Windows 8 Dev build

[Silent_Buddha]

My wife asked me why I don't have more gadgets. She has more than me. I pointed out that my deeper understanding of these things means I'm not fooled by marketing and "buy new stuff because it's new". I don't do Twitter or Facebook because it offers nothing of substance to me. I don't upgrade mobile phones every five minutes, I don't buy a new TV every year.

I love new stuff. I'm ususally an early(ish) adopter. I was looking forwards to Win 8. However, unlike a lot of people, I don't think something is better just because it is newer. I want to get a tangible upgrade, I want to see benefits, improvement, I want to see the old problems solved, not just replaced with a different set of problems. I want something to be effecient and give maximum benefit not just the next new thing that corporations want to sell me.

And that's my attitude to Win 8. It's not good enough. It doesn't give enough benefit without giving me new problems. I'm not going to buy it while it's harder and more clunky to use that what I've already got. I'm happy to change the way I do things if the new way is better, but if it's actually worse... then I've got better things to do with my time and money.

MS hasn't convinced me with glossy sign-screens and the promise of touch-screens (which I don't have), and the interface problems have actively repelled me. So I see no benefit to me, and MS lose a sale. Provide me an OS that is useful to me, and I'll buy it. Provide me with a messy mish-mash of tablet and desktop OS squashed together like roadkill, where people tell me to ignore the interface and use a keyboard and command line to make it work, and I'm not interested in going backwards.

There are a whole host of rather, IMO, massive improvements in Win8 versus Win7 that go way beyond the minor cosmetic changes between Win7 and Vista.

But because there's a start screen instead of a start menu and no start button, it's somehow worse overall. That's the bit that I find so strange. But when I look at the history of Windows adoption from people that just don't like Microsoft in general, then it isn't a surprise. BTW - not saying you are one of those people.

And really if it's just the start screen that bugs you, there are plenty of free or paid 3rd party methods of removing it and Metro and giving back the start menu. It absolutely boggles my mind that people would pass up the improvements that Win8 brings when they are so much more substantial than the improvements that Win7 had over Vista.

People that have an open mind just buy Win8, because it is so much better than Win7, and if the start screen bugs them, they just get rid of it and put in a start menu.

Regards,
SB

 

[Davros]

It absolutely boggles my mind that people would pass up the improvements that Win8 brings when they are so much more substantial than the improvements that Win7 had over Vista.

And what are the improvements ?

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

The problem isn't the improvements. It's the improvements I want. What I don't want is all the crap that comes along with it that's only relevent for tablets.

 

[UniversalTruth]

People here still don't understand that the value of the improvements in Windows 7 over Vista was much more substantial than the "improvements" over something which works in a perfect way as Windows 7

 

[Grall]

But because there's a start screen instead of a start menu and no start button, it's somehow worse overall.

Yes! Absolutely! ...But it's not just the start menu of course. You're being deliberately obtuse by focusing purely on the start button. It's the whole integration of that metro shit that fucks up win8, starting with all the hidden crap you HAVE TO KNOW ABOUT before you can use it, which goes totally against the grain of a graphical user interface. Want to restart or put your PC to sleep? Hover your mouse in a corner for a moment (takes time) to bring out a god damned secret hidden sidebar, click a "settings" button (which totally makes no sense whatsoever since I don't want to change any settings), click another button to bring up a menu, pick choice in that menu.

WHAT THE FUCK!!!

That triple-damned start screen which has no order, no context and no cohesive, structured thought is just icing on an already rancid cake. Things get seemingly randomly pinned to it automatically when installing new stuff, but most of the things I need access to won't fit there, and to access that other stuff I have to right-click once to bring up yet another hidden fucking bar (totally redundant step that just complicates stuff and trips up inexperienced users) and click an obscurely designed icon in the right corner to get an absolute fucking mess of icons thrown right in my face which scrolls HORIZONTALLY of all things. Jesus fucking wept! Try find ANYthing in less than 30 seconds on that screen with 150+ programs installed...

The original start menu was hierarchical, sorted, structured. The start screen is just a big bloody load of pure fail.

