the Windows 3.1 interface; Windows 3.1's Program Manager had one thing over what I've seen of the Windows 8 Start screen: it had one layer of grouping. The top level was program groups, within that, the actual application icons. What I've seen of Windows 8, it's a flat structure. Workable for a small number of applications, but given how every application I've seen in Windows insists on creating its own program group/directory within the program manager/start menu, and how many icons some applications generate, I can see this becoming a sea of icons very quickly. With animations to boot!
A well organised hierarchy is good. Take a look at the menus in most Linux desktops (except Gnome3/Unity, which does its own thing). On my computer under Graphics, the system automatically put things like Gimp, Inkscape, Okular (KDE's document viewer), XSane, … etc. Under Games, they're divided into types such as Strategy, Logic, etc. All programming related things hide under Development. It's logical.
Okay, sometimes an application gets installed and you've got to hunt for where it got put, but you then learn that place, and it stays there. It beats everything sticking itself near the root of the tree or one branch below and having clutter everywhere every time however.
Maybe if they introduce some levels in the start screen (doable I think with some imagination) Microsoft are in a good position to make that happen. The question is though, will the industry give them the chance?
exactly **HOW MANY** surrender monkeys work at el reg????? MS got you nice and drunk, gave you lots of money, so you would even look at an overcooked, mushy cabbage, and give it 5 stars??????
as for you, TIFKAM you FDGFBN .... I guess you are just lovin your new free toys, and cannot give a **damn** for the poor 'non tech aware' sods that will have to use it.... :( :( :( to say nuthin about us, who have to repair their mistakes!!!!
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You are a geek, potentially with Asperger's or similar. Your patience for other, normal human beings is non-existent and you fail to accept that GUIs were principally invented to make things easier for normal humans. Now be a good boy, put your Red Bull down, stop eating those crisps, step outside and have a look. That yellow thing in the sky is called 'The Sun'. Try and get more of it. Tell Mum and Dad you are off out somewhere, and try to spend less time hating people who are clearly inferior to you with your clever keypress combos and command line shennanigans. I have used various computers with different GUIs for a very long time (Atari, Amiga, PC, Archimedes, etc) and still believe that shortcuts like that should not be necessary. It's OK anyway I have created shortcuts on the desktop for the most useful stuff but still feel that shouldn't be necessary and I'm fu**ed if I'm going to try remembering those keyboard shortcuts, so there. Troll.
Caveat - I am a developer.
I put a lot on the desktop, different dev environments, I use start programs quite often to find things I want, I know what I want, but I can see which version. XP start menu in compatability mode is the best I have used for finding a program from a list, 7 is claustrophobic.
What really annoys me is the dropping back to Tiles rather than Desktop.
Win8 would just annoy me too much
I think the time has come when the big organisations like Microsoft and Apple cant afford to make mistakes. The latest Linux distributions such as Ubuntu 12 and Puppy Slacko 5.4 are pretty good and cost nothing. In the case of Microsoft it will always have to support legacy applications, however many people are content with running Windows XP.
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