Windows 8

What's great is it does what it's supposed to do, so many years running. The interface is not that great; there was a learning curve I went through.

I doubt you'll glean much from a screenshot of a small-window VM. For the last many years, I pretty much use it to only print out the calendar.

I must be getting feeble minded; it runs on W98, not XP.
 
That guy is also a doofus. I expect that this particular appellation will be more broadly agreed upon than my previous one.

Metro bites, but a lot of crap he was complaining about I'd covered in the tutorial you see on user account creation . The rest is whole entire google search away, even for someone sufficiently uncomfortable as to resort to doing that search from another computer.
 
(Not defending the clip, nor the person - just playing devils advocate)

With all the research on user interaction (something which Microsoft has spent millions on and published books on (yes - there is a Microsoft Press book on UI design)), why should one have to use Google to find out how the basics of the primary user interface that is presented by the operating system works? (I sat through the tutorial, and it leaves a lot of information out). I want to close an application, oh s*&t< none of the common and understood indicators are present, I'll guess I'll have to Google it to find out? ALT-F4, oh why didn't I know that? Oh - I'm on a touch screen, double crap... (mini rant over).

While I have no issue with user interface/interaction (basically UX) changes when they show an improvement in common workflow patterns, IMHO, the changes (specifically in regards to the Modern UI) don't enhance the workflow, it hinders it.

Mind you I would argue that GNOME 3.x suffers from the same infection that the UI in Windows 8 has... (but GNOME3 at least has all the common UI indicators present making using it quite easy).
 
There's a tutorial. It plays the first time a user account is created on a machine. I have observed this to happen after a sysprepped system is configured (how an OEM system would be) and on new installation. The tutorial basically says "The new start thingie is called Metro and it's in the lower left corner of the screen. Hit the Windows key to toggle it. The thingie on the right is called the Charms bar and it's available in the right corners. Remember corners and you'll probably be just fine." I can't remember if gestures are covered or not, but it sounded to me like the biggest frustration this guy had was a poor touchpad habit combined with inability to find a corner and/or the Windows key.

Stuff changes in every new Microsoft OS and yes, the lack of contrast between buttons and labels and the lack of whitespace between tiles in Metro is stupid, but as I've said over and over and over, Metro is only as present as you want it to be. Pin shit to the taskbar. Make desktop icons. Install a Start Menu replacement. The only thing that was really taken away for the Metro screen is that fact that it covers up all your other open apps by default.

And no, no one who uses *nix Window Manager with any regularity any business whining about uniformity of UI conventions. That guy said he's familiar with OSX and Ubuntu, and if he can figure out those guys well enough to call himself conversant, he could've at least taken the two minutes he probably would've needed to watch the little Windows 8 user interface tutorial.
 
IIRC, I don't think that the gestures are covered in detail, but I think there was mention of them in the tutorial. I do remember using the hot-corners and the Win key to get around from the get go, and have had no great issues (other than those mentioned in my previous review on Win8).

Having played more with Windows 8 over the last few weeks (mainly using VS2012 for some C# code), I don't really see what all the fuss is about. (My original review points still hold). My only concern is the lack of uniformity of user interface between the 2 modes of operations (Metro vs classic), and as you've mentioned the lack of contrast in the controls/labels in the Metro UI environment.

I do agree the guy doing the review was a bit of a spanker, but I do acknowledge the point on the 4C's are relevant. (just not how they were presented).

Likewise, the *nix environment has been a really bad state of affairs, especially now that we have essentially 3 main desktop environments (Unity, GNOME, KDE) plus a slew of minor desktop environments (XFCE, LXDE, Mate, etc). At least all are moving towards a common set of GUI widget sets (being QT and GTK), rather having further fragmentation on that part. (In other news E17 has finally made it's official release). And QT has decent support of GTK look-and-feel emulation... But, that is one of the "features" of the Linux OS ecosystem - you have choice (and lots of it).
 
A task that has been common for me for years keeps getting more difficult with each OS, and I would love people's advice on the simplest way to do it in Win8:

Change an IP address on the wired NIC.

Thanks.
 
