My wife and I purchased a laptop on Black Friday at Wal-Mart for my son. It has Windows 8 installed. At first, he just wanted me to install *nix on it in addition to the Windows 8. I looked at the steps necessary to restore the classic interface and get Windows 8 to behave nicely, like Windows 7 did, instructions here, and started to really question the value of Windows 8. After a week of using *nix, my son asked me to just let the Xubuntu 12.04 64-bit install take up the entire hard disk. He realized that every game he wanted to play would work fine under Wine and had no reason to ever even try Windows 8.
If he ever does need Windows, I will gladly put a Windows 7 install on his laptop for him. Currently, Windows XP is the most used operating system in the world. When Microsoft discontinues all support and updates for Windows XP, Windows 7 will become the new Windows XP.
Windows 8 General Discussion
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compguygene
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Re: Windows 8 General Discussion
Armagetron: It's a video game that people should just play and enjoy 
https://bit.ly/2KBGYjvCheck out the simple site about TheServerPharm
https://bit.ly/2KBGYjvCheck out the simple site about TheServerPharm
Re: Windows 8 General Discussion
not sure if off-topic: I'm saving money to be able to afford a new laptop next year. I thought about buying a Sony or Dell this time. My Acer laptop turns himself off regularly (although I set the CPU performance maximum to 0%!), and I found that Toshiba/Fujitsu products last forever but make weird sounds after some time, and the battery is crap in both cases. I'll probably wait until Windows 9 though...if Windows 8 is Vista's spiritual successor and not XP's.
Re: Windows 8 General Discussion
Lol, vista was horrible. I don't think 8 is anywhere near that badWord wrote:if Windows 8 is Vista's spiritual successor and not XP's.
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epsy
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Re: Windows 8 General Discussion
Well I've used it, Dell-preinstalled, for about a week now so I guess I should comment.
First of all, feature discoverability seems to be at an all-time low. Seems to be a trend these days. Every interaction in relation to starting and switching between tasks relates to putting the cursor in a 1 pixel area at a specific corner of the screen, or even also dragging the cursor from a corner to the middle along the edge of the screen. There are no hints of this. You're supposed to guess it.
Also they seem to have thought it was a good idea to create touchpad gestures which trigger as you move your finger from outsite the touchpad onto the touchpad, hitting the very edge of the touchpad in the process. It is very easy to do without noticing. One of these gestures does switches between tile applications. Again, no hint at what you did. While I guess it's funny to look at if you are sadistic, it's no good. Thankfully I knew how to close things so I didn't run into it until I saw an option to turn it off.
The touchpad support is bad. I don't know how people usually run their laptop, but I usually either am using only the touchpad, or I plugged the mouse in and am using both intermittently. My mouse has a high-resolution sensor magnitudes higher than that of the touchpad, and I like a slow sensitivity, so I scale it down a lot. However, on this, there is no way to reliably set a different sensitivity for the mouse and touchpad. Dell pre-installed a goofy-looking settings application for the touchpad, which lets me scale the touchpad sensitivity up and down(although the controls are reversed). That'd be OK but you'd have to just hope your OEM installed something like it. But it's not OK. It resets all the time. Sigh. Why do I even have to deal with a goofy-looking vendor-provided app when touchpads existed even before Windows 3.1, before I was even born. Yet, 20 years after 3.1, Windows still doesn't have a unified configuration interface for touchpads, so vendors provide their own shitty ones. What. The. Hell???
The start menu isn't too bad, even though it doesn't really warrant fullscreen-ness on a PC setup. I can just press the windows key, type what I want, press enter, and I usually get what I want. It has a nice unified search interface where you can also search the store, etc. I would like the search function to be able to default to more than one source though. However, when you right click, it really shows that it was meant to be for a tablet with a menu button and a touchscreen. When you do, a list of options shows up at the bottom of the screen. Just like on an android 2 phone. But I'm using a 15 inch screen with relative-position pointing devices. It's annoying.
As for the tile apps. Many of them require a Microsoft account, because they are messenging or shop apps. I tried Camera, Maps, Music, Travel and Weather. They are as barebones as it gets, and I don't even know what the hell Travel wants to help me do.
