Windows 8

[CougTek]

Yeah, I'm still wainting too. I've been looking every hour and it still isn't there as of 12:56pm.

 

[Mercutio]

It's up now.

 

[CougTek]

I had to set the country as United States, because it still isn't available on the French site. Thaks for letting me know.

 

[CougTek]

Ok, it should be available, but I always get an error message when I try to acess it. I think Microsoft's servers are drowning.

 

[MaxBurn]

I see them in my account.

Okay I guess I was late to that one.

 

[Mercutio]

I've gotten as far as an Akamai timeout. Anyone want to bet that the ISO is already on the Pirate Bay?

 

[MaxBurn]

I was just thinking they can torrent it and get better performance.

I can't even get the keys for it.

 

[ddrueding]

I'm already 4% into a download at 80kB/s.

 

[ddrueding]

And the only reason it was going that slow was the 1.8MB/s of torrent traffic at the moment.

 

[CougTek]

So far, it has always failed to start the download.

 

[sdbardwick]

I had to switch to IE so the Akamai download manager would work, then had to restart DL manager before it would download. Completed in 10 minutes.

Now trying to get a key - the key servers are timing out.

 

[CougTek]

Thanks. It finally worked when I tried in IE.

 

[ddrueding]

The key worked in Firefox on the third attempt.

 

[Mercutio]

I installed Windows 8 on a 2GHz T60 with an 80GB x25 and 3GB RAM. It really boots up and resumes from hibernate quickly (~12 seconds?) but there's no other subjective difference in performance from Windows 7.

 

[LunarMist]

When will 8 be the required purchase?

 

[ddrueding]

Hopefully never. companies will still insist on 7 for corporate stuff. if metro continues I can see another home/business split like 98 and NT.

 

[LunarMist]

But I am not corporate. What will be the status for normal people at the Frys or Egg for example?

 

[ddrueding]

Same as before I'd imagine, it will be available, but will cost more.

 

[LunarMist]

I was hopping for December Christmas timeframe.

 

[ddrueding]

Than stay in Windows 7. I suspect 7 and machines running it will be available for another year or three. I hope they remain in the channel until something better than metro comes along.

 

[Mercutio]

The rumor right now is that there's going to be a Windows 8.1 next year and that MS is going to try for faster releases and less expensive OS upgrades for the future. Which would play hell with Common Operating Environments but maybe they don't care.

One nifty thing about Office 2013 (I'm just using the preview) is that it can actually edit PDFs now. Which is handy.

 

[LunarMist]

Is 8 an upgrade from 7, or do you have to wipe yourself and lose everything?

 

[CougTek]

I only need to wipe myself when I get a cold or after a #2. I always recommend doing a clean install instead of upgrading when doing an OS installation. I'm pretty sure it saves some trouble down the road.

Also, installing Windows Classic Shell works fine on the RTM. So we don't have to suffer Metro or "Windows 8-style UI" if we don't want to. I'll spend the 40$ to get it at the end of October.

 

[Mercutio]

Is 8 an upgrade from 7, or do you have to wipe yourself and lose everything?

I installed it on a clean drive. OS upgrades are usually a bad idea.

 

[CougTek]

I don't like the fact that you have to enter the key during the initial setup. I haven't found a way around. It won't let me install it and enter the key later. My plan was to install the OS and then enter the key when I get it on October 26th. This sucks.

 

[ddrueding]

I don't like the fact that you have to enter the key during the initial setup. I haven't found a way around. It won't let me install it and enter the key later. My plan was to install the OS and then enter the key when I get it on October 26th. This sucks.

I'm sure they had a D'oh moment when they realized how many people were able to run 7/2008 for 6 months+ at a time without ever having a key.
I also suspect that the retail keys won't work with the MSDN downloads of the OS. I know this is the case with 7.

 

[CougTek]

With the retail version, maybe not, but it sure works with the OEM licence. The installation disk in my kit is from MSDN and I've used it to install almost all the systems I've sold and repaired in the last few years.