Then there's all the other metro bullshit, like when you want to search for some stuff you HAVE to do that on a totally blank (in my case green) screen, cut off from your normal windows desktop where you may have a list of the stuff you want to search for or other reference material, for example. Totally bogus, doesn't add anything, all it does is annoy and cause hindrances.

All of the new UI stuff in win8 was designed by brain damaged monkeys. It's so fucking BAD, and it doesn't work well at all. Just to log in I have to press a key to remove that blasted image of seattle that appears whenever I boot up my box (which I don't want and never asked for, and don't seem able to turn off) and wait for the image to scroll all the way up. I can't simply start typing; nothing registers until the image is COMPLETELY GONE. Then I can log in, wait for the fucking start screen to appear (which I don't want to see), then I have to press enter one more time so I can start using my PC.

All of this is just stupid bullshit. Why is there even a title page to the login screen?! Put the clock and the blasted seattle image on the login screen itself! Doesn't take a genius to realize that redundant things are simply redundant, and a hindrance to productive use of the computer.

And really if it's just the start screen that bugs you

No for most people it isn't, but thanks for putting up your handy strawmen...

It absolutely boggles my mind that people would pass up the improvements that Win8 brings when they are so much more substantial than the improvements that Win7 had over Vista.

What substantial improvements precisely are we talking about? I've noticed nothing off-hand really. There's under the hood stuff with security, better SSD support, things like that. Nothing that registers during normal useage.

People that have an open mind just buy Win8, because it is so much better than Win7

LOL, whattafuck. People buy win8 because it's what MS is foisting on everyone at this particular point in time. Win8 has only just passed win vista in sales (an OS which has been totally obsolete for years), so the number of supposedly open minded people must indeed be far and few between!

My sincere apologies to you if I seem overly hostile or rude in this post; it's not you I'm angry at. It's the asshats at Microsoft who are to blame for my poor disposition, due to them having made serious mistakes during the design process of win8, mistakes I'm pretty sure MS will insist on keeping to try and wear down resistance in their users through persistence rather than trying to remedy more than cosmetic flaws (like putting a symbolic start button which mostly does nothing back on the desktop screen.)

They still think they can take over the phone and tablet world by trapping desktop users in their software environment, like they did with the internet and IE in the late 90s/early aughts, even though it's clear to everyone this isn't going to work.

 

[Malo]

PC's don't really need to be shutdown anymore. If you're on a tablet press the "on" button it goes to sleep. On a laptop you close the lid. On a desktop.... just leave it go to sleep on it's own?

 

[Grall]

None of the desktops I've owned for the better part of a decade have agreed to let themselves reliably be put to sleep. Either they crash or bluescreen during the go-to-sleep process or upon waking up, or else they go to sleep and immediately wake up again (every g-d time!) or else they go to sleep, then randomly wake back up again for no reason whatsoever.

It's either the power button or else yanking the wall plug out of the socket... I know which one I prefer!

 

[UniversalTruth]

My sincere apologies to you if I seem overly hostile or rude in this post; it's not you I'm angry at. It's the asshats at Microsoft who are to blame for my poor disposition, due to them having made serious mistakes during the design process of win8, mistakes I'm pretty sure MS will insist on keeping...

Your comment is okeyish, I have already read similar attitude towards Windows 8 in professional articles

All of the new UI stuff in win8 was designed by brain damaged monkeys. It's so fucking BAD, and it doesn't work well at all

It's the management people who forced the engineers to design such a shit.
But they are not monkeys without brains. They are like genial with very evil intentions at the first sight. G O D knows what secret hidden aim they have and why they decided to do the most stupid possible

Perhaps it is just as you say, to introduce:

a hindrance to productive use of the computer

The question is why. Is it just a game of psychology to force people to get angry and do something or something else? Or they have other benefits- to force people abandon PCs and go to smartphones/ tablets/ etc. Where Android with 80% market share is waitng for them to direct them to the bankrupt

 

[nutball]

None of the desktops I've owned for the better part of a decade have agreed to let themselves reliably be put to sleep. Either they crash or bluescreen during the go-to-sleep process or upon waking up, or else they go to sleep and immediately wake up again (every g-d time!) or else they go to sleep, then randomly wake back up again for no reason whatsoever.

