Windows 8 users: How do you like it?

And I don't mean a nightmare! Seriously, 8 was horrible, couldn't find how to close a window or shut down without going online to look it up. I saw no improvement over 7, but since customers were calling to ask how to do stuff, I figured I'd better find out.

One is terrified of installing/uninstalling ANYTHING, no matter how simple & asks me to do it for him. So, he asked me to update his Win 8 laptop to 8.1 for him. Not only simple, but what a difference! After the update, from pushing the power button to desktop/ready to work was 10 seconds. Seriously.

I've installed it on a few machines since & I'm amazed at the speed; from format the hard drive to drivers & updates loaded, ready to use, 35 minutes. What a treat!

As soon as I finish copying my files (not much, I do it regularly), 8.1 is going on my own PC. This from someone who held on to Win 2k as long as possible (I loved it).

I think many of the nay sayers dishing Windows 8 have never actually tried it. 8.1 is better and, from what I'm reading, the up-date coming this April will make it even more like "Windows 7"; and make it more friendly to desktop mouse/keyboard users. Windows 8 has had its problems but Microsoft is addressing them ---slowly but still fixes are coming.

I fully agree with all comments made here so far.
I also was somewhat taken by surprise by the awful look of the so called "Metro" page of win8 when I first switched on my newly purchased laptop.
Then I fond on Internet that I could download Classic Shell for free. I installed it and now I work again in a familiar environment. Simple !

Hi from down under,

I am an older PC user and have just had to go fro XP to 8.1. What an EYE OPENER. I didn't ask to have all those apps pre installed, and to try and get rid of them permanently is a nightmare. They just keep coming back!

I was using a perfectly good system and many others including AU Govt departmets are still using - XP. If things aren't broken why try to fix them and complicate things?

Benny from Caboolture

... is that there seems to be no clear path for those of us who use Windows as a professional platform for corporate software, such as integration middleware etc.

(Proceed to the last paragraph if you are only interested in my Windows 8 story.)

When I joined my current employer about 16 years ago the laptop I was given ran OS/2 and mostly 16 bit Windows based office applications. In order to be able to use the more current 32 bit applications those of us who exchanged documents with customers were "upgraded" to Windows 98SE. Once Windows 2000 came out we all went to the professional edition and for the first time had machines on which we could demonstrate the software we were selling. We then progressed to XP, no Vista, 7 and so far no 8. Most of the virtual images I encounter are at XP level - still today because they don't have any outside contact.

At home I have some true legacy running - irrigation on 98, because I need direct hardware access and because the DOS system that should have been sufficient exposed a memory leak in Quick Basic that froze the machine round about every 4-5 days. Running that under Windows 98 fixed that issue.

Another system is still on 2000, originally, because of a SCSI card driver for a film scanner that I couldn't get installed or replaced on anything younger. Then, when I needed to reinstall that 2000 the driver wouldn't install and I remembered that it had been carried over from 98 - so I would have to install 98 first, then install the scanner and upgrade to 2000. So I got me a more modern flatbed scanner with transparency option and USB connectivity instead, but the old machine remained on 2000. Another one was upgraded to XP when I encountered some software that wouldn't run on anything less.

Then I discovered the need for more memory and 64 bit systems and moved to Windows 7 - and that is my rule today: Windows 7 for 64 bits, anything else stays where it is until it gets retired, the irrigation computer, which is not connected to anything except the valves and the pump stays on 98SE.

So, why no Windows 8? Simple - I sometimes teach people the use of - you guessed it - corporate level integration middleware. Most users used WIndows 7 or virtual Windows XP. Recently I encountered a bunch that had been given brand new machines with Windows 8 preinstalled. Software installation and administration was a nightmare - More than a decade of experience with Windows as a platform for corporate software - server and workstation - was rendered useless by a seemingly unbreakable wall of "tiles."

What more can I say?