 

[LunarMist]

Same as before I'd imagine, it will be available, but will cost more.

I installed it on a clean drive. OS upgrades are usually a bad idea.

The cost of some software makes an upgrade more desirabe.

Are there any changes pending to the current version of 7?

 

[Mercutio]

Does Adobe tie its shit to a motherboard or something? You should be able to reinstall or migrate a license to a different machine. Also, frankly, you should be stealing Adobe's software since you feel that you have to have it. There's no justification for actually giving those worthless fucks money.

 

[sechs]

They have an activation scheme. You just need to deactivate before installing on a different machine.

 

[MaxBurn]

Win 8 is going to be expensive.

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2012/08/21/windows-8-pricing

I think I'd rather invest in technet.

 

[Mercutio]

Here's a fun and handy tip for everybody:

Windows Defender will re-write your hosts file for you.
If you have an entry for something like facebook.com (as I do) or DoubleClick.com, Defender will do a DNS lookup and re-write your hosts for you.

You can get around that by either turning Defender off completely (yay!) or slogging through its interface to manually exclude the hosts file from the crap that it monitors.
Isn't that fantastic?

 

[fb]

Microsoft seems to be a bit like NWA in the good old days: "We're just trying to make operating systems that pisses people off"

 

[Mercutio]

I'm going to put together a Server 2012 system tomorrow-ish for my own amusement, since it's finally up on Technet.

 

[MaxBurn]

Hmm, I need to check out the final version too.

Interesting, I seem to have access to datacenter edition at my low level too.

 

[Mercutio]

They give you a retail key for it. I think that's because there are fewer SKUs for Server 2012 but as far as I know the only real differences are extra SMP support and licensing for Hyper-V stuff. I'm more interested in seeing what IIS and AD management are like.

 

[Mercutio]

I haven't managed to dig as deeply in management tools with Server 2012 as I wanted, but I will say that overall I approve. I don't think the install even took five minutes (USB3 thumb drive to SSD), and adding/installing roles is simple and well-organized. A lot of my criticisms about Windows 8 still apply as far as disjointed interfaces between Metro and Control Panel, but after my initial configuration, I really haven't had to touch any of that stuff. The default installation options are fairly sane, and I didn't have to do very much fighting to whip the UI into shape. That might just be because I've been messing with Windows 8 for a while, though.

 

[MaxBurn]

My main concern was our application compatibility but I was pleasantly satisfied when it got along with server/sql 12 with no particular complaint other than needing the IE compatibility mode.

In the lower left there is a little helper popup if you stick the mouse down there that appears now to help you get to the metro screen I don't remember seeing before.

I don't see our techs having any particular trouble getting things going on newer customer servers, other than the whole lack of start menu thing.

 

[Mercutio]

I'm in the habit of hitting Win-R and/or starting things from a cmd.exe Window, which is more or less the same way I interact with a *nix system.

What I wound up doing to make things easier for myself was to toss a bunch of batch files for the relevant apps in a folder called c:\bin where I usually put handy command line or "orphan" installer-less tools anyway. I copy that folder from system to system where I work and it only takes a second to add it to cmd's path environment variable. Yes, that's a kludge but now that I've done it, I like it better than screwing around with menus anyway.

 

[timwhit]

I'm in the habit of hitting Win-R and/or starting things from a cmd.exe Window, which is more or less the same way I interact with a *nix system.

What I wound up doing to make things easier for myself was to toss a bunch of batch files for the relevant apps in a folder called c:\bin where I usually put handy command line or "orphan" installer-less tools anyway. I copy that folder from system to system where I work and it only takes a second to add it to cmd's path environment variable. Yes, that's a kludge but now that I've done it, I like it better than screwing around with menus anyway.

The Windows CLI is pretty bad, I use Cygwin for most CLI type things on Windows.