That's probably a good candidate for a little powershell action. I can't think of a way to do it with just regular DOS commands off the top of my head, but more of that kind of functionality is exposed to powershell and VBscript.
 
So you would keep the scripts on a thumbdrive? For the most part these are computers I'm touching for the first time, and don't have anything on them.

At the moment I'm going to the desktop, opening the folder explorer, using that to get to the standard control panel, and getting to network settings from there.
 
Well the point of doing anything with WMI is that it's ridiculously easy to script stuff and push it out to clients. Keep it on a thumb drive or stick it on a network share for occasional use.

One of the things that I do as an admin is copy a collection of scripts, batch files and install-less programs on to systems like Spacemonger or Hijack This and add that folder to the computer's PATH so I can use it how ever I want. This is the kind of thing I would throw in there.
 
Well the point of doing anything with WMI is that it's ridiculously easy to script stuff and push it out to clients. Keep it on a thumb drive or stick it on a network share for occasional use.

One of the things that I do as an admin is copy a collection of scripts, batch files and install-less programs on to systems like Spacemonger or Hijack This and add that folder to the computer's PATH so I can use it how ever I want. This is the kind of thing I would throw in there.

Also, the shortcut to go straight to the Network Adapters list from any address bar or search is ncpa.cpl
 
Chewy509 said:
With all the research on user interaction (something which Microsoft has spent millions on and published books on ... why should one have to use Google to find out how the basics of the primary user interface that is presented by the operating system works?
Click to expand...

Quoted for truth.

Metro is a massive fail, and already the market sees Windows 8 as a dud, "Vista Mark II" is a phrase I'm hearing quite a lot. And that is a shame, really, as the mind-boggling stupid UI aside, I reckon it is, under the skin, the best Windows ever. Sure, you can patch it up, but it's still a broken UI with ugly patches. Me, I have enough geek blood not to mind that too much, but Joe Public won't wear shate like that. Win 8 will fail and have to be replaced, presumably by a Win 8.1 with a working UI, very soon.
 
One thing Microsoft might want to worry about, I found it much easier to get around my first mac last year than I did with win 8 which I think is a real problem as I have been with them sense win 95. I seriously do not see businesses deploying win 8.
 
MaxBurn said:
One thing Microsoft might want to worry about, I found it much easier to get around my first mac last year than I did with win 8 which I think is a real problem as I have been with them sense win 95. I seriously do not see businesses deploying win 8.
Click to expand...

My company is already deploying it, granted they are asking for volunteers to upgrade. We are also a Microsoft partner.
 
I gave a Win8 machine to a user that had never even heard of it, in fact, their last machine was XP. No complaints. Start8 makes that much of a difference.
 
MaxBurn said:
I seriously do not see businesses deploying win 8.
Click to expand...

I've installed Windows 8 for three businesses already. With Classic Shell installed, people reasonably familiar with computers can find their way around. The speed improvement over even Windows 7 is much appreciated.

I agree that Metro is a failure, but once you find a way to ignore it, Windows 8 is ok.
 
So everyone here deploying win 8 to a business are using hacks to make it work like the other versions?
 
I've demoed Classic Shell to a few persons looking to buy new laptops. All said that that is the only way they will move to Win 8.
 
The mandate for my training job is to configure Windows with as few changes from the vanilla UI as possible. I have to be familiar with the defaults.
But every Windows 8 system I've configured for an individual has had Classic Start on it.
 
I've got it on a dual core T60. It's... adequate. I don't think you're missing anything though.
I think the oldest CPUs that are officially supported are the top-end single core Athlon64s, and those things are nine years old.
 
But I have two complete working spare P4's (3.2 GHz Dell Dimension 8400's) doing nothing and I don't have any Athlon64's (well I do, but no working motherboards for them). I was going to add Windows 8 on one P4 and GPU fold on it. That would've given me a Windows 8 machine to play with. Putting Windows 8 on a virtual machine doesn't give me the excuse to use one of the spare P4 machines to fold with.

As far as I can tell, some later P4's will work with Windows 8 (Prescot or Cedar Mills) and some do not. I have two that do not.
 
