Windows 8 Dev build

Lol my work is moving everyone onto Windows Server 2012 Terminal Server for their thin clients next week -> Metro interface.
Is gonna be pretty hilarious watching people try to work out how to deal with it.

Win8.1 is a slightly less retarded version but its still got a severe disability.

Agree with Grall on the upgrade, couldn't for the life of me find any upgrade to win8.1 type thing in the Windows store, googled for it & it was only when I ran the hardware compatibility app that I found something offering to upgrade, which then disappeared & I had 0 feedback on progress other than seeing a bunch of data downloading via taskmanager/resource monitor until after it had downloaded the 3GB & started installing.

Utterly incompetent nonsense that should not have left Alpha.
 
For me the update showed up in the store, and I just started it from there. It told me the size, that it would first download and I could keep working, and the progress bar worked fine.
 
Didn't tell me NOTHING about how much it would download, what speed it was downloading at etc, only showed a teensy-tiny two pixel high progress bar on an otherwise 99% white screen. Wow, awesome use of a high-res widescreen display Microsoft... :rolleyes:

Btw. IE has started autocorrecting shit I type. I don't know how to turn that off! Can anyone help, please. :( It's capitalizing stuff I don't want capitalized and so on...
 
Grall said:
Didn't tell me NOTHING about how much it would download, what speed it was downloading at etc, only showed a teensy-tiny two pixel high progress bar on an otherwise 99% white screen. Wow, awesome use of a high-res widescreen display Microsoft... :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

I mostly had the same while downloading, but when selecting the download from the store it very clearly showed that it was 3.93 GB or something like that.

Btw. IE has started autocorrecting shit I type. I don't know how to turn that off! Can anyone help, please. :( It's capitalizing stuff I don't want capitalized and so on...
Click to expand...

You use IE? How quaint. ;) Chrome fan here ...

Which IE do you use? I'd imagine that the one in the store would follow your WinRT global settings, and the Desktop IE probably has its own preference setting in the regular menus.
 
Arwin said:
You use IE? How quaint. ;) Chrome fan here ...

Which IE do you use? I'd imagine that the one in the store would follow your WinRT global settings, and the Desktop IE probably has its own preference setting in the regular menus.
Click to expand...

Well for touchscreen usage I've not found a single alternative to IE that works well. The IE "Modern UI" version is actually very nice for quickly navigating and swapping between tabs etc. Chrome is all but useless on a 1080 11" screen on touchscreen only and Firefox Nightly has serious potential but still has a long way to go for general use.
 
zed said:
Does win 8.1 fix this
'click on my download directory' 1minute until anything is displayed! Seriously the dir contains a massive 178 items are in it
instead Im treated to this
downloads.png

the bar at the top creeps along, well sorta its related to the problem with win 8 when I search.
eg the bar races along to 50% full in 5 secs but that last 50% takes 5 minutes, the last couple of pixels take a minute to complete. Im looking at the screen willing it along. :)
Whoever at MS who has codded the progress bar algorithm needs to be put on something else.
Click to expand...

I have this same problem on my Windows 7 machine (which is very similarly specced, but a laptop, same RAM, i7, SSD, but a slower second HDD). I'm thinking it is either a certain number of files that cause this issue, or the anti-virus software (as I have very different anti-virus software at home vs at work). Though recently we changed from McAfee (which I've never liked) to ESET, and I can't remember if this improved. My Win8 downloads folder isn't nearly as big, but lighting fast on my Win8 PC.

Malo said:
Well for touchscreen usage I've not found a single alternative to IE that works well. The IE "Modern UI" version is actually very nice for quickly navigating and swapping between tabs etc. Chrome is all but useless on a 1080 11" screen on touchscreen only and Firefox Nightly has serious potential but still has a long way to go for general use.
Click to expand...

I understand. Our screen is 13,3" and 1366x768 res, and that just about keeps everything touchable, even regular Windows menus.
 
For me Windows 8.1 update was not showing in Windows Store till I loaded all recent updates to Windows 8. I admit, on my main PC Windows 7 is still the default option and will stay for some time, so my Windows 8 was at least 6 months 'old' (last time I loaded it before W8.1). Besides, I hate when something decides to update itself without my knowledge, so all auto updates are disabled on my systems :)

One or two more things which maybe are not an issues in themselves but a bit stupid (funny?) design decisions:
- downloading progress bar is linked with system checkup, compatibility and unpacking itself while still labelled 'Download progress'
- no requester asking you after downloading the whole file if you want to proceed with installation immediately (which all SP for previous Windows had before) leading to forced PC restart after it downloads (annoying)
- (after reboot) installation displays current % progress from 0% to 100% only to start again after yet another reboot from 0% to 100% and to make it even more funny, restarts 3rd time to do some other things from 0% to 100%!!! :rolleyes: Microsoft was never good with percentages, but I think they should know up front that upgrading process needs to be done in 3 steps and do 0-33, 34-66, 67-100 percent progression. It would better indicate to people how much time they really have on hands for other things before their computer updates itself ...
 
Arwin said:
You use IE? How quaint. ;) Chrome fan here ...
Click to expand...
Lol, yea I know... I just can't stand chrome, partly because I don't trust creepy uncle google any farther than I can throw him, and also because there's no way to change the default path of the webcache. Not that it matters now that my SSD is 480GB, but when it was just 60 it really was a big deal!

