Windows 8

The developer preview was ok but the consumer preview that came out last week is very nice. So far I've been using it on my home laptop but its stable enough that i decided to put it on my work machine. Much nicer than Win 7, the new start screen (replaces the old start menu) is much faster to use, more useful if you have lots of apps, and much more flexible. It combines functionality of the start menu, taskbar, and quickstart bar in a very elegant manner. Task switching is easier since they show you a preview, and you can close apps from the preview, though it does a very good job managing tasks (esp the new lightweight Metro apps) by itself. And the new chromeless IE is great, everything except the webpage disappears until you need it, titlebar, menus, nav bar etc. It makes the new widescreen ratio monitors useful despite their lack of vertical resolution.

I'm not a big fan of the ribbon in Word, but in the Win 8 file manager it works very well. And the new file copy dialog is the boss..

I haven't been excited about any new Windows version since Win95 and NT4, but this version is a huge step up. I haven't had a chance to play with it on a tablet yet but have a Thinkpad X220t tablet on the way, as nice as it is on a desktop it should be even better on a tablet.

Very nice, thanks for sharing!

I hadn't touched windows since XP until recently when I went to 7 (for some things). I found it good, but not great and I'm glad the next version sounds even better! One thing I didn't like was the start menu, but it sounds like they've made it better. Thanks for posting!

From what I've read, it sounds like Windows 8 may run better than Windows 7 using the same computer. Here is a link to the system requirements:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/...-consumer-preview-system-recommendations.aspx

You can also download the consumer preview from here:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/consumer-preview

Still running XP.

And I run it in "Classic" mode.

If Windows 7 or 8 won't do a proper "classic" mode, I'm not interested.
It's bad enough that I had to relearn my Office apps.

Microsoft needs to get it through their head that us old farts don't want to try something new every 3 years.
I'd still be running Win 3.1 if modern software supported it.

From what I see I like the look of the layout.

lopazopy said:

From what I've read, it sounds like Windows 8 may run better than Windows 7 using the same computer.

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That's been my experience with my old laptop.

cb91710 said:

If Windows 7 or 8 won't do a proper "classic" mode, I'm not interested.
It's bad enough that I had to relearn my Office apps.

Microsoft needs to get it through their head that us old farts don't want to try something new every 3 years.
I'd still be running Win 3.1 if modern software supported it.

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It doesn't support any sort of classic mode at the moment, but it's an alpha release, I suspect that MS disabled the classic mode to force the testers to use the new interface (the old one doesn't need testing after all). My favorite version of windows was NT4, this is the first one that I think is genuinely better to use. IMO XP, Vista, and Win7 are less usable than NT4. I've been using their server OSs on my desktop machines for the last decade because their consumer OSs had such sucky user interfaces.

cb91710 said:

Still running XP.

And I run it in "Classic" mode.

If Windows 7 or 8 won't do a proper "classic" mode, I'm not interested.
It's bad enough that I had to relearn my Office apps.

Microsoft needs to get it through their head that us old farts don't want to try something new every 3 years.
I'd still be running Win 3.1 if modern software supported it.

Click to expand...

No offense to you, sir...but software companies don't care about people who don't want to learn new software. They constantly change to create new things to sell. Just the way it is. No need for you to change if you don't want to, though. Just keep those old installation disks and reg keys.

Well, except that XP goes off of bug fix support (including security) on April 8, 2014. Granted, it's probably been flushed out pretty well in that regard, but I wouldn't bet money that there aren't remaining exploitable flaws. At the same time, it will become a much smaller target in terms of installed base, so the black hats may well more on to other things. I guess you just have to evaluate your own tolerance for risk. It's two years away, so quite a bit of time to decide, or move up.

I'll have to go grab the preview and stick it in a VM, and check it out. It sounds good from what I've heard from you , and others.

Techichi said:

No offense to you, sir...but software companies don't care about people who don't want to learn new software. They constantly change to create new things to sell. Just the way it is. No need for you to change if you don't want to, though. Just keep those old installation disks and reg keys.

Click to expand...

The major complaint that I have and what lots of people seem to have about windows 8 has to do with the metrosexual interface. The biggest complaint about it is that there is currently no option to shut it off. Not everybody uses a touch screen interface, which is what the metro UI is designed for. I feel it will alienate many people and cause lots of people to stick with Win7. It would be much better if the metro UI was optional.

Another complaint is that many common tasks, like shutting off the computer now require having to mouse all over the place and hover in just the right magical spot, then wait for the sidebar to pop open so you can finally see the shutdown button. There is a noticeable delay as you wait for the sidebar to open (oh wait, that's not the right spot, there it is, wait, no, damn, finally there it is) to do anything such as open the control panel or find the shutdown options. What used to take a quick click-click now requires fiddling around to find the magic hot spots, then waiting for it to decide to open or not, then a delay while it thinks about it before it decides to do it.

