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Windows 8 (and 8.1)

What's your opinion?

  • Total voters
    28
Here's something I just noticed about the default Metro Windows 8 Start screen...

3583.image_5F00_78ACA139.png


Where's Documents or Recent documents? - which is a productivity thing and something we might use a lot. "Documents" or "My Documents" has been on the Start menu ever since Win 95, and now it seems to have gone. I'm thinking of someone who might have been using Windows for office productivity, buys a new Win 8.1 PC, they can find Music and Photos but is wondering where Documents is, and might ask, "What's this 'SkyDrive' thing all about?"

For the brief time I used Win 8, I installed Classic Shell because I couldn't stand the sight of Metro, and seemed very clunky and childish on a 90inch projection screen running at 1024x768 IMO, reminded me of Fisher-Price. :D
 
richmatthews76 said:
I was trying not to show my age to much. As this was started as a Microsoft post. Allot of folks forget, the early Apple, Tandy(NOW.! try doing a document on this baby.... Lol... Just getting the margins set??). And yes many forget IBM had Allot to do with the start of Microsoft. I LOVED my data cards.... Lol!!! My dot matrix printers. I never got to mess much with the early Apples. We used apple Allot for publishing as early Microsoft could not handle it.
Click to expand...

Heck, I had an Atari for years before my first apple 2e LOL. It used to take 30 minutes to save my data from one small data base on a cassette tape! LOL
 
mikedt said:
Here's something I just noticed about the default Metro Windows 8 Start screen...

3583.image_5F00_78ACA139.png


Where's Documents or Recent documents? - which is a productivity thing and something we might use a lot. "Documents" or "My Documents" has been on the Start menu ever since Win 95, and now it seems to have gone. I'm thinking of someone who might have been using Windows for office productivity, buys a new Win 8.1 PC, they can find Music and Photos but is wondering where Documents is, and might ask, "What's this 'SkyDrive' thing all about?"

For the brief time I used Win 8, I installed Classic Shell because I couldn't stand the sight of Metro, and seemed very clunky and childish on a 90inch projection screen running at 1024x768 IMO, reminded me of Fisher-Price. :D
Click to expand...

For that matter does anyone actually prefer the metro version of chrome or explorer? Is it really easier to drag and drop a window you're closing than just one click on a little x?

Imo they destroyed windows users interface in a pathetic fruitless effort to sell windows phones and tablets.
 
recDNA said:
For that matter does anyone actually prefer the metro version of chrome or explorer? Is it really easier to drag and drop a window you're closing than just one click on a little x?

Imo they destroyed windows users interface in a pathetic fruitless effort to sell windows phones and tablets.
Click to expand...

I believe it was an effort to try and unify and how the different versions of Windows worked. But what might work well on a phone or tablet, doesn't work so well on a large screen. If the predictions and leaks are correct, a Start menu and windowed Metro apps are coming in 8.2, i.e. Microsoft is back-pedalling.

They tried it before, desktop Windows had a Start button and menu and so did Windows CE running on a PDA. Trouble on a PDA screen it was really tiny and fiddly, and you had to use a stylus.
 
Phone ui is fine on phones. I don't like windows phones because of a shortage of good apps though. If they want to sell more windows phones they should work on app development rather than ruining the desktop version of windows.
 
recDNA said:
Too much hassle finding drivers in Linux. I have one windows 8 laptop and 8.1 smartbook. I also have a windows 7 desktop and a windows vista desktop. Windows 7 rules but I prefer Vista to 8.x. I can't think of a single thing about windows 8.x that I like. Nada, nothing. I can't imagine any big business using it. Windows me redux imo.
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I haven't had much of a problem with Linux drivers in years.

Since Ubuntu 08.04, in fact, it's been pretty much boot-and-go for me and the myriad of machines I have used since then.

Vista was not nearly the debacle that ME was, but it was still a transitional product.

But then, nearly every Microsoft OS is a transitional product...

I am running Win 8.0 on my laptop alongside Mint 15. It is okay. I do have a touchscreen, which helps a bit, but the main menu thing is kind of a mess-- half the icons that show on boot are worthless to me; on my Toshiba, they don't even show Windows Media Player in the list (and I can't be bothered to learn how to add it); and more often than not, I just hit the icon for the desktop and go from there.

Sadly, I was trained to use the Search function to get to my programs by Ubuntu's Unity interface (before I ditched Ubuntu), so the big difference with Win 8 is going SE on the desktop instead of NW.

I won't switch back to Windows as my primary OS again until it becomes 1. Reasonably priced and 2. Has multiple desktops.

The odds of the first happening are pretty much nil, and the second... well, that would be a bit of a paradigm shift for them.
 
I use Windows 8.1 and really, I am never in the modern UI so I just use the desktop. It works just fine for me and I don't think there's a reason so many people were complaining about the UI.
 
Too late to save them?:

Windows 9 coming in 2015, will try its hardest to distance itself from the Windows 8 train wreck

To distance itself from the Windows 8 snafu, Microsoft’s next major update — Threshold — will reportedly skip Windows 8.2 and jump straight to Windows 9. Windows 9 is expected to arrive in April 2015, with internal sources saying that Windows 9 will make good on many of the Windows 8 features that caused such cruel and unusual distress to Desktop users. The Start menu is expected to make its illustrious return, and you should be able to run Metro apps on the Desktop in windows. Microsoft is still on schedule to release Windows Phone 8.1 and a service/feature pack for Windows 8.1 at the Build conference in April.
 
