Interesting Windows 8 Report - Page 2

I actually think it's the MS marketing department who owe a lot to the (so far) consumer/corporate flop that Windows 8 is. They hold a huge amount of power within MS, and have the ability to make or break a product. They can even push the O/S development in a certain direction if they feel it will sell more copies. Sure, the Windows 8 adverts were everywhere in the first 2-3 months of release, but now I don't see many at all. It became very obvious that, in the marketing eyes departments, Windows 8 was all about tablets, or the Surface/Surface Pro. They only ever concentrated on the Metro UI (a consumption interface), aimed fairly and squarely at the Apple/Andoid tablet market. 8 may have the desktop (productivity) interface buried away in there on the desktop/Surface Pro versions, but it was never, ever highlighted upon, and this is what people were used to. Many looking at Windows 8 would probably have thought, how am I going to run all my desktop apps? It's changed so much in this 'new interface' world that people would actually be turned off 8 before even looking at it.

There's still no killer Metro app, the MS Office team conceded they couldn't make a native Metro version, but just included some lame 'touch' mode that spaces out the menu's a bit. Simply put, the world is not ready for touch on the desktop, or it might never be until there's a radical re-invention of the PC. Metro is a confusing mess with a keyboard/mouse, no matter what MS say. I agree there are a lot of very good improvements in 8 under the hood, but this one decision to not give people the choice between Metro and the legacy desktop/start button has pretty much killed any chance of the product now being a commercial success. Four months in, and the damage is done.

Word is though, MS are preparing a second push to try and get the world to understand what Windows 8 is all about, but I think it's now too late. Take up is way below even what Vista was at this point of it's life. Corporates are staying away from it entirely, and consumers are so confused they just want their desktop/start button combo, and this is why Windows 7 will be here for a very, very long time. It is interesting though that MS have now said there's not going to be a Windows 7 SP2. I know the product is very stable, and maybe doesn't even need an SP2, but have you tried installing all the patches from a fresh build? It's a painful experience.

I read a lot of people stating that Windows8 boots up quicker than Win7 but that is not my experience. I have just finished setting up a new Windows8 laptop for my father in law and found that the boot up time is about double that on my old Win7 Athlon PC.

I found setting up Win8 to be a time consuming and frustrating experience, the inconsistant operation of the Metro UI is confusing when some apps quit to Metro but some apps quit to the desktop. I had to install a third party email app as the inbuilt mail app just wouldn't play nice. Another thing I hated, why can't you shutdown the PC from within Metro? Having to go to the desktop to shutdown whilst is not difficult should not be necessary. And why do I have to bring up a list of all the installed apps and scroll to the end of the list to find control panel.

The weird thing is I bet you could re-release windows7, call it windows9 and anyone not used to windows7 would think it was an upgrade.

David
Edited by DavidT99 - 3/3/13 at 8:53am

My experience with installing Win8 on five computers over Christmas break is that it does boot faster than Win7.

If you want an app to shut down in Desktop instead of Metro then you need to associate the file type with a desktop app... .jpg needs to be associated with Picture and Photo View as an example.

To shut down from Metro you go to the upper or lower right (Charm Bar) and click Settings then Power.

How crazy is that! Why not just have a shutdown button on the Metro screen just like on the desktop?

I guess that at least is one use for the charm bar, I can't think of any others.

David

People complained that to turn off the computer you had to hit Start when you are actually wanting to stop. Now they moved it to Settings...

This has been my experience also on the half dozen or so new laptops I've setup. Boot times were painfully slow, around a minute or longer & these were mostly Core i3/i5 systems with little bloatware & most unnecessary programs disabled from starting up through msconfig. I did install Classic Shell on these computers, but the boot time before & after installing it seemed pretty similar.

What's weird is I installed the Consumer Preview on an old desktop I have (was an Athlon 64 1.8ghz & 2gb ram, I've since upgraded it) & the boot times were very fast. Does anyone have an OEM Win 8 PC that boots fast? Does it need to be rebooted so many times before the boot times speed up?

