Windows 8 - first impressions

[ATCclears]

I sent the email below to tech friends. I've been doing IT/tech for 26 years.

Peter


I was forced to go to Windows 8 on Friday when I needed to replace my work laptop. The other laptop is dying and had Windows 7 on it. I had no previous exposure to Windows 8. So these are my observations after 24 hours with Windows 8...

Pros

• Performance seems good. This is a new laptop with a newer chipset and so that may be a factor, but I've heard from others that the OS is faster in general.
• Time to startup or reboot is good. My new laptop still has a clean OS so there is not a lot of stuff opening at startup, but I'm hoping this continues.
• Printing and specifically the setup of a new printer. I'm glad to see this automatically recognized my WiFi-enabled HP printer at home, and set it as my default printer.

Cons

• The UI is crisp, but it is difficult to navigate and definitely not intuitive. My litmus test is "could a family member do it with some initial guidance?" My answer is no.
• The UI sometimes shifts between Metro and Windows 7, such as when I manage Users. I am in the Metro UI, select the app/task to manage Users, get thrown into a UI that looks like Windows 7, and when I am done I still remain in there. I must manually tell Windows to go back to the Metro UI. Naughty naughty.
• Windows Update. Cripes, can't you do any better Microsoft? Download 445MB of patches, no problem. Take a while to install them, no problem. Then tell me that there was a problem and 3 are not OK to install? Not OK. Handle it. Reboot again and install if needed. Make it more it more invisible to the non-technical user. The only reason those fixes got installed is because I rebooted and manually ran Windows Update again. What if they were fixes to resolve a zero-day exploit?
• The Search feature is stupid. I must first highlight one of Apps, Settings, or Files before searching. For example, if I don't changed the highlighted default from Apps to Settings and search for "Windows Update", Windows won't find anything. Is this really that intuitive to a non-technical user? Just search, and segment the results for me. This is how Apple does it - I just enter the search string and Apple immediately starts searching and segmenting the results.
• While you're at it Microsoft, don't bury the Search feature in that right-side tool bar. There is probably a known sequence to get it to appear, but after a couple of hours I am still fumbling. Put it somewhere where it is always there. Maybe I can drag this in as a tile. Who knows. Grrr.

Overall, I wouldn't voluntarily go to Windows 8. The Metro UI is clunky, perhaps better suited for a tablet or touch screen, and many times is not intuitive or consistent.

The bar has been set higher, Microsoft. The days of one needing to be a geek are over. Fire at least some of your design and useability teams...

I'm not just being an Apple fan boy saying this. Selfishly, I want Microsoft to succeed since they are in my local backyard and the employees' salaries are good for the local economy. Moreover, competition is good across vendors overall since it forces innovation. The Metro UI just seems like it was designed by geeks for geeks.

Anyway, caveat emptor if you're going to Windows 8...

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[Redcap]

Windoze 8 is garbage.

 

[jrprich]

Tried it, I will stick with W7, which I like

 

[Old as Dirt]

It's.. aahhhhh Different for sure.. had to go in the BIOS and reset defaults so my dvd/cd/external drives and stuff would be recognized.. be better with a tablet when "swiping" for sure.. on a desktop, not so much..

 

[3MTA3]

ATCclears hit the nail on the head. Had to get Windows 8 to get the new laptop I wanted. Also figured MS would squash 7 sooner rather than later to force us off of it like every other OS we get used to enough to be productive with. W8 sucketh for sure, but I've gotten mostly used to its UI nonsense. For home use its doable, if I had to use it at work, I'd be seriously unhappy. Hope the 8.1 upgrade due soon fixes the UI.

If MS keeps going down this path I'll need to shell out more bux next time for a Mac or go Linux.

 

[t.huynh]

Download "start8" it gives you a start button and gets rid of that metro bubblegum. <---this for some reason is a paid app now.

Adding link to free app

http://ninite.com/classicstart/

Sent from my Nexus 4 to annoy people who can't skip one line of text.

 

[Garg]

Windows update, has always been an issue. 3 updates not installing only means that it need to reboot to finish (is my guess). I personally find the W8 update way more invisible than before, W7,XP, etc...
I, after a few weeks with it, find nothing really wrong with it per se, just a little different.
My job requires me to adopt any NEW OS early. Although I did like W7 very much, I have had no real problem learning and adapting to W8. It is smaller, and faster, and does pretty much anything W7 did.

My only real MAJOR grip is backward compatibility. This has always been a weak spot for MS. I just think that any software designed to work for MS should automatically work with any NEW os from MS. It does not. GRRRR..... I have some really cool software that is now garbage.

 

[sheepdip]

we got an offer from Microsoft to upgrade to windows 8 for a onetime download fee of twenty dollars. the wife talked to a friend of hers with twenty years at Microsoft, she said don't do it. that was good enough for us!

 

[drew]

Windoze 8 is garbage.

They seem to really screw up every other release. Millennium, Vista, 8. At least there's a pattern. The other ones suck much less.

