I have a password-protected administrative account for security purposes…while the standard user accounts on the computer have no real need for a password, I can’t find a setting that will allow me to turn off the password requirement for the user accounts while leaving the administrative account protected. I did locate the setting that turns off the password requirement for a user account when returning from standby though.
You can either use your microsoft account password (which I agree does tend to encourage people to use simple passwords), or you can set it up so that you log into Windows with a PIN.
I think it probably is possible just to log in without anything, but the cloud integration will probably not be seamless then.
Yes - Alt+F4 brings up a dialog that asks “What do you want the computer to do?”, with a dropdown box offering: Switch user, log out, restart, sleep, shut down
IMO, this is part of the problem - sure, Microsoft made some mistakes in the initial release of Win8, but there is also a groundswell of entirely unjustified, self-perpetuating negativity about it.
Does anyone know why the window manager in Windows is so tightly bound to the OS? Why didn’t they make the window manager easily swappable, so that if you want the Windows 8 OS with the Windows XP interface you could do that. I know Windows allows you to change the theme, but that’s not the same thing as swapping out the window manager.
(The window manager is the thing which provides the look of the desktop, the decorations around the window, controls how you launch new programs, etc. )
In the unix environment, the window manager is just a regular program which can be easily swapped out. You can install different window managers to provide whatever look-and-feel you want. It seems if Windows had that same approach, people could move up to Windows 8 but retain the desktop interface they want.
I think the simplest answer (although not very satisfying) is just because Windows isn’t Unix/Linux - I think it’s fair to describe *nix as an OS with an optional/additional GUI, whereas Windows is a graphical OS with an optional/trivial command line.
You contradict yourself.
According to your first statement they did indeed “take out Alt+F4 for being too useful”. Alt+F4 used to be clean, simple and reliable way to shut down an active program/window from the keyboard. It was useful, for instance, if a program had hung, or your mouse or screen was malfunctioning.
You are telling us it now no longer does what it people have learned to use it for over the years, and even for what it does do, it demands a second interaction, calling for reading a menu from the screen, and probably the mouse too. This seems to be another excellent example of change for the worse, just for the sake of change, and for the sake of forcing experienced uses to learn a whole new way of doing things.
Windows 8 fully deserves its bad reputation, and 8.1 merely mitigates a few of its very worst features. I have been a Windows user since 3.0, and this is the first version that has had me completely baffled on startup, so that I had to go to another machine and start furiously googling in order to be able to do anything at all. It is also the first version where I have had to to hack the registry in order to get a window background color other than blinding white. I need to get into the registry again to see if I can find a way to make the ugly “flat” edges of inactive windows stop blending into what is behind them, now. The startup screen is still largely terra incognita to me, but I suppose I need to take the time to clear off all the useless apps and install tiles for the programs I actually use, making it function a bit more like a useful start menu, although it will still be one with elephantiasis.
No…it is absolutely, entirely justisfied— to bitch about stupid changes which provide no benefits and cause you significant headaches, and even prevent you from working at all.
The praise I hear about Win 8 is always from people who for some reason are proud to say "yes, it only took me 3 days, 2 downloads and a bit of tweaking, and I was able to work almost as efficiently as I did before. And golly gee whizz, the colored tiles sure are pretty!
I get paid to produce professional documents. My clients often demand same-day service. I can’t tell them, “Sorry, I can’t do that for you because we just switched to Win 8…Tell the judge and all the lawyers to postpone your court date; he’ll be sure to agree-- after all, Win 8 is more important than anything else on earth.”
No I don’t
Oh dear.
Let me be clearer: Alt+F4, when used on an empty desktop (what asterion was asking about) brings up the shutdown dialog. When used with a focused window, it closes that window. In summary, Alt+F4 does exactly the fucking same as it did in Windows XP.
The example I quoted though, was negativity about an entirely imagined problem (the cynical notion that a feature would be removed for being too useful). There’s a lot of that about (in fact, I just responded to another example of it above).
You haven’t heard that from me.
If that actually happened to you, something is wrong that isn’t Windows 8.
To put the Windows 8.x fiasco in perspective, I was – and still am – debating whether an upgrade to Windows 7 over XP provides any added value – and for some of my machines/apps, the answer is no! 
Whereas I and many others regard Windows 8 as mostly a couple of giant steps backwards, even if some random things under the hood are better. Here’s the deal: ever since Windows 1.0, each successive iteration of Windows provided significant and compelling new functionality and, generally, reliability improvements. This reached a peak with Windows XP which brought the vaunted NT kernel into the consumer mainstream and gave consumers unprecedented OS stability and NT functionality. Ever since then, Microsoft has been trying to figure out what to do for an encore, and failing to come up with much of anything. There’s a reason that there was no successor to XP for such a long time.