I have two Yoga 13 systems that came with 8, both were lightning fast to boot the first time and haven't slowed down in the 2.5 months I've had them. My XPS 15 came with 7, I installed 8 Pro and the boot times are so fast I was amazed - faster than the Yoga systems, but I'm sure that's because of the additional drivers needed to support the touchscreen input are slowing them down a bit. I also have two i3 530 systems (H55M Pro and DH55TC, neither of which support Windows 8) that run 8, and other than needing to install a video card to get bitstreaming working (Intel dropped 1st gen support so no bitstreaming goodness for me anymore) they also boot very fast, much faster than 7 did.

I'm thinking it's a combination of hardware and drivers that are causing some systems to be slower, while other systems are faster. Since my i3 systems aren't supported, I had to find some drivers from Realtek and VIA to get the onboard audio and NIC working (the built-in Windows 8 drivers didn't work at all) - perhaps finding and using manufacturer drivers will help reduce your boot times?

Windows Key + X brings up the most common commands/system apps. There are a ton of shortcut keys for 8, do a bit of googling and you should find a nice PDF with all of them.

I think it's pretty odd that they removed a single power button, but from what I've read, Microsoft believes that Windows 8/RT doesn't need to shut down, which is why the default power option when you press the button/close the lid is sleep. If you want to shut down, you can reconfigure the power options so that you can press the power button or close the lid, and the system will shut down. Or, as a workaround, you can create a shortcut that will call the -shutdown command. I did that on my computer that I use for my media server, so I can quickly shut it down if I need to.

From my experience with Win8, boot times are fast with EUFI. If EUFI compatibility is missing/broken, boot times are much longer. I can't say I've seen a significant difference in boot times between a clean Win8 and a clean Win7 running on the same system.

DavidT, Ctrl-Alt-Del always works. As for email, Mozilla's Thunderbird is still the best out there.

Not much faster. Actually if you have a SSD in the machine, it boots faster than 7.

Boot time on a bare Windows 7 PC is pretty fast with a SSD. It only gets bogged down when you start running lots of apps at startup. My Windows 8 PC boots insanely fast with a SATA III SSD, but it's also a pretty sparse setup. I still think Windows 8 has the edge on faster boot times, but that's really only important if you reboot your PC a lot. During initial installation it certainly speeds things up, but once you've got everything installed and configured it pretty much becomes a moot point. The real kicker is whether or not you can work as efficiently on a Win 8 platform vs. Windows 7. Given enough time and familiarity this may become possible. Until then, I'm still groping my way around the Metro UI trying to figure out where everything is. I really need to spend more time playing with it, but I just can't seem to get motivated enough to do it. I'm comfortable using Windows 7 and really have no overwhelming desire to learn a new OS at this point. Besides, my company is currently transitioning over to Windows 7 so I have no need to learn Windows 8 other than just for the sake of doing it. Someday, maybe. For the time being, I really could care less.

captain_video, boot time on any machine will be fast with a SSD. I found that regardless of the Operating System, the boot time will always be fast with a SSD compared to a Platter drive. Ubuntu 12.x, Win7 pro, Win8 pro all boot up about the same time span on the Acer a0532h netbook that I use. I am using the Crucial m4 64gb SSD in the netbook, and have maxed out the RAM to 2gb.

We found that taking my son's Toshiba Satellite to 16gb allowed Win8 to boot faster than it did with the 4gb that it came with. The price of SSD's are still kind of out of reach, to replace his platter drive with a 256gb or 512gb in it. May do it for his birthday in September.