Maybe this: I am not in this business to solve puzzles about where Microsoft decided to hide the essential functions for the professional use of their platform. It may be a "cute" new surface for people that want a smart phone or tablet from Microsoft, but I see it as useless for those of us that need to use a proper computer for real work - maybe those who said Linux is that system were right all along.

And I am not buying the argument that with some additional software you can "fix" Windows 8. I am already using quite a bit of additional software that make working with previous versions of Windows a lot easier. Some of that covers areas that Windows does not address even today, other programs stay on even though Windows can now perform these functions as well - or almost as well?

I agree completely with Gerdd. The basic platform may be the best ever, but the interface is useless unless you just use your PC for gaming and networking. The email software is laughable - I use email a lot as I run a choir of 25 people - and even the best download version available is only a pale reflection of Windows Mail. And as Gerdd says, why hide everything in strange places? Even locating power-off or sleep involves a search. I can't be bothered. I have gone back to my old PC running Vista which although very slow at least does what I want it to.

Microsoft seems to be abandoning its role as the standard operating system for business and serious users and just concentrating on the recreational market.

Microsoft is in the business of new software. Without that sell, it will go broke. To summarize I have been told to never put a .0 software on my computer. Hence, I started with DOS, then Windows 3.1, then Win 98, now XP and skipping all the stuff in between. Getting excited over the mid-life crises that requires the newest, untested, crapware from Microsoft, or someone else, is what the car manufacturers use to sell the same car with baubles instead of improving it.

A bit late to the party, but much of this is actually being addressed behind the scenes with what is being dubbed the Microsoft One initiative. The idea behind Windows 8 originally was to bring all versions of Windows under a single kernel and API. Probably for fear of another round of Vista level delays, Microsoft decided to ship Win 8 before this was even remotely done. So you wind up with about 3 different platforms (Windows Phone, WindowsRT and Windows x86) that are quite different.

Since the launch of Windows 8, Microsoft has done a pretty commendable job of trying to converge all of these platforms. It helps that WindowsRT was more or less stillborn which let Microsoft focus a bit more on the Xbox platform instead. Just a couple weeks ago at a developers conference they were outlining how they now have a system in place where something like 90% of apps written with this new API will work on any of the Windows platforms. Of course as any developer will tell you, getting 90% of something is generally pretty easy, but the closer you get to 100% the harder it becomes and the longer it takes because by then you're trying to factor in unusual use case scenarios and other types of behavior the developer would never even think of on their own.

But the "plan" for the metro/modern UI is to allow companies to have a more sandboxed environment in which to build business apps. Sort of like how for a while the big thing was company intranets that were all built to run specifically with Internet Explorer which then rotted on the vine same as Internet Explorer did for several years. Another part of this whole Microsoft One thing is that by taking advantage of special APIs that basically cost about $100 to license, companies can build metro/modern UIs to existing backend apps.

It's Microsoft, so at least half the time the ideas are absolutely brilliant, it's the execution that is beyond terrible. Still, Ballmer's gone, so hopefully things will turn around a bit at MS. That man had an uncanny ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of success for Microsoft and if not for his constant rejiggering of license terms on the volume customer end, Microsoft would have been losing money hand over fist.

I'm a little bit of a latecomer to Win 8, having just gotten my new computer today after 8.1 and 8.1 Update 1 have been released, so maybe things were a bit worse in the early days. Still, I had maybe a 10 minute crash course training in Win 8 about a year ago and then never used it until today. It took me about 5-10 minutes to figure out everything I needed. Of course I don't focus on learning every single function of Microsoft Word, I focus on learning things that are common to any word processor I may come across. The result is, I can sit down at virtually any computer and within a few minutes acclimate myself. Doesn't matter if it's running Windows, Mac OS X, Linux or probably half a dozen other operating systems. The simple truth is that there hasn't been much innovation in computer interfaces since Microsoft and Apple shamelessly stole the concepts developed by the Xerox PARC team like 40 years ago. Virtually all the same concepts from then are still in use now and they're exactly the same as they were all those decades ago. So I can't ever bring myself to feel sorry for people who try and take shortcuts and then have it bite them down the road.

its great its so faster and prettier than all old windows but it have some problem with many video
games and programs that with updated to 8.1 its ok

why not just go Linux? I'm posting from Mint 16 Linux running Firefox 28 and can't even imagine all the problems I'm reading here for windows 8. I actually left XP to go to this once I had some other software I wanted running OK under WINE. So long as Linux distros keep the course on these good desktop environments they have today, I'll never go back to Microsoft's expensive products.

