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Socoder -> Off Topic -> Win8 Lovin'

Sat, 23 Mar 2013, 14:13
JL235
I installed Windows 8 onto a new SSD yesterday; my PC is so god damn fast! It makes such an incredible difference
Sat, 23 Mar 2013, 14:13
Dabz
Quick question... Do you like Windows 8? /(I have really looked forward to this answer, on the basis that, I class JL, as... neutral, and in such cases, worth listening too!

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Intel Core i5 6400 2.7GHz, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 (8GB), 8Gig DDR4 RAM, 256GB SSD, 1TB HDD, Windows 10 64bit
Sat, 23 Mar 2013, 14:15
Dabz
Damn.. where should I have put the closing sodding bracket?

Only kidding... Whats your full SP on Windows 8 JL?

Would love to hear it, because, I have, the idea... That, you will find it... Like I do... Not bad!

Dabz

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Intel Core i5 6400 2.7GHz, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 (8GB), 8Gig DDR4 RAM, 256GB SSD, 1TB HDD, Windows 10 64bit
Sat, 23 Mar 2013, 16:35
waroffice
I have been on W8 for a while and kinda like it too.

And it does seem fast. I compared battlefield 3 FPS and its was 1-2 quicker but that could be due to the reinstall.


Sat, 23 Mar 2013, 18:19
9572AD
Win8 runs better (aside from some schizophrenia with the not-called-Metro stuff) with a smaller footprint, by all accounts.

It also excludes developers, spews ads, and forces you to buy yearly updates.

Personally, I won't support that kind of crap unless the OS and its updates are ridiculously low cost (say, less than $20 for the OS, less than $10 for the updates). Which they are not.

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All the raw, animal magnetism of a rutabaga.
Sun, 24 Mar 2013, 02:42
Jayenkai
The thing is, it doesn't even need a SSD to show off it's fast-booting abilities.
Or at least, the old preview edition from last year didn't, anyway!
Even my shitty old half-dead crapped out PC was able to boot the consumer preview edition up within about 5 or 6 seconds from power-on to "Ready to go"
That's BLINDINGLY fast, especially when you compare it to my Laptop.

I have to hit the power button, then leave it for a minute before I type my password in. Then I have to leave it another minute before it switches from "Here's your desktop" to "Here's your USABLE desktop"!

Win 8 preview was Power.. ... Password-Ready-Go-go-go!!!

A DRASTIC improvement.

...
Having said that, The Win7 lappy is getting all the use, whilst the crapola PC with Win8 preview edition on it, is still sitting there, completely and totally unused since I went into hospital over a year ago.
It hasn't so much as been powered on.
It still has the Win8 preview on it.
.. I wonder what might happen if I dared to turn it on, today?
I might setup the iPod camera, and film* that!! Could be good for a LOL at MS's "WTF!? Buy me, buy me!!" billboards that'll no doubt pop up all over the thing!

(* Spot the archaic word.. There will be no actual film involved. iPods record digitally!)

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''Load, Next List!''
Sun, 24 Mar 2013, 03:46
waroffice
I've seen ads in metro but its not like you get on your phone, its crap like news feeds for products. You can just right click uninstall tile or words to that effect.

To be honest, as soon as metro loads I click desktop and only go back if I have to
Sun, 24 Mar 2013, 11:23
JL235
First, it's **MUCH** faster. Jay is also right, SSD is not really needed for that. Lots of small things that used to be seamless, like installing devices, copying files, and windows update, are even more seamless now.

The desktop UI also feels far more compact, and much more clean. Explorer especially has *WAAAAAY* more space for content. There are also lots of other improvements, like being able to mount ISOs (damn useful).

There is a spellchecker built into Windows it's self, which is refreshing. However some desktop applications, such as Metro IRC (which is a desktop app), offer their own right-click menu, which means you are only informed that your spelling is wrong. You don't get any corrections. : (

However overall, my opinion is mixed. I certainly won't be moving back to Win7, but when I upgraded to Vista and Win7, I knew straight away the upgrade was an improvement. This is even though I've already been running Win8 on my laptop; it's quite a different experience on a big desktop.