Camera lets you take pictures and delete the ones you took. That's about it. There is a timer function but it is locked to 3 seconds. It has a video mode which I expect to be just as basic.
Tried Maps for the purpose of this post. It asked me if I wanted to let it determine my position and then did so accurately once I accepted. When I tried to plot directions for town, the form defaulted to "Directions from [] to [My current location]". I don't know why you would want to do that. The form didn't auto-complete so I just typed my request and it showed me directions. The fact that it soon promptly disappeared leads me to believe it crashed.
Music has to be the worst music player I have ever used. Let me show you.
When using it fullscreen, it just shows a bunch of album covers in the background, overlaying the current track info on top, which is sometimes unreadable because of said background. None of these album covers are in my library or account or whatever, mind you.
You can split the screen between two tile applications by (obviously), moving the cursor to the top edge of the screen, grabbing the invisible handle and dragging the thing to a side of the screen. Whatever application you select next, via alt-tab or the start menu will fill up the bigger space. You can't share the screen equally or with more than two tiles, it's 5:1 or 1:5.
Now, look at it when it is a small tile on the screen. Anything shock you? It manages to show more useful information in less space. However there you can't seek in the track. Whoever designed this must have their head and ass swapped or something. Anything else? The order in the music player is completely different than the correct order. Well why? The tracks are numbered correctly, their filenames also sort correctly. But the Music player just shuffles it around. So you try to reorder them and try to drag one of them. Haha. That's right, you can't reorder it. I haven't found a way to add or remove things, either. Anything you open completely replaces the current playlist. On top of that, it doesn't play Ogg/Theora.
As far as I am concerned, Travel is a bunch of pretty pictures.
Weather tells the weather, with pretty pictures and awkward scrolling. You see, all tile apps have their content expand to the right instead of to the bottom. Surely a way to feel "different" or whatever. But then it gets really dumb. If you use the mouse, your normal scroll wheel goes left and right. Seems fair. On the touchpad, I pretty much have to scroll my putting down two fingers and moving them in the direction I want to go to. There, I have to move my fingers left and right, while in my browser I go up and down. Fair enough, it does scroll horizontally. But the weather tile has a hourly forecast box that scrolls up and down. Guess what. As soon as your cursor ends up in its bounding box, you're scrolling up and down in the box as you move left and right, and not at all if you move them up and down. Once your cursor is in it, scrolling won't get you out, you have to move the pointer out.
In short, the tile apps are very unconvincing and it does not make me want to buy more. GG. I must say however, that if it is the tiles thing that bothers you, I don't think you will actually care about it. I do well enough without them.
Remember how I told you I knew how to close tiles? When you drag tiles to confine them to a side of the screen, the tile appears as a much smaller thumbnail, which you can drag horizontally to the side of a featureless screen. A bar denotes the sidebar's width if you move the tile there. The tile doesn't budge up and down. To close a tile, you have to drag the top of the tile to enter that screen, and, obviously, drag it to the bottom of the screen, even though it doesn't move down until your pointer is all the way there, and there is nothing down there that looks like a trash bin, or that says "Drag here to close". Don't get me wrong I like minimalism, but I don't think it excludes discoverability. Pretty sure I wouldn't have figured it out without looking it up. So thanks, kyle.
Enough with tiles. Has Windows improved its window-management capabilities? No of course not. To drag a window you still have to seek the tiny area that is the window title and drag that. I expect to be able to press ALT(or something else, I don't mind) and just drag the damn thing from anywhere. Same with resizes. It's also still completely stuck in the "Focused window is raised" idiom, while drawing no benefit from it(eg. menubar always on top of the screen) and drawing the most avoidable hindrances from it. The scrolling wheel is on the mouse, you move your fingers on the touchpad to scroll: Scrolling is a function of the pointer. Yet it only works on the active, raised window. A bug I experienced was windows I have expressly summoned sometimes show up behind others, unfocused.
Yeah. I'm eager to get my own setup going and not have to boot into this.
TL;DR: A designer masturbated on excessive minimalism a lot. Windows 8 was his idea.