I have learned several systems now and have found little or no advantage from one to another. I and others resent the prospect of having to learn yet another system with little or no apparent advantages just to do the same things that the previous systems did just fine. So maybe the problem is, 1) the advantages are not identified such that we can understand and appreciate them, or 2) there are no advantages that are very useful to many (or even most) users. The latter strikes me as more likely.

BTW, I have XP, W7 and W8.1 machines. I like the W8.1 system the least. Start Menu 8 makes W8 bearable as I've been unable to find a simple way to uninstall it.

Actually, if you pay a little attention to the Windows 8 development, there were a lot of under the hood type improvements, such as increasing the amount of the GUI that is handled by the GPU instead of CPU. Might not seem like much, but this can have a large impact on laptop battery life. Microsoft has also done quite a bit to put Windows on a diet with Windows 8. Sure the reason was so it could be installed and run reasonably well on lower end tablet hardware, but we all benefit from the reduced memory requirements.

But read up on some basic neurology, learning to do new things keeps our brains young as we get older. Staves off things like dementia and just generally slipping into a fog of confusion later in life.MS could have done a better job of preparing people for the coming start screen, but no matter what they did there would be people who are more interested in complaining than finding a solution. Once you pin the most frequently used apps to the taskbar, you almost never need to see the start screen unless you want to. I know it's a recent addition, but you can even boot straight to the desktop mode now without needing any third party programs.

I can certainly agree that there's not much compelling for a Windows 7 user about Windows 8 if you're looking to upgrade, but compared to XP it's a no brainer even without the lack of future security updates factored in. The Aero GUI is based on DirectX, so uses the GPU instead of CPU like XP's GDI+ based UI. Windows 8 takes advantage of the major overhaul MS did with Vista to make the process scheduler work better with multi-core CPUs instead of multi-CPU like XP is geared towards; it's a subtle but important distinction. Windows 7 further tweaked and refined those settings, Windows 8 does even more. The driver model introduced in Vista is much more robust and secure as well. Most of the changes were under the hood types that aren't as sexy and noticeable to the masses, which is how you can tell that Windows 7 was popular just because it wasn't Vista. Take away the new taskbar in Windows 7 and it's just a warmed over Vista. Aside from the taskbar, it was just some minor tweaks and refinements to Vista, yet people proclaimed it one of the best Windows versions Microsoft has made. Everyone complains about how buggy and bloated Windows is, yet when Microsoft spends a couple of releases working on addressing exactly those concerns, people complain about the lack of features.

In any event, I would suggest you learn to look a little bit deeper than the surface, as you will find there have been many very useful improvements made to Windows, most of which had the groundwork laid by everyone's favorite whipping boy Vista. In the case of Windows 8, I wouldn't want to insult the people who only look at the surface of things by comparing them to the majority of people complaining.

I'm sure that Jimmy Greystone is right that under the hood Windows 8 is great - it's faster and do doubt more reliable than anything Microsoft has done before. But I don't think he understands why people don't like it. It's nothing to do with what's under the hood, and of course the basic interface is something you can change or else get used to. Its great weakness is the software that's bundled with it, especially the email app. If you use a computer primarily for recreational purposes, then email won't bother you, but if you need to use it all the time for business or for keeping in touch with people (for example if you run a club or choir as I do), then 'Mail' is frankly useless. Compare it to Windows Mail which we've been used to for the last 10 years or so - it's like comparing a piano with a Kazoo.