Metro Issues


Most issues are around here. Not Metro it's self, but that you are meant to be running Metro and Desktop side by side, but you can't really do that. A lot of this comes from the fact I have two monitors, and Metro only runs on one at a time. If you select a desktop application, Metro gets fully hidden. If I'm selecting something on the second monitor, and the application is not 100% living on the second monitor, then it'll hide then too.

I had hoped to use IE Metro as my main browser, because it *IS* really nice. But the desktop-metro switching is so jarring, I'm staying with FireFox.

Lots of Metro apps just don't make sense on a desktop. For example Amazon, Ebay, and Facebook would all be great on a tablet, but on a desktop, they are inferior to just visiting the site. Another example is that lots of small utility apps, you'd just never use. Like calculator, or an app to unzip files. On a desktop, you'd use 7-Zip or powershell/terminal for maths. So lots of Metro apps are a bit of a white elephant on a desktop.

The only Metro app which I find usable on a desktop, is the Mail app (which is clean, pretty, and does it's job well). That's it.

They have a music metro application, as a metro version of Windows Media Player. I had hoped to use it, as it can be set as a thin bar down the left side of the screen, however it's just not as natural as Windows Media Player it's self. Just finding your music section is surprisingly confusing. It fails to show the album art, and the UI is just wrong. For example if you select an artist, you are shown all of the tracks you own for them, not an album list. In media player I can type an artists name, to search for them; in the Metro Music app, you can't.

If you go to download Skype, you are pointed to the Metro app by default, which has *significantly* less features than the desktop version. It's also built far too heavily for a tablet interface; lots of big buttons and scrolling, and that's putting aside the auto-hide Metro problem I raised above.

Switching to open Metro apps gets tiring. You move the mouse to the bottom left corner, and then to the top left corner. That's fine on a tablet, or on a small resolution (such as my laptop), but on a 1080 monitor, it's quite a long journey to make.

If you hold the middle mouse button down, you can scroll, and this is broken in Metro (I've tested on both trackball and a mouse). The distance between scrolling slowly, and scrolling at maximum speed, is literally about 10 pixels. So you accidentally scroll, all the way to the end, all the frickin time. All Metro apps suffer from this, however desktops applications don't.

Desktop apps also have an ugly looking icon tile on the start screen, and there is no easy way to set a Metro tile. There is an application called OblyTile which allows you to create a custom tile, and so replace desktop app shortcuts with your own. However it would be nicer if I could just: right-click, set tile!

However, as a start menu, the start screen rocks! My screen is much better laid out than it was with a menu, and I'm now starting to put non-applications on there, like website links, because it's more natural.

So I'm just going to use desktop for everything, and only use Metro for the Start Screen.

On Windows Phone 8, you can arrange the tiles for applications, and I wish the Start Screen allowed you to do it to the same degree. You kinda can, but not much; it's all arranged into columns. MS should also build in the ability to pin pictures, as tiles, to the Start Screen. You can get apps to do this, but they are really missing trick by not building it in.

Fortunately, with Windows Blue it looks like MS are looking to improve a lot of the limitations on Metro, and make it all more seamless. Come back in a year, and Metro may actually be pretty good on a desktop.

Non Metro Issues


Another niggling issue I have is that the keyboard shortcut to create text files is now longer in explorer (yes, this really is a major issue for me). You used to be able to do: 'alt+f w t', and it would make a new text file. Now you have to do: 'alt+h w up-arrow up-arrow enter'.
Sun, 24 Mar 2013, 11:28
Evil Roy Ferguso
Windows 8 is indeed very fast. Metro apps are all but useless on a desktop PC, though, and like others I found the context-switching between the desktop and Start screen mildly irritating.

I have to admit that I installed Classic Shell and haven't looked at the Start screen since. Basically just gives you a faster version of Windows 7. (I only installed the start menu part, the rest of it seems kind of useless, honestly.)

Also have to admit that despite my desktop being massively more powerful I spend most of my time on a Mac from 2008...