And the reasons for the Windows 8 fiasco have pretty much already been stated – mostly Microsoft’s doomed (IMHO) tablet-phone-PC integration strategy, and then throw in a gratuitous “change just for the sake of change” approach to confuse everyone. They tried that stunt (in a relatively more minor way) with Office when they introduced the “ribbon” UI in Office 2007, a stunt that has kept me frozen at Office 2003 and provided a healthy revenue stream for at least one company selling “classic interface” add-ons featuring actual menus where, for a price, your brand new edition of Office can look just like the old one that you actually knew how to use.
This. Someone needs to tell the kids at Microsoft to stop playing and try to understand how their software is actually used.
well, I was only slightly exaggerating…but my point is perfectly valid.
Changing to new software like Win 8 requires taking a staff person off of his regular duties for at least half a day, so he can learn to operate it, (after googling and downloading extra programs which he hopes will solve his problems), then giving him another half day to teach the rest of the staff, and then recognizing that everyone’s usual productivity will drop by 10-20 percent for several days.
That translates into telling a client that the work he expected to receive from you today at 5:00 will not be ready till tomorrow. You may not actually have to postpone a court date, but you will lose money for a couple days.
But hey, golly gee whiz, those colored tiles sure are pretty!
Any significant change to the software you use in a business critical context should be properly evaluated, piloted and tested - this isn’t a Windows 8 problem - it’s a problem with any kind of change.
Change can be painful and disruptive, but it isn’t going to stop happening - in fact, I don’t think you want it to stop happening - whatever your current favourite flavour of OS - XP, Windows 7, OSX, etc - it arrived to you as the end product of a process of change.
I’ve no idea who you’re saying that to, as that has no semblance to anything I’ve ever argued about Win8. You’re not obliged to use the tiles
Sure, but some kinds of change are productive, desirable, and justifiable. Other kinds are superficial or pointless and even counterproductive. We apparently disagree on how to categorize the changes in Windows 8, but you can’t argue that any kind of change is always good.
My view is that throughout the evolution of Windows, up to XP, there were always clear objectives arising from problems that needed to be solved. Windows 3.x introduced real multitasking. Windows 95 was a hugely revamped UI and, at least from the user’s perception, eliminated MS-DOS as a discrete component. XP brought everything together over the NT kernel, gave consumers rock-solid stability, and finally unified Microsoft’s OS product line.
And it was very clear to me that at that point, Microsoft started thrashing about because there was no clear direction for the future since there was no major problem to be solved. This may sound terribly naive and old-fashioned but there really does sometimes come a point of diminishing returns, basically a point where you go, “this is all I need”. For me, XP was like that. Longhorn (Vista) started out with unrealistic pie-in-the-sky goals like WinFS which went nowhere and, one by one, were dropped from the project scope, many never to be heard from again. There were even rumors that Microsoft would drop major OS releases altogether and go for some kind of cloud-based service-oriented architecture. I think every “change” – and every OS release after XP – has been a struggle to try to provide some kind of value – often with dubious results. AFAICT, among the most impressive “features” of Vista/Win7 is that the edges of windows are transparent! Also, that large directories of multimedia files can take a long time to display because Windows processes each file, and can hang if it stumbles across an unsupported format!
As I recall, Win8 asks you for a username/password by default, there may be a way to avoid that, but it was no big deal so I just put in a simple username/password to get me in.
Then later, I set up a Skype account since, hey, it’s there and I might use it. And all of a sudden, my login to Win8 itself changed from username/simple password to the email address/complex password I used to set up Skype, and things like my background/spash page changed back to default, etc.
Now, I’ve worked with computers enough to understand that it just generated a new user profile for me, integrated directly with Windows online services and such.
But holy crap, if my mom had Win8 and did that, I’d be in for a long, painful call and trip to her house.
I’m not arguing that any change is good - in a business context, finding yourself in a situation where you cannot function because of something you changed, means you have the wrong approach to IT management. The right thing to do here would be to evaluate, pilot, and then maybe abandon as an upgrade - that’s what we’ve done where I work (with the exception of a small rollout to tablet devices where people want them) - so we’re staying on Windows 7 for now, knowing that one of several possibilities looms in the future:
[ul]
[li]Another version of Windows will become available, in which these migration woes are reduced[/li][li]We’ll have to migrate, adapt and suck it up[/li][li]We’ll have to migrate, including finding ways to reduce the impact (such as third party add-ons)[/li][/ul]
At home, I just switched from XP to Windows 8 and it didn’t hurt at all.