The two things you only need to know with Win8. Windows key & D will bring you to the desktop, Windows key & X will bring up the context menu for the Quick links, Ctrl-Al-Del still brings up the screen for Task manager, Switch user, Lock, Shutdown, Sleep, Restart. Those are about the three basic things that you only need to know. Otherwise Win8 is like a Onion with dirt on the skin. Once you peel away the fugly Metro interface, it is nothing more than XP/Vista/7 for the desktop, just a few fixes to get to 8, but still the same.
Edited by gregzoll - 3/3/13 at 4:00pm

I just installed Win8 on an old Vista Ultimate machine which has been mainly used for Tivo Desktop to archive videos. I am really unimpressed with Win8. The Metro apps look so childish for lack of a better word. Especially the Mail app. Why do you need a full screen with giant font to compose an email. It seems like they style it for a phone screen and keep the same perspective for a PC. Then you can't even access it from the desktop. And why can't I access any other Metro apps from desktop. Had to download Mahjong and Solitaire from the store and also need to run from Metro. Using Start8 but you are stuck with Metro for some apps. Then the Start paage just fills up with all your apps like a phone. Can you make folders like on an iphone?

Not folders, but you can group them.

http://tweaks.com/windows/58183/how-to-organize-apps-and-create-groups-on-the-windows-8-start-screen/

Well, I actually LIKE Win 8. Windows 7 with added features and some slight changes.

I suggest 1st to take some time of consistent use then make an opinion. People hate change, yet adapt well.

Yeah I don't mind it at all - I don't use Metro in anyway so I just sit in the desktop all the time. That said, it's really no different than 7 - not in a bad way - not in a good way. Seeing as I got Win 8 for free - I'll reinstall it next time I reformat; but if I had to go back to 7 for some reason - I wouldn't mind either.

it's clearly not doing well, but I'm totally fine with W8. Classic shell solves almost every problem I have with it being all tablatastic. I put it in W7 mode and forgetta about it.

As far as corporate uses, my company (F500 company, almost 300,000 employees) still uses XP. We are in the process of upgrading to 7 though...FINALLY.

It would be interesting to know how many Windows8 licenses have been purchased that haven't come with a new PC and how many Windows7 licenses have been purchased since Windows8 was launched.

David

I bought the upgrade for $40 the day it was released. If it wasn't available at a reasonable price I would have definitely passed on it. I'd be interested to see how many people purchased it after the deal evaporated. Based on the fact that MS also offered it as a $15 upgrade for a lot of customers it would be interesting to know if MS is basing their sales on the number of copies/licenses sold or the actual dollar amount they took in. I would have thought the lower cost would have attracted more buyers.

Considering the volume of Windows licenses MS sells, they could easily drop the price to $40 or even less and still sell millions of copies. Considering Apple only has about a 10% market share (at least it was the last time I checked), they sell their current OS X for only $19.95.

So, Windows 8 supports region free disk drives and Bluray now?

No? Why the heck not

MS will never, ever release this specific information, and only they know the exact details. All they'll reveal is the 'total' number of licenses 'sold', but as a massive percentage of these could be to OEM's, you don't know whether these are true, activated installations, or just vapourware licenses that have not yet been shipped/purchased. I know which one I think...

I too think UEFI is the key to Windows 8's boot times, along with the extra kernel caching they now do. One of UEFI's main claims was improved boot times, and 8 takes advantage of this. If your mobo supports UEFI, 8 will use it by default without you even realising it, but older, non-UEFI systems will continue using MBR, which *should* be slower. Interestingly, Windows 7 fully supports UEFI, and boot times are very good if you configure your PC to use it before installing 7.

Honestly though, all this fuss about something being a few seconds faster to boot, how often (really) do you reboot your PC/laptop? Not many times I bet, and resuming from S3 is going to be no different between 7 and 8, but I'm guessing there is a chance resuming from S4 (hibernate) could be quicker on 8.

I'll add that I also like the copy/move dialog of Win8 better than anything before it.

Since MS is publicly traded they have to release sales information in their financial statements.

How does it compare to TeraCopy?

I've never used TeraCopy.

If you go by some of the arguments about Win7 and Win8 with Metro Start Screen people complain that they shouldn't have to install a 3rd party app to restore Win7 functionality when Start button replacement programs are mentioned. Using a third party copy program in Win7 to bring Win8 style functionality seems like a similar argument. I've never used a third party copy program, but do use Startisback.

Can you explain this further? How would you configure your pc to use before installing?

Please, anwser the question!