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General discussion

Windows 8/8.1 The Rebirth of Vista the Unwanted one...

May 23, 2014 3:04AM PDT

I have recently did a non bias survey with people of all classes, ages, and knowledge from college students to techs and retired people with a college graduate in one of the University's. The conclusion I have come up with is that Win 8/8.1 is yet another form of Vista the Unwanted one...

Negativity:

Over 75% said that they did not like the right clicking.

Over 50% said they did not like the apps.

Over 100% said reminded them of apple OS from Original iPhone

35% mainly college students Said Might go back and down grade back to Win 7 easier to work with and less right clicking.

Positivity:

25% said they enjoyed the new graphics and games

15% said worked best with touch screen 2 in 1's and all in one pcs.


Over all Win 8/8.1 has inherited the stink from Vista the Unwanted Child.

please voice your opinion on this matter.


Thank you and God Bless

Discussion is locked

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I installed Classic Shell and moved to 8.x
May 23, 2014 5:54AM PDT

So far I find most don't know about the free Class Shell that corrects a rather big oversight.

And with that one app, I get to enjoy a more stable OS. If you don't want Windows 8, care to send your licenses to me?
Bob

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I think you've nailed it Bob
May 24, 2014 5:32AM PDT

Classic Shell makes Windows 8 a very good OS. I've been using 8 since the pre-release days, and once I discovered Classic Shell, I have no complaints.

Metro apps may be wonderful for some folks, but the ones I've tried are buggy, clunky (you still can't really resize them other than half screen), and have less function than their desktop counterparts. You also have to jump through new hoops if you want to uninstall one - you can't use the Control Panel any more for that. If MS would let other software writers contribute to their app store, that could change; but with the bureaucratic MS only approach, I doubt Metro apps will ever make it. It's very fortunate that we can do everything with desktop apps and avoid Metro stuff all together IMO.

Unfortunately, as you say Bob, most of the masses don't seem to know about Classic Shell and the like. It's such a shame that MS stubbornly refuses to give us the legacy Start menu. The rumors have it that come August they'll relent and give it us, but most folks have already decided they don't want Windows 8 by now. MS really shot themselves in the foot, and even with the management changes in the last year, they're too slow reconciling the mistake. Too bad.

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And I see I made a typo.
May 24, 2014 5:35AM PDT

Classic Shell does have Class.

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what you are seeking
May 23, 2014 8:33AM PDT

are the other threads on this subject already here.

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I would say
May 23, 2014 9:18AM PDT

I would say people who can get over the new Start screen replacement for the start menu (which has long been held as one of the most idiotic UI designs of all time) will find an OS that is actually quite good. The new metro/modern apps have yet to see their potential tapped. Maybe after Microsoft's previous efforts failed miserably, like ActiveDesktop with IE4 which was a massive security headache until it quietly went away around IE5.5 or Vista/7 Gadgets which just a more limited take on the same basic idea, finally we have something that is properly sandboxed. Metro/Modern apps have the potential to actually deliver on a lot of the promises made by Java back in the day, that never really made it, about being able to write a program once and have it run anywhere. Just think of all those companies who have legacy web based apps that were created back around the IE6 days, so are becoming a significant liability. They can all be replaced by metro/modern apps which provide virtually all the benefits of a web based app and then a few more.

Windows 8 starts faster, uses less RAM, the search charm is excellent despite a stupid name, the ribbon UI has finally been largely perfected, better security via ASLR, the kernel is now tickless for improved power efficiency, more of the GUI is rendered by the GPU for improved power efficiency, connected standby is a nice touch, memory management as a whole is simply more efficient, DEP support is improved for better security, access to certain core Windows services has been better partitioned to prevent abuse... These are all just improvements over Windows 7, but none of them would have been possible without the significant groundwork laid by Vista.

I'm still waiting, but so far I haven't seen a single person be able to come up with even one objective technical reason why any previous version of Windows was better than Windows 8. If you reduce the complaints people give down, 99.9% of them are people grousing about the start screen, which you rarely even need to see after you set up icons on the desktop/taskbar. The rest you can just use the excellent search charm for. It's just not that big of a deal unless you make it one. Even if you exclude all the people who have never used Windows 8, but profess to hate it, what you appear to be left with are people who don't even take 5 seconds to form an opinion and then rather than admit they were a bit hasty, double down on their opinion and get all defensive and p!ssy when you challenge them to provide some kind of rationale beyond "I don't like it".

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The problem with Vista was it basically required
May 24, 2014 5:07AM PDT

new more powerful computers while Windows 8 runs on old and new PC's. I don't understand why a person would prefer a left mouse click over a right mouse click. Most of a time a right click allow you to modify setting and makes it quite convenient.

Someone saying they don't like the apps sounds like they are are voicing their opinion without trying. But I think as with anything there are good apps and bad apps. There are some good GPS apps and like someone was asking about an AD Free Yahoo there is a great Yahoo Metro app (no advetisements AT ALL).

Metro apps are basically web apps that the app is like a template that controls what you can do.

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So did XP
May 24, 2014 6:32AM PDT

So did XP when it came out. You think IGPs are bad today, back when XP launched they couldn't even handle the rather simple skinning of XP's Luna adequately. Like with Vista, people who had actual video cards were fine, but everyone else was complaining about how slow XP was.

And, kind of feel like a broken record here, but development wise, XP was a dead end. Any developer will tell you that sooner or later a project goes off in a direction you never could have anticipated when you started and most times you're better off just scrapping the whole thing, or at least large chunks of it, rather than trying to shoehorn in something else. During the time XP was in active service we had the shift from IDE to SATA, PCI to AGP and then PCIe, hyperthreading, dual and even quad core CPUs, dual channel memory became a thing... That's just hardware. Software wise people started consuming more and more video content on their PCs, the explosion in processing power and cheap storage allowed games to become much more complex, battery savings on laptops and other portable devices became much more important necessitating shifting a lot of XP's internals from CPU to GPU, dual and quad core CPUs also represented a significant challenge for the Windows developers because there are a number of subtle but crucial differences between multi-core and multi-CPU which can lead to a significant amount of unnecessary overhead. Vista also migrated from the inefficient file based install to the much more efficient image based install, which is why upgrades from XP to anything but Vista require a clean install. File based installs worked well when you needed to break things up across multiple floppy drives, but doesn't really make nearly as much sense in an age of CD and DVD installs, which are now giving way to a purely digital distribution. There was some significant hardening of the security on the Vista driver model which was used with Windows 7 and even 8 and all the lessons learned by Microsoft over the security nightmare that was the first 2-3 years of XP's existence were applied to Vista, which, compared to XP, has led a relatively quiet security life. Same as its offspring Windows 7 and 8. There haven't been the roughly 1-3 remote execution vulnerabilities found per week, every week, for the first 2-3 years like there was with XP. It frees people up to complain about other issues.

When you look at all the thorny technical issues that had to be tackled with Vista, you come to realize it was practically a brand new OS written from scratch as opposed to just a continuation of XP's lineage. As big a disaster as you might think Vista was, it absolutely pales in comparison to what would have happened if they had tried continuing on with XP's code base.

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Thanks all of you
Jul 14, 2014 5:05AM PDT

Thanks for the Advice all of you. I will take it into consideration. Bob sorry but no Win 8 give away yet. lol


God Bless America!!