Thank you all folks,
Methinks Classic shell may be the program for Armyn, in his 90 odd years he’s heard more swear words in more languages than I will ever know. I heard many of them yesterday whilst trying to get that dammed OS to function as he, a mere customer, wanted.
I really don’t understand why MS has been so recalcitrant in addressing this issue, every flavour of Linux is more intuitive than this pile of ****.
A previous poster recommended win 7, which I also heartily support. Sadly the majority of ‘vanilla’ Laptops and System units sold these days have win 8 as default. A change to win 7, even in it’s most basic version, is a hundred quid a pop.
If it were my PC and I had no choice but to learn a new User Interface then so be it. My friend pre-dates the modern PC by several decades and, rightly IMHO, deeply dislikes MS’s unilateral decision to change his modus operandi regarding something as obvious as how a human and a computer work together.
As a counterpoint to the above - I just moved my mother from an XP machine to Windows 8 and she loves it. The Start menu tiles give her a quick overview of weather, news, travel, awaiting email messages etc.
She was a timid user of XP, but has taken to Win8 very easily. If anything, Wini8 is better for people with lower levels of computer literacy or confidence, because it’s simpler.
My rule of thumb -
If there is something vry useful, familiar, intuitive, or easy to use - Microsoft will either hide it or delete it from the next version of Office and Windows.
The most annoying thing is that it’a all pretty much a fresh coat of paint on the same turd. Peel it off and it’s the exact same crap as before… I.e. Right click on (My) Computer - big pretty panel in Win7 or 2008, instead of XP’s plain-jane grey boring one. Select Advanced options or Remote Access and presto! you have the exact same panels and tabs as in XP, 2003, etc. What? They only showed the first panel to the big shots during the demonstration, so that’s all they prettied up? A huge number of “new” Windows features are like this.
Print queues - in Windows Xp/2003 the Printers/Details panel showed the number of print jobs pending in the queue - the most logical thing yo want to see in a busy or failing print enviironment, right? Guess which key detail is not visible in “new improved Windows”? (7 or 8) Similarly “Print test page” is hidden, and depending where you click, there are two different “Printer Properties”.
Screen resolution? Screeen saver? Every feature of new Windoze eems to be like this.
the beauty of Linux and Apple is that i is evolutionary. New versions may add features and functions, but there is very little of this re-arranging the furniture just for the sake of doing so.
shrug Cold booting, I go from POST to the Win 7 login screen in about 15 seconds. Windows 8 may be able to beat that (though I suspect it requires a BIOS/UEFI with Fastboot support and my enthusiast motherboard has had issues with turning that on in multi-boot environments), but really, even if it boots in 10 seconds to Win 7’s 15, I fail to see it as THAT great of a benefit.
Out of curiosity, does it do this out of the box? It’s fairly easy to set Windows 7 up to not even check for updates, to let you know an update is available but not download it, or to download an update, but not update until you say ok.
And in the meantime, eliminated the Ultimate option, replacing it with Pro which lacks any (admittedly buggy, but still useful in Windows 7 for those of us running Linux-based fileservers) NFS support from any version of Windows 8 except Enterprise. No thanks, I’ll stick to 7 Ultimate for that reason alone. And of course Windows 8 also tosses out built in DVD playback licensing and Windows Media Center support and makes you pay for the Pro license AND the Win 8 Media Pack in order to add it back in, which means that upgrading a Win 7 HTPC with a Cablecard tuner to Windows 8 is the cost of a Win 8 Pro Upgrade + Media Pack for exactly the same functionality I have in Windows 7 (Home Premium and above) now.
Eh, I suppose I can give Windows 8 the advantage over Windows 7 on this one.
Just because something has changed doesn’t mean it’s an improvement.
Just because something is old doesn’t mean it should change.
