Windows 8 - my verdict. - Page 20

I wouldn't say a "touch enabled device makes Windows 8 shine"

I would say a touch enabled device is essential if you want it to be tolerably usable.

It's only to be expected: Win8 is designed with touch in mind, and without that it's horrid.

It's like saying most people can get along with Win7 but you should really be using a mouse. Well, duh.

The difference is that PC's had a mouse for so many years before Win7 it was virtually guaranteed no-one would be struggling with just a keyboard. And in any case, mice are dirt cheap.

By contrast, the vast legacy PC base doesn't have a touchscreen, lots of the upcoming PC's won't either, because touchscreens are anything but cheap - espescially as the world has become accustomed to larger screen sizes.

This whole fiasco could so easily have been avoided, if Win8 had included the option: operate in classic Windows or Metro modes. But Microsoft wanted to push their unified front end...

But perceptions are more important than reality, which Apple encouraged. The lack of corporate takeup for Vista is another case in point - XP worked well enough and Vista had a lot of teething pains so it was labeled as bad, then Win7 was good because it cleaned up everything perceived to be wrong with Vista. Blue will be no different.

Yup, I agree with that entirely.

The issues may have been mild in your view, but they were so in your face, it really did make your PC unusable. UAC was way too strict, ruining the whole experience of using your PC. So much so that I quickly went back to XP. Win 7 took UAC down a notch and worked much better. Win 8 on the other hand has too many usability issues to count, not just a few major annoyances like Vista. They have a lot more work to do to make Win 8 usable for the average mouse-using customer like most of us. If I wanted to use a keyboard for everything, I'd still have DOS.

I disagree and run 7 with the same level of UAC as Vista, my reasoning

• I don't install tons of programs, over 80% get installed right after Windows
• When installing programs, tons of freeware now has multiple "gotcha" crap to "deselect" already (e.g. Ask.com, bing, and Google toolbars)
• No matter what level of UAC you have, installing a program always takes quite a few mouse clicks for me (I never use "express" or "recommended")
• An extra 2 clicks was trivial, so I never disabled it (thought disabling it was trivial)
• The value was great whenever I was done setting up and just using the computer (i.e. Getting a UAC notification whilst not installing anything - good catch)

If you read between the lines of that MS 'interview', they have not acknowledged or denied anything. They make a big deal of 100m Windows 8 licenses 'sold', but she was obviously intensely briefed beforehand on what she could/couldn't say. MS therefore didn't really give anything away, but early preview releases of Blue suggest not that much has changed. Metro has been tweaked for sure (god it needed it), but there's no massive change of direction even if MS are supposed to have 'listened to customer feedback' (why didn't they do this during beta testing????).

Leaked builds have shown a start button back on the desktop, but all this does it take you to Metro again (ie still no start menu), and while you may be able to boot straight to the desktop, Blue still pulls you back into Metro at every opportunity it can. Unfounded rumours also suggest MS might now have made it impossible for 3rd party start button replacements to work, but we'll wait and see on that one.

MS are not going to change direction with 8, they just want to do enough to divert some of the scathing opinions and try to co-erse opinions back in their favour. 8 was always going to be a steep climb for MS, but I don't reckon they ever thought it was going to be this bad. It's all about damage limitation now. Roll out the press releases with lots of big stories about huge sales, lots of partners working on 'exciting' new things, how the app store is growing faster then competitors etc. Classic MS diversion tactics.

At the end of the day though, it's how this O/S is perceived by the public, and at the moment it isn't good. It's very difficult to come back from something like this (they couldn't do it with Vista), so 8.1 might just be something to try and smooth out the bumps until 9 is released, when they may get things right!

One trick that I've discovered is that you can unzip the freeware.exe file and you'll get the program exe file without the addon crap. Most of that stuff is added by the download site and they just package up the program's installer inside of their crapware installer.

This comes in handy with Shark007 and lets you just install the program and not deal with declining the toolbars.

Really? I'll have to check that out

So basically, major geeks packages the ask toolbar in with Shark's Codecs in exchange for hosting them?

Exactly. Same goes for most of the other hosting sites.

When you extract the .exe file you'll see another .exe file for the program and some other autorun types of files that you can ignore.

What are you using to extract an exe file? 7-Zip?

I do too. It's been a long time, but as I recall I couldn't do ANYTHING without a UAC popup in Vista. I couldn't even change my wallpaper without a UAC popup. This doesn't happen in Win 7, even with the same settings. I get the standard UAC popup for installs and first time runs, which is fine with me. But in Vista it was downright debilitating. I get the same feeling of powerlessness and frustration every time I try to do something in Win 8. It's not UAC per se, but all the extra hoops I have to jump through accomplish anything at all. Things that used to take one or two clicks in Win 7 now require charms and searching and hotkeys. It's very frustrating. Unfortunately, I don't foresee any of this changing in the next version. I expect them to add even more layers of crap to make it look like Win 7 but still act like Win 8. That may improve their PR, but will change nothing as far as how inefficient the UI is. I really hope I'm wrong, because I really would like a better OS than Win 7.

After it was mentioned I tried it using 7zip, works fine. Pretty easy if you allowed 7zip to install it's "context" addon. Just right click the exe, 7zip -> Open Archive
I've been wondering for a while why Java bundles the Ask toolbar, you'd think (according to their marketing schpeel during setup of how many devices run on Java) they'd afford to host the stuff w/o bloat

Perfect. Next time I will be extracting with 7-Zip first.

I have often wondered the same thing about Java..

I use 7-zip too.