I use windows 7 & ubuntu on a dual boot, tried windows 8 & 8.1 & absolutely hate them.
will continue using windows 7 for all the games i have, but after using ubuntu i will never go back to a current version of windows again. Linux is inherently more secure than windows & with ubuntu being so easy to use anyone putting up with windows & its costs must have more money than sense. I must say a big thanks to microsoft for bringing out windows 8 as i would never have tried linux otherwise & missed out on a better OS
 
If you're coming from Windows I highly recommend Linux Mint. It has the classic start menu and just an overall polished look.
 
jmcook79 said:
If you're coming from Windows I highly recommend Linux Mint. It has the classic start menu and just an overall polished look.
Click to expand...

I have tried both Mint & Zorin & agree they are both very like Windows in appearence, but weather it is just me or not i did find they were quirky/ unstable once quite a few things are installed.
I found a better option to be Ubuntu with the xfce desktop installed making it look like Xubuntu but with the office etc of Ubuntu installed.
Once this is done you have the option to customize the desktop to look like windows if you like.
http://askubuntu.com/questions/292639/how-to-make-latest-ubuntu-look-like-windows-7
 
I have been using windows since version 2 (in at 286). My first pc was 386sx25mhz with huge 80mb harddrive and win 3.1 :p Since then I liked win2000 and win7. win98 was terrible, vista was awful and now I have win8.1 in my zenbook. Dont like titles at all and im using my laptop as a desktop mode on everytime. Win8.1 is stable but it sure has problems with habing drivers and working with accessories. After the update from 8 to 8.1, I lost some bt drivers and cannot send files from my note10.1 to pc or vice versa. I have no idea what is the problem, it will be connected for a second or two and then my computer says that my note 10.1 is offline. I should check it sometimes when I have time to look at it - or more like, when im interested in solving the problem. But if it had been possible, I would have chosen win7 instead of win8.
 
mrex said:
After the update from 8 to 8.1, I lost some bt drivers and cannot send files from my note10.1 to pc or vice versa.
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Which Zenbook do you have? I recall one of the first things I needed to do after the 8>8.1 update was re-install BT drivers.
 
The one thing I like about 8.1 is the email app. Still no way to access from desktop right? I like it because I can post pictures into body of emails. My work email doesn't allow that from owa. You have to be at work in Outlook to have that functionality. Now I have it at home and it works in all my emails. It's a big advantage because some people won't open attachments
 
lunatic59 said:
Which Zenbook do you have? I recall one of the first things I needed to do after the 8>8.1 update was re-install BT drivers.
Click to expand...

u500vz

All other bt devices work, but not my Note. Maybe I should just try to re-install drivers...
 
Did you try forgetting the pairing on both the Zenbook and the note and then re-pairing them after the update?
 
lunatic59 said:
Did you try forgetting the pairing on both the Zenbook and the note and then re-pairing them after the update?
Click to expand...

Nope, removed and repaired them. Pairing goes well. But there is something problem with the newest driver.

I get an error message when updated:
win81bterror.jpg

I removed drivers, then installed them. Tried fix-installation. All of them several times. No, help - the same error message after these drivers:
Version V3.1.1309.0390 (2013.10.11)
https://www.asus.com/Notebooks_Ultrabooks/ASUS_ZENBOOK_Touch_U500VZ/#support



Now I removed drivers, restarted the win8.1 and let the drivers be as they are. (And no error messages, but no connection with Note "not connected" and cannot send files via bt.) So this is the state now.
oldbtdrivers.jpg
 
@mrex,

I checked the driver version for your Zenbook with mine (UX31A) and it looks like we have the same dirvers. After updating to 8.1, I downloaded the Intel Driver pack from the Asus support page and installed them and I'm able to pair my bluetooth devices, including the N4, so we might need to look at your N7 for the problem.

I hate to suggest a factory reset, but we may eventually get there. First I'd try booting into recovery and clearing the caches.
 
lunatic59 said:
@mrex,

I checked the driver version for your Zenbook with mine (UX31A) and it looks like we have the same dirvers. After updating to 8.1, I downloaded the Intel Driver pack from the Asus support page and installed them and I'm able to pair my bluetooth devices, including the N4, so we might need to look at your N7 for the problem.

I hate to suggest a factory reset, but we may eventually get there. First I'd try booting into recovery and clearing the caches.
Click to expand...

Thanks, I tried all possible thing I could do and finally got a solution:
I installed newest VGA drivers for Intel HD4000 and now the error message is gone, but got another problem :D

No I cannot pair my N8000 with my computer. My computer doesn't find N8000 - my N8000 finds my computer. Aaaargh! Well, another thing to fix. Earlier one took only 10 hours to fix it and tried every single thing I found from internet from scanning with sfc to safe mode.

At first I need to try some other BT devices, but not now - Im full of win8.1 and need a break from it!

Edit. (another day and multiverse): And the problem is magically gone. I paired my Jabra Halo2 with my U500VZ and after that I was able to pair my N8000. Wow, now I have seen all!
 
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