Weird. My experience has been the exact opposite with desktops - hit the snooze button on the keyboard and it suspends to RAM, wakes flawlessly 99.9% of the time. It maybe needs a proper reboot once every 3-4 months, just so that Windows can wipe its bottom, other than that it's fine.

Laptops on the other hand - Macs and Windows - constant problems with the 'just close the lid'.

 

[Malo]

I've had the same problems with my desktops in the past. I believe my new one a year old is the first one that sleeps reliably. However we're ideally talking much newer PCs for Windows 8, not older frankensteins so I can see why an actual power off isn't quite as immediately accessible anymore. My newer HTPCs sleep fine, as does my laptop and tablet.

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

I've had sleep working fine on 10 year old PCs. As long as you've got reasonably up to date drivers (ie relatively new OS like Win 7) and you've set your BIOS correctly, there's no reason for sleep not to work.

If your PC is waking up, it's likely an over sensitive mouse, or something on your network waking the machine up (such as homegroup sharing), and these can be disabled.

Sometimes it's hard to track stuff down. The default installation of the software that comes with a Samsung SSD stops your PC from sleeping, just because Samsung are too lazy to fix their SSD firmware properly.

 

[UniversalTruth]

I don't have good opinion and experience with sleep mode either, neither on my laptop which has much higher probability to freeze afterwards, or my desktop with ATi card...

 

[Grall]

[ ... ] there's no reason for sleep not to work.

...In theory. In reality it's a total crapshoot wether it works or not. In my last five desktop PCs, stretching back to 2001, only ONE wanted to sleep somewhat reliably, and that was a prescott P4-3GHz Dell box running XP. The AMD self-made PC I had before that (using 2 different mobos, 2 different CPUs, several different graphics cards) ran win9x and therefore was inherently not reliable.

I always keep drivers current, BIOS settings generally don't affect sleep reliability in my experience, and still it won't work. My newest haswell/win8 box WILL go to sleep, but it wakes up whenever the fuck it feels like. Often within 10 minutes of putting it to sleep!

If your PC is waking up, it's likely an over sensitive mouse, or something on your network waking the machine up (such as homegroup sharing), and these can be disabled.

All the networking, PCI(e), RTC and so on waking-up stuff is disabled. Mouse won't wake up a PC unless you click the buttons and my mouse's buttons aren't so twitchy they randomly click themselves...

It's down to badly behaving hardware/drivers methinks, you roll the wrong combination of stuff and the fifty-eleven just-barely-or-not-quite-conforming-to-specs-due-to-cost-cutting-and-mediocre-programmers devices found in a modern PC just won't play along with each other.

 

[Reznor007]

That triple-damned start screen which has no order, no context and no cohesive, structured thought is just icing on an already rancid cake. Things get seemingly randomly pinned to it automatically when installing new stuff, but most of the things I need access to won't fit there, and to access that other stuff I have to right-click once to bring up yet another hidden fucking bar (totally redundant step that just complicates stuff and trips up inexperienced users) and click an obscurely designed icon in the right corner to get an absolute fucking mess of icons thrown right in my face which scrolls HORIZONTALLY of all things. Jesus fucking wept! Try find ANYthing in less than 30 seconds on that screen with 150+ programs installed...

From the desktop or if you have a program open, hit the windows key, and type the first few letters of what you want.

Example: Windows key->warc->list of icons for warcraft 3 and world of warcraft

or: Win key->pai->enter->MS paint opens

 

[Blazkowicz]

That's like saying you never needed a menu because you can always go to C:\Program Files.
(or d:\games). Which is maybe what I will do if I find myself before a Windows 8 machine one day - I suppose Win+E or Win+R and type %programfiles% will still work.

I remember that in win9x I would mostly run the games that way.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Yes! Absolutely! ...But it's not just the start menu of course. You're being deliberately obtuse by focusing purely on the start button

-snip multiple paragraphs about the Start menu versus Start screen

And you prove my point exactly. More than half of your post is going on about the Start screen versus the Start menu.

Then there's all the other metro bullshit, like when you want to search for some stuff you HAVE to do that on a totally blank (in my case green) screen, cut off from your normal windows desktop where you may have a list of the stuff you want to search for or other reference material, for example. Totally bogus, doesn't add anything, all it does is annoy and cause hindrances.