That's pretty much my beef, I like and actually prefer a mostly stock default install of XP and 7 so not looking foreword to have to do anything to get comfortable in it. If I ever get a second computer again I might do win 8 on that but I think I'm not doing that on my bootcamp partition.
 
Mercutio said:
Well the point of doing anything with WMI is that it's ridiculously easy to script stuff and push it out to clients. Keep it on a thumb drive or stick it on a network share for occasional use.

One of the things that I do as an admin is copy a collection of scripts, batch files and install-less programs on to systems like Spacemonger or Hijack This and add that folder to the computer's PATH so I can use it how ever I want. This is the kind of thing I would throw in there.

Also, the shortcut to go straight to the Network Adapters list from any address bar or search is ncpa.cpl
Click to expand...

Good call on the .cpl. I find netsh to be an easier way to interact with nics from the command prompt though still not easy to remember.

http://www.petri.co.il/configure_tcp_ip_from_cmd.htm
 
mubs said:
Are there many things incompatible with Win8 that work with Win7? You guys tempt me with the performance improvement over Win7.
Click to expand...

In broad, Mubs, the answer is "no". Most things that run on Win 7 will run on Win 8. Doubtless Merc will give you a more comprehensive answer.

I did strike a weird one the other day. I installed SMPlayer as per usual (I like to have a couple of different media players on a machine, and SMPlayer is my usual next-choice after VLC) and it worked fine. The next time I used the machine (a few days later) it failed to start. After a lot of messing about and troubleshooting, I was left with no alternative other than a full reinstall. I can't really see how merely installing SMPlayer could cause the system to fail to start. So far as I know, there is no load-on-startup component, and it's a pretty benign bit of software in any case. So, most likely, the problem is completely unrelated and SMPlayer was blameless. But te really weird thing is that ... well, I'll come to that shortly.

Eventually, I installed from scratch on a different physical drive and I suspect that the root of the problem might be the original boot drive itself ( a 2TB Seagate). Either that or some strange form of data corruption on a good drive. Plugging the Seagate into the Win 8 box as a slave, it could not recognise it at all, then it reckoned it wasn't formatted, then (after more tries) it wanted to perform a great long chkdsk on it. Meanwhile at every time through this process, I could plug it into my Win XP Thinkpad (via a USB dock) and see it working perfectly. Eventually, I used the Thinkpad to copy the wanted files onto a third drive and transferred them from that third drive back onto the Win 8 box. I haven't had time yet to do proper tests on the now no-longer-required Seagate drive to find out if it's a hardware issue (starting to seem unlikely) or some weird thing to do with Win 8's HDD access.

But now, as promised, the really interesting thing. When I went to reinstall SMPlayer, using the same file I had used the previous time, Win 8 refused to install it, saying it would not run on this version of Windows! Exact same file, exact same Win 8 Pro 64. I downloaded a fresh copy, same deal. Flat refusal to install, where on the previous install it not only went on fine, it ran perfectly too. Go figure.

Meanwhile, I discovered a 64-bit beta version of SMPlayer hidden away somewhere on their site and than installed no problem. But if Win 8 64 doesn't like SMPlayer (standard 32-bit version) why did it install and run just fine the first time?

One more thing, in case no-one has mentioned it: the stupid Win 7 upgrade media clean install bug still exists, completely un-fixed from some years back. You know the one - you clean install as usual and when it is complete, Windows says your (100% legit) product key is invalid. All threse years and STILL not fixed! What is wrong with these people? Anyway, the workaround is still the same - details here http://winsupersite.com/article/windows-7/clean-install-windows-7-with-upgrade-media-128512
 
Yeah, baring any problems with bootcamp drivers I think I will check it out using my technet sub. Currently wondering how I can back up that partition in case things don't work out.
 
It never stopped, Max. It started on release day in October and at that time was planned to run until 31st January 2013. I haven't heard of any change to those dates, and the Microsoft website still says January 31st.