First of all, feature discoverability seems to be at an all-time low. Seems to be a trend these days. Every interaction in relation to starting and switching between tasks relates to putting the cursor in a 1 pixel area at a specific corner of the screen, or even also dragging the cursor from a corner to the middle along the edge of the screen. There are no hints of this. You're supposed to guess it.
Also they seem to have thought it was a good idea to create touchpad gestures which trigger as you move your finger from outsite the touchpad onto the touchpad, hitting the very edge of the touchpad in the process. It is very easy to do without noticing. One of these gestures does switches between tile applications. Again, no hint at what you did. While I guess it's funny to look at if you are sadistic, it's no good. Thankfully I knew how to close things so I didn't run into it until I saw an option to turn it off.
The touchpad support is bad. I don't know how people usually run their laptop, but I usually either am using only the touchpad, or I plugged the mouse in and am using both intermittently. My mouse has a high-resolution sensor magnitudes higher than that of the touchpad, and I like a slow sensitivity, so I scale it down a lot. However, on this, there is no way to reliably set a different sensitivity for the mouse and touchpad. Dell pre-installed a goofy-looking settings application for the touchpad, which lets me scale the touchpad sensitivity up and down(although the controls are reversed). That'd be OK but you'd have to just hope your OEM installed something like it. But it's not OK. It resets all the time. Sigh. Why do I even have to deal with a goofy-looking vendor-provided app when touchpads existed even before Windows 3.1, before I was even born. Yet, 20 years after 3.1, Windows still doesn't have a unified configuration interface for touchpads, so vendors provide their own shitty ones. What. The. Hell???
The start menu isn't too bad, even though it doesn't really warrant fullscreen-ness on a PC setup. I can just press the windows key, type what I want, press enter, and I usually get what I want. It has a nice unified search interface where you can also search the store, etc. I would like the search function to be able to default to more than one source though. However, when you right click, it really shows that it was meant to be for a tablet with a menu button and a touchscreen. When you do, a list of options shows up at the bottom of the screen. Just like on an android 2 phone. But I'm using a 15 inch screen with relative-position pointing devices. It's annoying.
As for the tile apps. Many of them require a Microsoft account, because they are messenging or shop apps. I tried Camera, Maps, Music, Travel and Weather. They are as barebones as it gets, and I don't even know what the hell Travel wants to help me do.
Camera lets you take pictures and delete the ones you took. That's about it. There is a timer function but it is locked to 3 seconds. It has a video mode which I expect to be just as basic.
Tried Maps for the purpose of this post. It asked me if I wanted to let it determine my position and then did so accurately once I accepted. When I tried to plot directions for town, the form defaulted to "Directions from [] to [My current location]". I don't know why you would want to do that. The form didn't auto-complete so I just typed my request and it showed me directions. The fact that it soon promptly disappeared leads me to believe it crashed.
Music has to be the worst music player I have ever used. Let me show you.
- As a fullscreen tile.
You can split the screen between two tile applications by (obviously), moving the cursor to the top edge of the screen, grabbing the invisible handle and dragging the thing to a side of the screen. Whatever application you select next, via alt-tab or the start menu will fill up the bigger space. You can't share the screen equally or with more than two tiles, it's 5:1 or 1:5.
- As a small tile.
As far as I am concerned, Travel is a bunch of pretty pictures.
Weather tells the weather, with pretty pictures and awkward scrolling. You see, all tile apps have their content expand to the right instead of to the bottom. Surely a way to feel "different" or whatever. But then it gets really dumb. If you use the mouse, your normal scroll wheel goes left and right. Seems fair. On the touchpad, I pretty much have to scroll my putting down two fingers and moving them in the direction I want to go to. There, I have to move my fingers left and right, while in my browser I go up and down. Fair enough, it does scroll horizontally. But the weather tile has a hourly forecast box that scrolls up and down. Guess what. As soon as your cursor ends up in its bounding box, you're scrolling up and down in the box as you move left and right, and not at all if you move them up and down. Once your cursor is in it, scrolling won't get you out, you have to move the pointer out.
In short, the tile apps are very unconvincing and it does not make me want to buy more. GG. I must say however, that if it is the tiles thing that bothers you, I don't think you will actually care about it. I do well enough without them.