 

[Kruel J]

Had Windows 7. Upgraded to Win8. Back to Win7. No thanks. Been building gaming rigs for the last 10 years. Through XP and it's many SP's, Vista (cough/puke) Win 7 and then to Win 8. At the end of the day, Windows 7 64bit seems to be the most reliable of the group. Easy install, full USB driver support. Windows 8 is a tablet OS forced to play nice on a desktop. Doesn't work.

 

[nwo]

Yep, Windows 8 sucks the big one.

 

[Smitty79]

Windows 8 Ahhhhhhhhh!!

 

[Redcap]

They seem to really screw up every other release. Millennium, Vista, 8. At least there's a pattern. The other ones suck much less.

Yup. Win7 is tolerable if you absolutely must use a Micro$oft OS.

 

[svxr8dr]

Microsoft is incapable of having to good OS's back to back

Win 98 Followed by WinME
2000/XP Followed by Vista
Win7 Followed by Win8

Come Beavis.....come to Ubuntu

 

[accessbob]

I also dislike Windows 8. If I get a new computer, I will be reverting to Win7. I also dislike Office 2013 but am going to be forced to move to it at work by April of next year. I used to be Microsoft fan (heck I used to be a Microsoft MVP in Access for 3 years) but am no longer.

 

[3MTA3]

A quarter of a century developing a UI and can't get it right...when you do get it close enough you improve it until its unusable by the majority of your customers. Every time they roll out a new OS or product nobody will buy it until they force you to by removing support for the previous version, opening you up to security risks (that I'm starting to thing are designed in for this very purpose).

Nifty that I need to pay a third party (thanks for the tip, t.hyunh) $5 to fix a $160 OS.

 

[t.huynh]

Nifty that I need to pay a third party (thanks for the tip, t.hyunh) $5 to fix a $160 OS.

I could have sworn that was free the last time I downloaded it.

I'll try to find another one thats free.

http://ninite.com/classicstart/

Try out that one.

For anyone who works on computers a lot. www.ninite.com in an AWESOME site. You pick which apps you use, and it automatically downloads and installs them all. AND, it says no to installing toolbars etc..

 

[Botte Hork]

Like there are OFWGs that sneer at anything that's not a 1911, there are people that don't like changes in the user interface.

I like the idea of the Win8 Metro interface, but the problem is that there are still no decent 'apps' to take care of many important basic functions:

- Email. The client that comes with Win8 just sucks. OK for a low traffic user that doesn't care about slightly "advanced" functionality, but I haven't found a pure metro app that even does email (outside of the yahoo branded client).
- Browser. No app-interface one besides IE. The IE doesn't suck, but I'm now mostly a firefox'er, so I would like that.
- Skype is there as the 'desktop' and the 'app' version. The desktop is OK, but the app version sucks.

Some of my main gripes with the Metro interface:
- The runtime broker. After a few days on, it starts sucking up memory and you sort of need to kill it in case apps are unresponsive.
- The almost complete lack of configurability. Yes it keeps it simple for most users, but many would like to tweak the experience a little. My first 'metro' experience was a Windows Phone 7.5 phone. Quite nice, but once you wanted to play with settings, almost no app allowed it. Sort of the Metro styleguide of simplicity I guess, but it sucks. Compared to iOS it's nicer, due to the live tiles (same in Win8), but Android has the optimal mix in that sense (both live tiles/widgets, as well as configurability, although its styling is much less uniform).
- As mentioned above, the switching. They actually appear to be 2 different worlds, the traditional desktop and the app/Metro interface.
- Metro interface is very phone/tablet oriented. I have a 24" screen on my PC and I'm not alone, many people have even bigger screens. Having some sort of weird concoction of 2 apps open next to each other is not really as pretty as I'd like.
- Power off. Why do I need to go into settings? And did they fix the issue that hitting the power button on your computer would start the shutdown, instead of asking for confirmation, which got introduced with win7? I believe XP had the confirmation dialog, which was great.

I do not mind the move towards touch. Many laptops have touch screens and I got a little touchpad for the gesturing, which works well.



I'll try one of the classic starts I think.

 

[MrNiceGuy]

3 years ago I was a hardcore windows fan. I was on my 3rd windows mobile smartphone, I used 3 windows computers, my xbox was my main gaming console...

Now, 3 years later, I have and android smartphone, I wouldn't touch the xbox1 with a 10 foot pole, and for the first time since the mid 90's, i'm looking at an apple laptop to get the ultimate desktop experience.


I take no pride in the fact that microsoft has lost me as a customer. It's solely due to their anti-consumer policies and the horrible new cross-platform GUI. I hope they pull their head out soon.

 

[Ramjet12]

We've been testing it for over a year and it's not only hard to use but difficult to write software for it. Our project was delayed 4 months because we couldn't integrate our software with metro. In the enterprise space I know of no one that's using it nor willing to upgrade to it. Windows 7 is the next Xp.