Windows 8

I thought that I would make up my own mind about Windows 8, the net is full enough of other people’s opinions which, for the most pat I have avoided.

I have intentionally waited to install it on touch enabled hardware which, as we all know, it is really designed for instead of on traditional desktop equipment so that I could "experience" the full impact of the think.

I have been an avid Windows user since Windows 2, in my career I have made a lot of money off the back of Microsoft's products and certifications so I've tried to look at it with open eyes and minimal prejudice.

Yet all I can say is that I am utterly disappointed with this slow motion train crash of self-indulgent, incomprehensible, badly designed and from an interface perspective slow mess of a technology preview. Yes, it is a technology preview, a beta... but quite simply all I can think to say is that it is just awful.

I purchased both Windows Millennium and Windows Vista with my own hard earned cash, despite the rampant criticisms levied at both of the 'big flop' releases, I used them as stable OS's and particularly with Vista saw the criticism as facts of poor release scheduling and a lot of Chinese whispers generated through initial negative hype. A bandwagon on to which too many people just blindly jumped.

Yet I promise Microsoft right now that based upon what I have seen so far today, that I will not be investing a single penny of my own money into this venture. I cannot see myself using it, touch or otherwise and I simply cannot see enterprise investing in it save for the few hipsters who simply must have it because it's new.

What a mess the start menu is. I can just picture system in university libraries, loaded to the hilt with application software to cater for all classes of student and the complete inability of anyone to find anything in this system. All I have installed are Windows 7 device driver and already the number of help file shortcuts and meaningless icons has over taken the length of the native social networking nonsense.

For what it's worth, I fully acknowledge that most of the rest of the world is into social networking nonsense and that I am something of an exception here.

The transitioning back and forth between the new metro and the old Windows Explorer is a complete and utter afterthought. Someone came up with this 'bright idea' for Metro and just thinks 'well, this is all you need now, this is it. The be all and end all of UI design'.
I don't like it, I don't like it from an accessibility standpoint, I don't like it from a usability standpoint and I don't like it from an aesthetic standpoint. It looks dated and frankly desperate.
I don't like it on WP7 either, hence I didn't buy one. I can promise you that I won't be suffering it on anything else - any more than I will suffer the aesthetics of OSX - OSX may do a lot of things, but I (me, C:Amie) do not like the UI. I (me, C:Amie) do not want to sit looking at it all day. From my experiences here with Windows 8, even with the touch. I say exactly that.

The fact that the tech preview doesn't like my hardware and the system is throwing unhandled interrupts isn't helping much either.

But yes, the huge full screen PowerPoint presentation apps are somewhat nicer to look at than Metro... but if I want to know the weather, why do I need a 3 page PowerPoint slide and have to scroll and scroll and scroll to get to data. Up until Windows XP Windows was getting simpler to use, then with XP Microsoft started adding extra clicks and screens to get to where you needed to be. It's been an annoying adjustment as with Vista and 7 even more senseless extra clicking and screens became necessary to do things... I'll adjust. But they've gone too far here. Everything useful seems to be hidden. Want to get back into the start menu from old school Windows Explorer mode? Go fish. Want to change the default Weather in Seattle (in Fahrenheit) to something useful, go fish. Want to exit a Metro PowerPoint slideshow... yep, you guessed it. Go fish. Don't think that it's in right click (tap and hold) either, because it's not.

Beyond that, not only is Metro slow from a usability perspective, it is also just slow, unstable and buggy. I even managed to blue screen it by clicking around to try and find all the hidden options.

To cap it all, there is yet another cloud service that you don't want but you have to register for so that as much information is may be useful to corporations, spammers and advertisers can be mooched off of you in exchange for badly written, ad laden and 99.999% pointless craplet application (anyone been in the iStore or Google Play recently?).

So, as far as I can see, if Microsoft wound up with a disaster because of Vista, shareholders should be getting very nervous at this time about what is about to happen at the end of the year.