Remember how I told you I knew how to close tiles? When you drag tiles to confine them to a side of the screen, the tile appears as a much smaller thumbnail, which you can drag horizontally to the side of a featureless screen. A bar denotes the sidebar's width if you move the tile there. The tile doesn't budge up and down. To close a tile, you have to drag the top of the tile to enter that screen, and, obviously, drag it to the bottom of the screen, even though it doesn't move down until your pointer is all the way there, and there is nothing down there that looks like a trash bin, or that says "Drag here to close". Don't get me wrong I like minimalism, but I don't think it excludes discoverability. Pretty sure I wouldn't have figured it out without looking it up. So thanks, kyle.
Enough with tiles. Has Windows improved its window-management capabilities? No of course not. To drag a window you still have to seek the tiny area that is the window title and drag that. I expect to be able to press ALT(or something else, I don't mind) and just drag the damn thing from anywhere. Same with resizes. It's also still completely stuck in the "Focused window is raised" idiom, while drawing no benefit from it(eg. menubar always on top of the screen) and drawing the most avoidable hindrances from it. The scrolling wheel is on the mouse, you move your fingers on the touchpad to scroll: Scrolling is a function of the pointer. Yet it only works on the active, raised window. A bug I experienced was windows I have expressly summoned sometimes show up behind others, unfocused.
Yeah. I'm eager to get my own setup going and not have to boot into this.
TL;DR: A designer masturbated on excessive minimalism a lot. Windows 8 was his idea.
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epsy
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Re: Windows 8 General Discussion
I've bought this from Dell(the name is pointless, dozens have the same; similar to the one on the left there) for £500. It is capable hardware and ran cool enough even when running games on the AMD chip. I must say the Intel has gone a long way as far as graphics go, so you can use the Intel graphics to run less demanding stuff and use less power/generate less heat.Word wrote:not sure if off-topic: I'm saving money to be able to afford a new laptop next year. I thought about buying a Sony or Dell this time.
Don't idolize. A few meters away from me I have a Toshiba laptop with a hard drive that failed after 2 years of use, a screen about to fall off, and which overheats whenever Flash is running, and whose fans just spin up at the wrong times. I can't say that's common to all Toshiba laptops, but that certainly shows "Toshibas are all perfect" is a wrong statement. I'm sure there are Dells that overheat all day(seems like Vostro 3650's do that), and Acers that run as cold as ice(well, maybe not ice).Word wrote:I found that Toshiba/Fujitsu products last forever but make weird sounds after some time, and the battery is crap in both cases.
I think it's only going down from here. It's like they want you to think a non-touchscreen PC is not great anymore by forcing you to use an interface that's not very good at mouse/touchpad, and then switch you over to tablets. Kind of like a sloppy execution of the Embrace, Extend and Extinguish scheme.Word wrote:I'll probably wait until Windows 9 though...if Windows 8 is Vista's spiritual successor and not XP's.
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compguygene
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Re: Windows 8 General Discussion
Counting my son and my dad, I have switched 6 people in the last 2 weeks to Linux based on their Windows 8 experience. They all have one thing in common. They just want to use the web and maybe one other simple app. My son plays a few games that Wine supports sufficiently. In every case, they are not dual-booting, no Windows, just Linux.
Armagetron: It's a video game that people should just play and enjoy
https://bit.ly/2KBGYjvCheck out the simple site about TheServerPharm
https://bit.ly/2KBGYjvCheck out the simple site about TheServerPharm
Re: Windows 8 General Discussion
"Excessive minimalism"? LOL
I'd think that if it's excessive, it's not minimalism, even if the design consists of nothing but basic geometric shapes.
Well, thanks for that great reply, I'll comment again when I can think of something
And if it's only going down from here...I'll just buy a typewriter on the flea market.
Oh, and that music player looks truly horrible. What did they do to Windows Media Player? I'd search for "Microsoft Music" myself, but obviously such general terms don't lead anywhere. To be honest, all this sounds as outlandish as old GDR/Soviet Union products to me (you know, where cookies were all named "Cookies", etc., or different designs and names for the same product to pretend that it's new). It sounds somewhat uncreative, impotent. More like they had no designer at all. Didn't Steve Ballmer compose the intro of Windows 7?