Which IE do you use? I'd imagine that the one in the store would follow your WinRT global settings, and the Desktop IE probably has its own preference setting in the regular menus.
Click to expand...
11, like most other win8.1 IE users I'd imagine... ;)

It seems this is a well known bug or omission in win8(.1), it shits its pants when you use more than the configured system language. Only known workaround I've been able to find so far is to delete or rename the four system files responsible for spellchecking, named MSSPELL* located in windows/system32/

...Unfortunately, windows is being a c*nt right now and refuses to let me rename the files. It claims I need permission from TrustedInstaller to proceed, and despite I'm logged in as administrator I'm unable to assign myself rights to the files in question. This really has me pretty worked up, as you might imagine!

Fucken microsoft! How dare they!

EDIT:
As it turns out, I'm not actually an administrator, despite being shown as such in the user accounts control panel applet (and having originally created the user as admin when first installing win8 a couple months ago), I'm really a standard user, which I found out when clicking the change account type option in said applet. Unfortunately I'm not allowed to change my type back to admin (as, apparently, MS thinks it would be bad if users could just elevate themselves to admin by themselves...)
 
Last edited by a moderator:
I'm thinking it is either a certain number of files that cause this issue, or the anti-virus software
Click to expand...
Its not antivirus since I have none except windows defender
It could be theres quite a few vids there ~50 but
1. other dirs have more and no issues
2. I always display as details

IIRC an old linux version had the same issue with largish dir's, though they fixed that
 
I'm not sure if this helps but you could check if your folder is set to contain "General items". It should be. Select folder's Properties - Customize - "Optimize this folder for" and make sure "General items" is selected. I've heard that settings the folder to contain Videos or Pictures may slow down Explorer's operations.

Bases on this post, some users have made the Explorer to work after by disabling the indexing.
 
thanks Miksu that looks like "General items" has done it, weird that it only takes time on the downloads dir and not the video's dir (that has more vids). Bad design anyways, even if its set to 'show me lots of info about the videos in this dir' it should first list the dir's contents.
This is a basic design principle, show the user something ASAP, afterwards refine this info
 
zed said:
thanks Miksu that looks like "General items" has done it, weird that it only takes time on the downloads dir and not the video's dir (that has more vids). Bad design anyways, even if its set to 'show me lots of info about the videos in this dir' it should first list the dir's contents.
This is a basic design principle, show the user something ASAP, afterwards refine this info
Click to expand...

The default video folder is set to automatically index and save the index, while the default download folder isn't. Reason it doesn't is because the contents of the download folder for most users will change frequently.

So what is happening is that everytime you went into it, it was going through any and all picture, video, or music files to determine resolution, playtime, bitrate, audio channels, etc. for possible display in explorer (since the user could at anytime switch to details view which may have a column enabled to display any of that info and more).

Switching it to general files just tells Windows to ignore any media file attributes, which means it should then only worry about the type (extension), date modified, and size of the file.

Regards,
SB
 
i realize now what its doing, but its still fails one of the most basic design principles, not giving the user info as soon as possible. In this case it should display the filenames, like a standard dir. then afterwards during those minutes file in the further details.
Even worse it displays plainly false information by saying 'this folder is empty' for minutes when in fact it contains over 100 items.

heres another thing I saw today, done another search on my harddisk for a file.
same thing the progress bar races to 50% full in 10secs the next 50% takes 10minutes.
heres a suggestion how they should do it, no doubt they log what user has searched for & where.
now each time record how long it took to search at that location. ~eg 10minutes and use that as a basis to do the progress bar on nexttime as a ballpark figure.

also saw this today, with the new startscreen (windows key) say I start a program, it starts ... blah blah ..
then I press windows key again .. it displays the startscreen from the original position, it should display from the previous position..
I remember browsers used to do this (IIRC apples IOS browser still does) eg you were down halfway in a page click a link and then press backspace and you'll will get put at the top of the page again, not halfway down like they should
 
What really fscks with me when it comes to searches and windows, is how the hell it can take so long to find anything (IF! it even finds anything), when there's a resource-hogging god damn service that supposedly does nothing but hog CPU and disk space by indexing every god damn thing stored on the computer for the purpose of speeding up searches.

I just friggin don't get it. I have searched - many times! - for things I know is there somewhere and not found jack shit. Then later, I've recalled where on which drive whatever I was looking for was squirreled away, and sure enough. There it was. But you couldn't fucking find it using windows' own search if your life depended on it.

Incredible.
 
8.1 service pack changes system requirements so some people on win8 cant upgrade to 8.1
"While the Core 2 chips supported CMPXCHG16b, the motherboard itself did not. No Windows 8.1 for him -- or for this other Windows 8 user with an Intel DP35DP
Now, Microsoft can't support previous-gen processors in perpetuity, but a service pack seems like an odd place to pull the rug out from underneath owners of older machines"
 
It's a pretty big upgrade though, for sure.

There are a few things that could just be 'get used to new upgrades' - most of the stuff I was caught out by initially was that the update disabled the option 'allow non-digitally signed drivers' ... I had to reenable that again in order to use some of the legacy stuff (or in my case also a monitor driver hack to make 3D Vision work)
 
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