Has anyone else look at it yet?

I have an old home brew (3.4ghz) P4 machine that i use to test operating systems, play with viruses, and ect. and when i tried windows 8 I could not stand it the GUI is garbage...windows is almost dead to me I have almost fully migrated to fedora Linux and the only reason I still use windows is to sync my iphone and play games with steam. Lots of computer related stuff that I love has died and probibly wont be coming back

Meanwhile, I'm still going along happily with XP . . .

Probably i will alone in this opinion.... But i was more satisfied by vista than xp... I remember having several problems with xp, blue screens, ecc. In my opinion the older SO was less stable. Windows Vista need to be setted at first launch because it's full of useless grafical app that occupy a lot of ram... but when setted is quite good.

I don't necessarily disagree with you meolo2002, I had few problems with Vista and few With XP. I even jumped to to x64 with the move to Vista. Once SP1 was out and if you understood superfetch and the gpu loading it was perfectly fine.

What we have here though is an ilconceived problem that has no clear idea over its own identity. Microsoft have jumped on the tablet bandwagon at the expense of everything else. In other words they are terrified of IOS and Android.
I am sure that slate will be the next big thing... no arguments here, but Microsoft seems to have forgotten that they are not the catholic church, they simply cannot get away with telling us that we are all sinners and tell us what to do. Not that I'd ever do what the church told me.

I am writing this on 8 In tablet mode and I have to say that while the handwriting accuracy is much improved over 7, the on screen keyboard and general text input experience is poor. sigh. I guess that I will be spending the weekend stripping it off and rebuilding my boot sector to remove the fish.

Edit: hahaha, I'm back to laptop mode now. I just discovered that as my Toshiba has no hardware Windows key on the tablet screen, I cannot get back into metro (the start menu) from Windows Explorer mode. The OSK doesn't have a windows key of escape key either, so it's useless and I can't seem to gesture it back anywhere on the touch interface.

In addition, I just discovered that ie and ie metro don't inherit sessions or states automatically. Pha.

Hahahah i agree

So what we do, because we already have a vested interest in legacy hardware/OS, is wonder how long we can cobble our current workaround.

If Win8 is not the way, and XP is soon to be unsupported, then Win7 (w/ all its legacy drawbacks) seems to be what we have left.

With a new-to-me netvertible, I'm finally trying out Win7, and rather enjoying it, but I'm not trying to sync a handheld with it.

Funny how all roads keep leading back to XP. It's is very discouraging.

Jake

I think that I will be passing on 8 and waiting for 9, I suspect that enterprise will too which will mean that Windows 7 will be extended in the support lifecycle a little bit. Windows 7 is OK for the time being because you can run XP in a VM on it and still benefit from access to sync your H/PC. So long as MS Office is supported on XP, you should be OK to do that.

I don't have any problems with 7 that I can't suffer through. I can turn off the task bar grouping and the taskbar pull out menu's and be fairly happy that it works how I work. From where I am sitting now, I simply cannot see 8 being intuitive towards how I do anything. It's converting the PC from 'do what you want' into 'do it our way and oh by the way if you want to use it for something other than light web browsing, social networking and being violated privacy wise, get out'.

About 30 minutes ago I made the mistake of typing in a Live ID into the thing... well, guess what, it's like Adroid. You cannot unassociate the account. Most of the major apps on the home screen also require live sign-in... I just DO NOT want it. Similarly with the app store, it's all just a social joke.

There is an 'all apps' option (hidden of course) mode for the home screen. It's clumsy, inefficient and cumbersome.. but if that were the new start menu and they reorganised it better and added a persistent search box I could live with that. Sadly there is no option to pin it that way or customise it.


Edit: Here is another observation. There is no help, contextual or otherwise anywhere on the interfaces. With android when you first start using it there are popups making suggestions, here you are expected to know it all already. Here there isn't even a help & support link on the start menu any more!