Microsoft need to wake up to the amazing fact that in the real world outside, people do use email and not just Facebook or Twitter for essential communication. Otherwise serious users will increasingly look elsewhere for the computers which are essential for business and not just for gaming.

Why not install Thunderbird or MS Outlook (or even Windows Live Mail) if you need a decent e-mail program. Those all run in Windows 8.

Kees

If you really want to uninstall Windows 8.x from your computer, get yourself a copy of Active@ KillDisk. I believe it's up to version 8.0, and it's free to try. Of course you will only need it once, but I think that after you see how well it works, you will be willing to shell out for the full version. Here's what you need to know;

Active@ KillDisk 8.0 (Windows):
One Pass Zeros erase method supported in free version
Erases all data on HDD, SSD and USB disks completely
Wipes out all unused space on disks, not touching existing data
USB Plug'n'Play devices are supported
Professional package:
Supports 20 security standards including DoD 5220.22-M
Bootable Disk Creator that allows you to boot from CD/DVD/USB into Windows environment, and erase or wipe out your system disks
Supports Vertification, Batch Mode, Emailing Reports, Certificate customization, PC Shutdown after completion

The requirements are pretty standard;
Windows application:
Windows XP/Vista/7/8 (x86/x64)
Windows 2003 / 2008 Server
20MB free disk space
350MB RAM for Boot Disk

Hope that helped.
Regards,
Mr. Windows

Mr Windows needs to step up a little here and fill everyone in on what happens next. Back to you Mr Windows.

And as Bob hinted at, what do you then suggest people do now that they have a blank HDD with no OS on it? You conveniently left out the bit where they'd need a copy of another OS to install and how if that OS is Windows, they'll need to track down, supply and install all the necessary drivers on their own. Plus how, just as an example, an OEM copy of Windows 7 will run the person following your advice at least $80 and the OEM license terms have been changed to prohibit people from buying a copy to use on a system they personally own and use.

These are not minor inconsequential details either. These are very important things for people to know if they aren't experienced in installing an OS. Most people have no clue how much effort goes into installing Windows because they've never done it. It just was already there when they turned the computer on for the first time.

Also, running something like killdisk on a SSD is a great way to shave a couple years off the life of the SSD. Running several passes of a disk zeroing program will chew through those limited write cycles like there's no tomorrow. Doesn't matter how much SSD prices have come down recently, that's no excuse for not warning people that such things will result in them having to buy a new one much sooner than they otherwise would have. Especially when there's no particular need to do this. You can just run a quick format of the drive when installing some other OS. The only time you'd need something like killdisk is when you're planning to sell a computer and want to make sure that it would take considerable effort and resources to get any data off the drive.

Add all this up and I'm left kind of thinking this is an emperor with no clothes situation we have here. Someone regurgitating information gleaned from other forums and/or posts with no real understanding of the specifics. Let's see if someone can prove me wrong.

You both have valid points, but let's face it, if Spike715 wanted to uninstall Windows 8 bad enough he would already have the new operating system to replace it with, before he used my little trick. And if you're going to install a new operating system, you certainly don't want any of the old one left on your hard drive. So, yes I know it's a hard drive wipe, but it gets your hard drive ready for your new operating system.

If you're going to do something, do it right. Have all your tools ready, before you start. That includes the new operating system, and a good driver program. I use Advanced Driver Updater, and have had great success with it. But, that's me, you can look on line for other similar programs.

When you have all your tools ready, run Active@ KillDisk, let it run over night, as it takes a while to complete. Then in the morning, you can install your new operating system, and driver updater. By lunch time you should have a fully functioning computer that you can begin to load your software, and applications on.

Yes, this is a drastic procedure, but I have read so many story's form people who can't seem to uninstall Windows 8, I thought I would offer the Nuclear Option. Windows 8, & 8.1 are fine operating systems for some situations. However, if you've tried, and tried to learn it, and just want to roll back the clock to Window 7, or Linux, you have that right. It's your computer after all.

Regards,
Mr. Windows

Well known purveyors of snake oil and c*ap.

Dafydd.