Eh? there's multiple ways to search for things or run things that don't require you to go into the Start screen. And again if searching on the start screen bugs you so much (you're still ranting about it) just get rid of it and put in any start menu you want.

All of the new UI stuff in win8 was designed by brain damaged monkeys. It's so fucking BAD, and it doesn't work well at all. Just to log in I have to press a key to remove that blasted image of seattle that appears whenever I boot up my box (which I don't want and never asked for, and don't seem able to turn off) and wait for the image to scroll all the way up. I can't simply start typing; nothing registers until the image is COMPLETELY GONE. Then I can log in, wait for the fucking start screen to appear (which I don't want to see), then I have to press enter one more time so I can start using my PC.

You must have a really slow computer if it takes more than a fraction of a second for that to happen. Even my dog ass slow first gen Atom system takes less than a fraction of a second before I can start putting in my password.

What substantial improvements precisely are we talking about? I've noticed nothing off-hand really. There's under the hood stuff with security, better SSD support, things like that. Nothing that registers during normal useage.

To name a few things that I use daily. Windows Explorer is much improved. Windows Task Manager (orders of magnitude better than anything previous). File copy operations, whether intiated via Windows Explorer or not. Logging into wireless networks, especially after waking from sleep where the slowness for Win7 is truly agonizing, but it's a vast improvement over Win7 no matter the situation. Win-X for quick access to many features I use regularly. Overall responsiveness of the system is faster than Win7 and Win7 was already decently fast. Lower system resource usage compared to Win7. For me, the Windows Start screen is significantly better and FASTER than the Windows Start menu, but that isn't an improvement for others. Yada yada yada.

My sincere apologies to you if I seem overly hostile or rude in this post; it's not you

No worries, if I took it as being hostile towards me (I didn't) it wouldn't bug me as I have a pretty thick skin.

The only complaint I have about Win8 after using it for 6 months now is that the shutdown/restart/logoff dialog is hidden in the sidebar under settings. And even that is minimal considering that...

1. Anything that requires a restart will pop up a prompt to restart the machine.

2. Power button can be configured to either put the machine to sleep/hibernate or initiate a shutdown. The power button on my desktop is configured to initiate a shutdown, the power button on my tablet is configured to put the tablet into sleep mode.

And no matter how you configure the power button on your computer a long press will always shut down the system (useful if something locks up for any reason). don't do this if you have a file operation in progress as it isn't a system initiated shutdown but a forced hardware shutdown.

Other than first putting Win8 on my machine, I honestly have never had to use the shutdown/reset/sleep option in Windows except on my tablet if I want to completely shut it down.

Regards,
SB

 

[Davros]

Even my dog ass slow first gen Atom system takes less than a fraction of a second before I can start putting in my password.

so how do you enter the bios or start in safemode if you in windows in a fraction of a second ?

 

[V3]

My problem with Win 8, is still the fact that Metro (or whatever it is called now) is its own environment with its own software. It has its own IE that is different from desktop IE.

Why is this ? For tablet ? Security ? I really hated this about Win 8. Did they fix this for 8.1 ?

 

[Blazkowicz]

No they won't fix it, it's done on purpose. It really is a kind of contained, second environment, like a bunch of java applets if you wish. There are security benefits, it's all sandboxed managed code (the reason why the minimum CPU is a late Pentium 4 with NX bit)

Is it annoying?, yes. Not the first kind of different apps. On a Windows 8 system you can have those kind of apps, from slow and generic to fast and specific (very roughly) :
html + javascript (any recent web browser) > flash > java > Metro apps > desktop apps.

Also why some geeks say "no, Android isn't linux!" : Android uses the linux kernel but is built on a renamed java virtual machine so it's all a different environment than desktop linux. So it's similar to Metro/RT which is on top of the usual Windows kernel but unrelated to the win32 environment.
An Android/Ubuntu hybrid could be a similar OS to Windows 8 x86, with two separate environments.

 

[Malo]

so how do you enter the bios or start in safemode if you in windows in a fraction of a second ?

He's referring to the opening screen of Windows 8 which slides away to the password screen once you stroke the screen or press a button/mouse.