Windows 8 - my verdict. - Page 5

For instance, this website implies if I buy a laptop without Win8 Pro, I need to pay $70 for WMC:

Pay for WMC

That's a deal breaker, when I can get a laptop now with win7 and free WMC.

If you want WMC on Windows 8, you need Windows 8 Pro (plus the WMC pack). Virtually every version of Windows 7 includes WMC.

For people who like a familiar interface, yes, it's needed. I'm old school power-user, what can I say Heck, my Desktop has looked the same ever since Windows 98. I'm weird like that!

But I added that screenshot just to show that there is nothing to fear with Win 8 in terms of power-users and those who want to stick with a familiar face and work environment. This was my biggest fear too, hence the reason I just want to ensure to those on the fence about Win 8. Like I said, you can use Win 8 just like Win7 (XP). I think everyone (media/TV ads, etc) is focusing on the new Metro stuff and ignoring the core Windows interface. Which IMO has been causing the most confusion and concern. I was one of those people. I thought I would be stuck in Metro and learning a whole new way of doing things. I was very wrong.

I am very glad I went with Win 8 instead of Win 7 for my new laptop. Now I have the best of both worlds.

That's my personal take on it...
Edited by TeddyP - 11/4/12 at 6:07pm

For those who like keyboard shortcuts

http://www.winbeta.org/guides/comprehensive-list-windows-8-keyboard-shortcuts

I'll post my current desktop. I have a 3-monitor setup. I'm only going to post my primary and secondary as the tertiary display only has different wallpaper and taskbar items.

My primary monitor is a vertical portrait display:


this is when I move the start screen to the secondary display:

Take down the picture of my girlfriend now! :ReallyAngryFace:

Oh, my bad. I purposefully did not buy a a keyboard with a button I can accidently hit and shutdown my PC...
Edited by cybrsage - 11/6/12 at 12:44pm

I hate to break it to ya what she's been doing behind your back...

Yup, no need to fear win8, its easy enough to make it behave like win7.

Because win8 has updates to the core OS, why wouldn't you use it on a new machine? The question is whether its worth money to upgrade existing machine.
Edited by jeffkro - 11/5/12 at 6:00am

The power button on computers hasn't killed the power directly in more than a decade. Any system that can run Windows 8 will send a shutdown command to the OS rather than cutting the power, and Windows has a preference for what this button does. (you can have it sleep or hibernate the machine instead)

And yes, closing the lid on a laptop does put it into standby, which is what the majority of laptop users do. With the exception of system updates, there's basically no reason to shut down or restart a computer in 2012.
Most keyboards have it in the top right corner, away from the other keys, or require a combination such as Fn+Esc or Fn+F12 as is most common. By default, a lot of them send a sleep command rather than shutdown.

I don't know why the idea seems so shocking to you. I have an old Microsoft keyboard here that must be about 15 years old that has a power/sleep button on it.

You can create a button on the taskbar to shut down the computer. That's only one click to shut down! Just create a shortcut with the command "C:\Windows\System32\shutdown.exe /p" and pin it to the taskbar.

Has anyone noticed a difference with WMC in Win8 as opposed to Win7, even minor things like there was going from Vista to Win7? For my HTPC pretty much all I do is WMC and Chrome, so I'm not seeing a big reason to upgrade from Win7. I seldom shutdown or reboot, so the faster times are not much of a factor.

For at least the following reasons:

1) Neither I nor my wife have time to learn another OS.

2) I have to buy a WMC add on for $80, or I have to get the "pro" version of win8, which may or may not come with a laptop I buy from a place like Costco.

3) I read through this entire article of the 30 best features of Windows8:

30 Best features of Win8

I thought maybe 3 were applicable to me or I cared about. 27 were not applicable.

4) Why do I want an OS where I immediately have to download and install a program to get the OS to work properly for my purposes?

5) Win7 is going to continue to be supported for the near future.

Personally, I'm going to go out and buy a laptop this weekend WITHOUT win8. I need WMC functionality and don't want to pay for it, I don't want a tablet interface, and I don't want to have update the OS that I just bought to get it to work the way I want it to work.