I personally think the answer is because Bill Gates was on a singular mission to win in business which drove a rapid pace of change without a lot of deliberate thought for product design implications.
My friends that worked on windows in the 90’s were pushed hard to get stuff done and out the door fast. I don’t think there was time allowed for lots of planning and elegant design.
This is a part of the problem Microsoft has faced for years. Windows XP was GOOD ENOUGH and tight-fisted IT departments can’t afford the time or hassle or expense to beta test new versions of the OS in which old programs will mysteriously stop working. There’s many many examples out there of programs that will only work on XP- all the compatibility layer stuff built into 7 is useless. Only XP will suffice. (However my personal thought on this is that the compatibility layers will work fine because one of them is XP in a virtual machine but again IT departments don’t have the time or energy to try this). The only way Microsoft will ever break this vicious cycle is to actually break the software and take out backwards compatibility.
Note also that Apple does not do backwards compatibility - if you stop upgrading, eventually your program of choice will stop working. So on the Apple side you won’t see people in 2014 being forced to use programs put together thirteen years ago. Innovate or die.
As mentioned above, shiny graphics equals increased power and resource consumption. Does it do you any actual good to have a window border that looks like frosted glass?
However, I think MS would be doing themselves a great favor by making these bells and whistles available for those who wished to have them and could afford them in terms of graphics capabilities.
It was necessary. Microsoft was getting requests for features that were already in the software but hidden so deep in sub-menus that a casual user would never find them. The ribbon puts it all up there for you and doesn’t actually take up much more space than the old menu bars did. As I understand Win 8 took this a step further and made the ribbons collapsible so you could push them out of the way if their existence rankled you that much.
In any case, Win 8 has been put out to pasture and will be remembered as Ballmer’s big failure. Balmer was also put out to pasture and Gates might be next. The Nadella era of Microsoft is already a marked improvement over the previous regime and I am pretty sure he got rid of that horrible system in which MS employees had to play a vicious, backstabby version of musical chairs to keep their jobs. If Google’s mantra was “don’t be evil” MS seems to have acquired the mantra of “stop pissing people off”. Windows 9 will be a welcome change.
I agree… with a caveat. Hardware does still drive OS requirements, but not nearly as fast as Microsoft would like. I mean, eventually you’ll have to upgrade your PC to accomodate 128 bit processors, or something along those lines, but that kind of thing is slow in coming.
But you’re absolutely right- for years, MS probably had all these grandiose ideas of what a desktop OS could and should be, and come about Windows XP or 7, they did it.
Windows 8 was essentially their attempt to copy Apple’s semi-unified UI experience, except to go one better- EVERYTHING Microsoft was going to have that interface- mobiles, tablets, PCs, and even game consoles. They actually retrofitted that interface onto the Xbox360 at some point, and the Xbox One has it out of the gate.
Thing is, people seem to be more resistant to change than they are stupid. Most people can handle having a Windows 7 PC, an Android phone, and a Xbox One with the charms interface, without it being a big problem for them. They do get cranky when someone moves their cheese and makes something different, without a good reason (from their perspective) for doing so. And just making the PC look like the Xbox isn’t usually a “good” reason from most people’s perspective, hence the irritation with Windows 8.
About a week ago, my octogenarian father-in-law called (like many Dopers, I am my parents’ and parents-in-laws’ Technical Support Professional – many holiday visits to their homes start with one of them stating, “Say, can I show you something on The Computer?”) because his monitor wasn’t turning on when he turned on the computer. I figured that the monitor power button had been pushed inadvertently, but it took 10 minutes over the phone to A) convince him that the monitor did have a power button and then B) describe where it might be.
In between him hanging up after saying he’d look for the power button and him calling back to tell me that he’d found the power button and the monitor was working, I had time to contemplate him getting a new computer with Windows 8.x when his current one (running Windows 98) gives up the ghost, and then me, via phone, trying to walk him through connecting to AOL so he can look at emailed photos of grandkids … I poured myself a stiff drink before the phone rang.
I completely understand that retirees who use their computers to access AOL and update their IRA spreadsheets on Windows 98 (and continue to store those spreadsheets and other Very Important Documents on floppy disks, despite assurances from family members that many new computers don’t come with CD drives, let alone floppy disk drives) represent a slice of Microsoft’s clientele pie chart that is so miniscule as to not even warrant its own color, but still … Windows 8.x is gonna result in a lotta liquor flowing at my house.