When it goes from $40 to about $200 (Pro version; Home version will be about $140-odd) there will be a huge drop in sales! I can't see how they are going to sell it at all at that price. THe days when you could charge grossly inflated prices for something as basic as an operating system are over. Especially when that OS is as hopelessly flawed as Windows 8! (Sure, under the skin it's pretty good - but Joe Average doesn't see that, he just sees the terrible mess they made of the UI and buys a Mac.)
 
^ Good question!

My guess is that they won't extend it, and they won't lower the real price either .... but they will do stuff to lower the effective price - i.e., some other special. The way I'm seeing it, they could:

a) Extend the special. This would be a massive admission of failure. They won't do it. they won't even think about doing it. Oh, and it would cost them a lot of revenue too. And it would annoy a lot of their partners. How, for example, is a PC dealer going to feel about paying upwards of $150 for an OEM Win 8 Pro licence when he is trying to sell machines against (among other things) the upgrader market, which is paying $40? Nope: this won't happen.

b) Lower the real price. Again, an admission of failure, which is not something Microsoft ever does. Well, only when there is absolutely no alternative other than to own up. Hell, they still haven't really admitted just how much the Vista disaster hurt them, and that was years ago, so why would they admit that Win 8 is a dog already? And it will cost them some big bucks too. OK, it would also be a practical step towards reality and an admission that the days of the easy-money billion-dollar profits of the DOS and Windows monopoly days are finally over - these are both things Microsoft needs to face up to if it is going to survive - but Microsoft has never much likes reality, at least not that sort of reality. They will come around to admitting it eventually, but not this year, and probably not next year either. Nevertheless, whether they realise it or not, reality has hit. Joe Consumer won't pay $200 for an OS licence ever again.

(OK, OK, Apple owners pay truly absurd amounts of cash for all sorts of near-worthless things and seem to enjoy doing it - possibly including OS upgrades but I haven't checked - but they ain't buying computers or telephones or operating systems, they are buying fashion items which they think make them look cool and the outrageous price is even less important than the lack of practical functionality. How important is functionality for a $2000 Patek Philippe wristwatch or a $1000 Dior handbag? Exactly.)

c) Keep the real price as-is - i.e., $140-odd for Home and $200-odd for Pro. Sales numbers will fall off a cliff on the 1st of February, and stay fairly low pretty much forever. It's just not a $200 product. At $200-odd, Windows accounts for around a quarter of the cost of an entire new PC, and a third of the cost of a cheaper model. That's not sustainable. Remember, even back in the days of Microsoft's pomp and glory, the OS was never more than around 10-15% of the total cost. That's where it needs to get back to today - i.e., Windows has a natural price in the current decade of around $50 to $100 for the top-level product. Anywhere much over that and Microsoft is going to bleed and bleed and bleed. They will still sell a lot of product and make money for a few more years, but their market share will continue to reduce. If you own MSFT shares, you should be planning to sell them over the next 6-12 months and reinvest in some other company with more future. (No, not Apple. Once Apple stops being cool - and it's already wavering - their incredible run will be over, and their future deeply questionable. If you like shorting, Apple is going to be your very favourite company sometime soon. The trouble is, it's hard to say exactly when. Sooner rather than later is my guess, but that is all it is: a guess.) On the other hand, this policy will at least give Microsoft the benefit of good prices on the OS software they do sell, and they will still sell a truckload just on inertia. Hell, people queued up to buy ME and Vista!

d) Their best policy is to combine (a) and (c) as best they can. Keep the list price exactly as-is ($200ish) but have a series of "one-off" specials which let them keep on pretending that $200 is the price while everybody actually pays something like $80. Look out for bundles - Win 8 plus Office 2012; Win 8 plus Publisher; Win 8 with free Skype subscription and a gazillion free downloads on iTunes ... er I mean whatever iTunes competitor MS likes this week; free Win 8 if you buy a Microsoft wireless keyboard and mouse set ..... and so on. This way they get the value-conscious consumer, and they don't have to admit how badly they have screwed the pooch this time, and they still get to sell quite a lot of copies to dumb people or corporates who have no choice at full price.

They will do (d). Bet money on it.
 
Like the home upgrade three pack bundle thing. Yeah we could indeed see creative bundling.
 
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