Thanks for the link to the article.

The learning curve isn't that steep. You'll spend more time setting up a new computer just setting it up than you will learning Win8. Or at least that was my experience doing an upgrade.

Well spoken! I've looked through the same list, and struggle to find 3 of any importance.

Meh. I decided to give the upgrade a shot yesterday. Had purchased a copy of Win8 Pro for $15, and received a free license key for WMP.

Upgrade went without a hitch. Installed ClassicShell as StartIsBack is still in beta. Computer boots to the desktop, bypassing Metro. Start button is back. I even put the classic Win7 wallpaper back on.

So I basically have Windows 7 again, but with:

1. Faster boot and application times.
2. Native ISO and VHD support
3. Native USB3 support
4. Access to Windows apps (if I ever desire to use them)
5. Sandboxed instances of IE10
6. Much improved Task Manager
7. True copy/paste and cut/paste times
8. Taskbars on all 3 of my monitors, different wallpapers on different monitors

Apparently security is even better, as the Win8 code makes it much more difficult to access the NT kernel for exploits.

I guess this seems more like Windows 7 SP2 to me, rather than Windows 8.

Nice. I installed Win8 on a separate partition, but haven't played with it much. I'd be down with faster start times, especially for the HTPC.

the new task manager is amazing. it allowed me to dump a bunch of utilities. you even know exactly how many megabytes each app is pulling over the network and Internet. you know exactly what executable is instead of a generic filename.exe. I didn't know about how good the ISO virtual drive support was in Windows 8 so I accidentally installed a third-party one. Now, the third-party one (Virtual CloneDrive) is kind of redundant.

Skydrive integration with the first and third party apps is fantastic. Here's a vid I made pulling images from deviantART:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ns_UBe35qik
I've underused Skydrive even though I have 25 GB of space. It's because in some ways, Dropbox is easier (and because I kind of grew up on Dropbox). I had to watch some video tutorials on how to do things in Skydrive which seems really unnecessary. But now that I have a handle on how to share folders properly, things are great.

With the free software in the Windows Store, it blunted what I paid for the upgrade.

The synchronized account feature is a godsend for setting up multiple PCs. Even your wallpapers are synced. So I didn't have to go to each new PC to show file extensions or show hidden files or to show delete confirmation.

Its a 3meg app that takes 30 seconds to install

I installed it on a SSD and boot times are ridiculously fast. I don't think it takes 15 seconds to get to the main screen. I haven't played with it much, but it does look interesting. It's just going to take a while to get used to the new layout. My primary concern is usability. I'm not all that concerned with the extra features in Win 8 vs. Win 7. I probably haven't used any of the features added by either Vista or Win 7 vs. XP.

I installed Windows 8 and a new SSD drive in my three year old laptop.

Before the thing was slow now it boots and loads applications like Office in no time, the laptop is 100% quicker doing just about anything.

Well worth the $39. Added benefit there is already a ton of free apps in the store.

A lot of that is just the SSD. On my main machine running Vista adding the SSD not only helped the time to get to the desktop from boot, but once the desktop appeared I could load Outlook (with a huge PST file), Chrome and Windows Mail Live immediately, and they would load practically instantly even while the other start up programs were still loading.

Moving to Win8 made things even faster. Now the main delay in booting on my older system is just waiting for the bios to process. That takes much longer than what it takes Windows to launch once that process has started.

More than 90% of any performance improvement you're going to see is due to the SSD.

I haven't had a chance to play with Win8, because I'm so busy ripping out hard drives and putting SSDs into client computers, and my own. ;-)

Last client machine I worked on has Win 7 and took over 3 minutes to get to even see the desktop. This machine had a slug of hardware attached to it via USB and the like, and was also running Norton and a ton of programs that were loaded during boot.

Put in a RAID array of 2 512 GB SSDs (stripe set), and it now boots into a idle desktop (nothing noticeable running in the background) in less than 10 seconds after POST.