Saying that “things must change” really doesn’t address whether the interface is appropriate for most use cases or not, it’s just an empty meaningless statement.
you- like most people- seem to believe that “intuitive” is equivalent to “what I’m used to.”
you mean the same Apple that threw out their OS entirely in favor of one they purchased from NeXT? Or the same “Linux” that still has people complaining about Ubuntu’s move to Unity from GNOME? Or how much scorn has been heaped upon GNOME 3.0 because of how different it is from GNOME 2 (now called MATE?) See, I’ve used most versions of Windows, all versions of Mac OS from 7.x to 10.7, multiple Linux distributions and several classical UNIXes (some with the most user-hostile GUIs imaginable.) I’ve reached the conclusion that the people bitching about Windows 8 are bitching just to have something to bitch about. They spend more time bitching than it would take them to get used to the changes in Win 8.
if you think that moving to Apple or Linux is somehow going to be an easier transition for someone than to Windows 8, you’re off your rocker.
It’s not hierarchical, and it doesn’t scale to large numbers of anything. When I first installed the Win8 as an upgrade from Win7, my “start screen” was 78 screens wide(!); mostly because it insisted on making a tile for every internet favorite and little Adobe helper app. (This was a beta, there may be a more reasonable limit, now). And this is on a machine with no touch capability, so I don’t need an inch-and-a-half square icon for every little thing. Yes, I could clear it, but since you can’t group-select either, it would take weeks.
Developers don’t get paid for leaving things the same.
ETA: So you get arbitrary changes like the type of *.bat files going from “Batch File”, where it sorts alphabetically near the top, to “Windows batch file” where it sorts to the bottom, to “Microsoft Windows batch file” where it sorts in the middle.
Or for stacked icons in the task bar, the newest window stacks on the bottom in one OS, and stacks on the top in another.
Yeah, the “Metro” screen (who came up with that name??) takes up multiple screens and space-wasting tiles to do what a screen full of icons or a text Start Menu list does much better. Why? Because it’s actually for tablets where fingers are fatter than mouse pointers. “Jack of all trades, master of none.”
Intuitive, schmintuitive - when I have to Google how to simply logoff Win8/Svr2012, that’s not just different, it’s completely unintuitive. At least in the older versions, on the start menu, you would see those options while doing other tasks, which helped you learn where your pieces of the puzzle were.
(Not only that, they call it “Sign Out” now that they spent 20+ years telling people it’s logoff or logout. )
The same people who named Windows NT 6.1 as “Windows 7” and Windows NT 6.2 as “Windows 8”.
And they are also the same people who forgot to properly research the name Metro before using it, so stop calling it Metro. It’s now the “Modern UI” because the German company Metro AG already owns the rights to the brand “Metro”.
Microsoft Forced to Rename Metro After a Failure of Due Diligence
I wouldn’t say that about Apple at least. This is the company that decided Mac OS X 10.7 didn’t need arrows on scroll bars and that reversing the default direction of the mouse scroll wheel would be helpful.
In fact, OS X 10.7 was the straw that made me convert my business to Windows 7.
For the OP:
We had to replace two computers at the office, and they came with Win 8 installed. Classic Shell is about all it takes to make you feel like you’re working in 7 again. It really does work, and it’s easy enough even for a minimum-wage receptionist to use without even realizing that it’s Windows 8.
I’ve had to “fix” the horrible Win8 interface on a couple computers. One is even a touch screen ultrabook and it was still total garbage using it on that.
In addition to ClassicShell, I also install MetroKiller. This keeps the weird edge stuff from taking over the screen. You can just run it and see if it works for you, but then it has to be set to run at startup or login to keep it doing its job.
There are also some scripts out there to uninstall the useless Metro apps and such that you don’t need and just mess things up.
Note that you’ll want to install the standard free programs to watch videos, edit documents, etc. (VLC or MediaPlayerClassic, LibreOffice, etc.)
You could restore the previous mouse behavior, yes.
The scroll bars had some options to mitigate the damage, but you couldn’t go back to full-size, colored bars with arrows at the top and bottom. So, no, not really.
In any event, my old point in favor of Apple was “I don’t have to learn how to turn off all their new BS, so-called ‘features’ with every upgrade.” With 10.7, that was no longer true. This one issue was a small one, yes, but I already had a lot of other reasons to switch to Windows and this issue was the final straw in changing my preference.