What the metro UI really is, so far, is an OS optimized for phones, but on a desktop. Is this really needed or it is a step forward? Why would MS cut out 99.9% of the windows under-base for a potential 0.1% that are tablet and cell phone users? An OS designed to replace all your programs with mobile applications built to run on some low powered ARM device. What is the point of that on a desktop that is more powerful than a tablet or cell phone. Change that makes an improvement is what innovation is all about and is what drives us forward. Change simply for the sake of change, just to be different, is counter-intuitive, non-productive, and is not an improvement.

I have installed this consumer preview on a couple of test machines as well as in VMware and VirtualBox, on my quad core main rig, and it seems to run snappier in VirtualBox. Just make the metrosexual interface an option and it may be an OK operating system.

jamesspo said:

Well, except that XP goes off of bug fix support (including security) on April 8, 2014. Granted, it's probably been flushed out pretty well in that regard, but I wouldn't bet money that there aren't remaining exploitable flaws. At the same time, it will become a much smaller target in terms of installed base, so the black hats may well more on to other things. I guess you just have to evaluate your own tolerance for risk. It's two years away, so quite a bit of time to decide, or move up.

I'll have to go grab the preview and stick it in a VM, and check it out. It sounds good from what I've heard from you , and others.

Click to expand...

That means that by the time that it is finally "abandoned" by microsoft it will be about 13 or 14 years old... I would say that asking users to upgrade their OS every 13 or 14 years isn't too much to ask. But I am a Mac guy who LOVES to upgrade as soon as a new revision comes out... so take my opinion with a grain of salt.

I have read a lot of complaints about the new "Metro" start menu, but I found that my initial feeling of being overwhelmed by not being able to find things was gone in an hour or two and that I am now zipping around like I always have. Many people don't realize that you can click back and forth between the Metro "interface" and the traditional desktop in one mouse click, and I think they are shying away from it because of that. Win 8 still needs a little work, but I'm liking it so far.

Tried to install it on my work/personal desktop..meh..too many important programs aernt compatible

smalltank said:

Tried to install it on my work/personal desktop..meh..too many important programs aernt compatible

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which ones? So far I haven't run into any problems.

DustMite said:

The major complaint that I have and what lots of people seem to have about windows 8 has to do with the metrosexual interface. The biggest complaint about it is that there is currently no option to shut it off. Not everybody uses a touch screen interface, which is what the metro UI is designed for. I feel it will alienate many people and cause lots of people to stick with Win7. It would be much better if the metro UI was optional.

Click to expand...

The only part of Metro that isn't optional is the start screen, and my suspicion is that it will be optional in the final version. Microsoft doesn't want it optional right now because they want people to test the new system.

IMO the new start screen is a huge improvement over the old start menu, but there's a lot of heated discussions about this going on nowadays.

DustMite said:

Another complaint is that many common tasks, like shutting off the computer now require having to mouse all over the place and hover in just the right magical spot, then wait for the sidebar to pop open so you can finally see the shutdown button. There is a noticeable delay as you wait for the sidebar to open (oh wait, that's not the right spot, there it is, wait, no, damn, finally there it is) to do anything such as open the control panel or find the shutdown options. What used to take a quick click-click now requires fiddling around to find the magic hot spots, then waiting for it to decide to open or not, then a delay while it thinks about it before it decides to do it.

Click to expand...

This is actually something I like about Win 8. They've separated the UI elements for logging off and powering down the machine and made it easy to log off and slightly harder to power off. It's still easy to power down the machine, just put the mouse out in the lower right corner (just put it out past the corner, there is no "magical spot"), click settings/power/power off.

DustMite said:

What the metro UI really is, so far, is an OS optimized for phones, but on a desktop. Is this really needed or it is a step forward? Why would MS cut out 99.9% of the windows under-base for a potential 0.1% that are tablet and cell phone users? An OS designed to replace all your programs with mobile applications built to run on some low powered ARM device. What is the point of that on a desktop that is more powerful than a tablet or cell phone. Change that makes an improvement is what innovation is all about and is what drives us forward. Change simply for the sake of change, just to be different, is counter-intuitive, non-productive, and is not an improvement.

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I don't see this at all. The phones are too small to run this sort of app, I think WP8 will be running a UI very similar to what it is today rather than the much more powerful Win8 UI. The Win8 Metro UI should be really great on a tablet, but I don't think that it makes Windows 8 less capable on traditional desktop and laptop machines - after all they've added features to Windows, not taken them away. Windows 8 still runs all the traditional windows applications, it's not like Microsoft is forcing us to go all-Metro except on ARM-based tablets which have never run windows anyway. Other than the start screen (which I really think is a huge improvement over the start menu) you don't have to use any of the Metro applications. The only metro app I use on my development laptop is the metro version of IE10, my start screen just has the usual suspects for a developer (VS2010, guidgen, emacs, msdn, etc).

Where the metro apps will be used heavily are (a) tablets and (b) technical neophytes like my parents and cousins. Office and Visual Studio and Photoshop aren't gonna be ported to the Metro system any time soon, because they just don't fit that model. Microsoft is betting that tablets will be changing from toys to tools over the next decade, and laptops will fade in importance just as desktops did years ago.

DustMite said:

The major complaint that I have and what lots of people seem to have about windows 8 has to do with the metrosexual interface.

Click to expand...

I will stick with OSX- the pretentious operating system