I went though the BIOS setup and minimized unused devices to speed POST, otherwise POST would take longer than the OS takes to boot.

I never touched Win7 other than to optimize its interface with the SSD. Yes, this is the identical same Win7 system, not a clean install.

I always see similar improvements with XP as well.

My primary laptop has a SSD hard drive to speed boot and to make the battery last longer (about 50%) .

Yes I realize the SSD is going to give me the biggest speed increase, but Windows 8 does just seem to pop when doing tasks.

yes, SSD is the biggest difference maker in the feel of a system.

But Windows 8 with a HDD is amazingly fast. Windows 7 gets me to a desktop with a HDD decently quick but then it spends the next couple of minutes loading in processes while the hard drive thrashes. Windows XP? man, let me make breakfast while that fully loads in.

Windows 8 will get you to a done desktop much faster.

That remains for me to see.

When the software phase of the boot takes about the same time or less time than POST, which is not uncommon with a SSD, you just can't make the machine boot much faster.

Do the arithmetic. A machine that spends 10 seconds in POST can't POST and boot in less than 10 seconds! When you get software boot down to 10 seconds, it takes an awful lot to improve on that.

Besides fast boots after a clean install are deceptive. Install the usual run of software over a period of months and years, much of which modifies the system, and boot times on a HDD go all to blazes.

Even XP runs relatively fast after a clean install. And, it keeps on running fast if you install it on a SSD.

My system boots within 10 seconds, POST is around 5. I also install no software over the years to crap up the system. At all. I have less than a dozen core programs I use and nothing else. As for XP HA, it definitely doesn't keep running fast on a SSD as it doesn't have a clue about TRIM. Win 8 is FAST. Stupid fast. Everything has been pushed up and tweaked for speed.

that's the only time Windows XP is fast. when there's nothing installed. but as an OS with functionality and things installed, it's really slow. that's why people spent so much time trying to keep windows xp lean.

I've loaded down my Windows 8 with all the programs as in Windows 7 (minus some utilities that are now redundant) and it's definitely faster.

I'd say you are quite unique then. It's a known fact that a fresh install of any version of Windows (ok, maybe except Vista!) will be very fast for the first few weeks. Start adding the software, fragmentation kicks in (on normal HD's at least), registry starts growing, and you will see a noticable slowdown. Besides, it's all about perception. If you get the user to the logon screen as fast as possible, they think the PC has finished booting. Watch that disk continue thrashing away for a good 30-60s afterwards and you'll see everything is still loading in the background.

Anyway, 8 maybe fast at booting, but who reboots their system all the time? Not many I bet, and there's only so many ways you can dress up a turkey. 'Fast' does not mean 'great'. I rebuilt my main PC 6 months ago on an SATAIII SSD (Windows 7 x64), and it's quite a lot slower now than it was originally I'm sure, but I still think 7 is the best O/S MS have made so far by a long way.

Win 8 could have been so much more if the entire OS hadn't been crippled by the design requirement to look the same on a tablet. As it is, the Metro/ModernUI parts are just a giant phone. The new Metro style apps Microsoft is so proud of are giant fullscreen apps with lots of wasted space, limited support for non-touch, and are mostly just some HTML+Javascript code running in a shell instead of a browser.

 

There is no technical reason why these have to be fullscreen, or why Windows can't adapt itself when it detects a non-touch device (such as hundreds of millions of pc's). Instead of the awful, unintuitive charms bar and fullscreen apps, we could have had an elegant OS where all kinds of apps are 1st class citizens. This would take care of nearly every complaint about Win 8.

 

Microsoft should have spent some time fixing the half baked parts in the OS - why for instance is the network settings and file picker Metro and still shown in the desktop? Settings in general are strewn all over the place. Logout and shutdown are in 2 different places and impossible to discover. The volume OSD is on the top upper left for the single reason that that's where WP7 phones have a volume key - how stupid is that ?!!

 

This is not an OS for traditional pc's. Yes they made it faster, made some minor tweaks to file manager etc. But the primary focus is touch devices and the goal was to make an OS to power tablets, which MS didn't have till now.