Well, we still have a working, at least 30-years old GDR fridge my parents (both Western German) bought shortly after the reunification when they got married...
I want to cut my fingers off just to protest against those touchscreens.
I'd think that if it's excessive, it's not minimalism, even if the design consists of nothing but basic geometric shapes.
Well, thanks for that great reply, I'll comment again when I can think of something
And if it's only going down from here...I'll just buy a typewriter on the flea market.
Oh, and that music player looks truly horrible. What did they do to Windows Media Player? I'd search for "Microsoft Music" myself, but obviously such general terms don't lead anywhere. To be honest, all this sounds as outlandish as old GDR/Soviet Union products to me (you know, where cookies were all named "Cookies", etc., or different designs and names for the same product to pretend that it's new). It sounds somewhat uncreative, impotent. More like they had no designer at all. Didn't Steve Ballmer compose the intro of Windows 7?
Well, we still have a working, at least 30-years old GDR fridge my parents (both Western German) bought shortly after the reunification when they got married...
I want to cut my fingers off just to protest against those touchscreens.
Last edited by Word on Tue Jan 01, 2013 11:09 am, edited 1 time in total.
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epsy
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Re: Windows 8 General Discussion
I suppose you could say Information Minimalism. It's like some guy thought it be grand if this screen had a circle and things would work when the user spins the mouse three times clockwise around it. Whatever you call that.Word wrote:"Excessive minimalism"?
Apparently it's still there. Have the right-click the files. The interface is slightly awkward, but it's not awful. I guess I should say thanks, even though in the end I won't be using that.Word wrote:What did they do to Windows Media Player?
A new laptop certainly won't last that long. Funny you bring it up.Word wrote:Well, we still have a working, at least 30-years old GDR fridge my parents (both Western German) bought shortly after the reunification when they got married...
Re: Windows 8 General Discussion
Funny the music player sucks, even after the success of the classic Zune and the Zune HD.
Honestly, Microsoft should've tweaked windows 8 a bit more ( the apps aspect at least ) to make it more useful. It's kinda why during the last month, I opted for an android phone rather than a windows phone, and an ipad rather than the failure called the Surface with "windows rt"...whatever rt means.
Honestly, Microsoft should've tweaked windows 8 a bit more ( the apps aspect at least ) to make it more useful. It's kinda why during the last month, I opted for an android phone rather than a windows phone, and an ipad rather than the failure called the Surface with "windows rt"...whatever rt means.
Re: Windows 8 General Discussion
Those guys are running out of ideas I'm sure. First they come up with the Aura style for Windows 7 which is fine and everything but this Retro style is kind of strange. Takes me time to get used to which tab takes me to which place.
Still, I got no complaints on the graphics side considering I went and bought the latest stuff only a few days ago. So my specs are good for now. It only takes me longer to switch through the menus but I'll get used to it eventually.
Still, I got no complaints on the graphics side considering I went and bought the latest stuff only a few days ago. So my specs are good for now. It only takes me longer to switch through the menus but I'll get used to it eventually.
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delinquent
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Re: Windows 8 General Discussion
I was happy with Windows 98, why did they change it?
Re: Windows 8 General Discussion
Windows 98 is a lot slower and less reliable than what it is today del
Re: Windows 8 General Discussion
They didn't change it. They just gave you the option to have a more convenient version. Although i still prefer "Vista" tbh, the only thing i would love for "Vista" that " 7" has is that you can just grab a window and move it, instead of having to minimize, or double click the top of the windowdelinquent wrote:I was happy with Windows 98, why did they change it?
I haven't tried "8" yet but with what iv'e read, just from this site alone, puts me off
Oh well "Windows 7" is fine for me, i see no reason to change
Re: Windows 8 General Discussion
Bottom line is windows 8 relies heavily on its touch interface. So unless you buy a windows 8 certified touch laptop, or a new $500 windows 8 certified touch monitor, the experience falters.
Windows 7 for now, for sure.
Windows 7 for now, for sure.
Re: Windows 8 General Discussion
Well my sister is going to buy a laptop tomorrow with windows 8 (it isn't touch screen) so i will have a bash and get back to y'all 