Anything. Anything at all. As I say though, I haven’t been forced to use it much. Based on what I’ve read, my experience is far from unique. However, people do say that once you find the secret settings to remove the horrible defaults, it becomes much more usable. That makes it not so much different from several other Windows iterations.
Ditto this. There was a reasonably steep learning curve at the start, but now I’m trucking along just fine with 8.1. I bounce between 8 at home and 7 at work with no problems to speak of.
Thank you.
Understand. I was being blatant about the underlying architecture. not the UI (which is being further refined)
Not a MS fan-boy by any means…they are making progress since Balmer left IMHO.
You have a cite for that?
No shit. It is called legacy code…
Half a dozen small tweaks and it’s just Windows. I think I spent about the same time and effort tweaking WinXP out of the box. It does have some very nice features.
What sucks is that Vista users whose OS was installed after a certain date got to upgrade to Win 7 and will be able to upgrade from there to Win 10. For people like me whose copy of Vista is older, there is no free upgrade path to Win 10. 
Ah, yeah. Open a command window (click Start -> Run and enter cmd) then enter ver. It will show Microsoft Windows [Version 6.x.xxxx] which is the Vista kernel. Windows 95 & 98 were 4.x, Windows 2000 & XP were 5.x, and Vista (and later) are 6.xxxx…
He is using a computer from Clintons second term in office.
Declan
Allegedly they bumped the version of the kernel to 10 to match the OS version. Whether there are any technological changes is another matter entirely.
I’m running the Windows 10 Technical Preview for Enterprise on my Surface Pro 3:
Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.9926]
© 2015 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
C:\Windows\system32>ver
Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.9926]
I generally like it, but as expected there are some rough edges.
Of course, none of that really means all that much. First of all, the kernel version is just a number, and has no inherent meaning. Sure, kernels with the same major version number are supposed to be ‘similar’, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t have pretty major differences between minor release versions. And second, the kernel is not the operating system. The kernel controls the low level interaction between the OS and the hardware, but without all of the other programs that make up the operating system, the kernel would be pretty much useless. Even if Windows 10 ultimately ships with a kernel numbered 6.4, to say that makes it essentially the same as Vista because they have the same major kernel version, is a gross misrepresentation.
That’s interesting, because on mine, I get:
Microsoft Windows [Version 6.4.9841]
(c) 2014 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
C:\Users\Mange>ver
Microsoft Windows [Version 6.4.9841]
C:\Users\Mange>
he wants it to be exactly like whatever version of Windows he used previously.
I’ve never given these complaints much regard. people get bent out of shape because Microsoft moved their cheese with Windows 8, and of course this means there’ll be a mass exodus to the Mac and or Linux.
Yeah, right. 90% of Windows 8 worked the same as previous versions of Windows and you found that “unusable.” So you’re going to throw everything out and move to a completely different platform and be happy.
Yeah, like fuck you are.
that doesn’t mean what you think it is. The “version number” Windows reports has little to do with the kernel. The tenuous reason they gave was to keep poorly written apps from barfing because they used the wrong method to figure out what version of Windows they were being installed on. The NT Executive (which is all of the kernel-mode stuff) has changed substantially with each version post-Vista. The fact that MS decided to keep the major version number 6.x doesn’t nullify that.
Oh, and as for Windows 95/98 being “Windows 4.0,” well, guess what? Windows NT 4 was also “Windows 4.0” and it had practically nothing in common with Windows 98.
So there.
The problem with Win8, or rather its new Metro GUI, is simple: It is designed for touchscreens. It is nearly unusable with a mouse. Seriously. They should have released two versions, Windows 8 Touch & Windows 8 Desktop, but Microsoft knows the consumer desktop’s days are numbered (as is potentially Windows itself). But if Windows 8.1 didn’t have the ‘boot to the desktop’ mode I would have had to wipe my new PC and bought & installed Win7, I found it that ‘unusable’ as a desktop system.
Yeah, I know that. And before XP Windows NT and Windows 9x were two completely different products…
no, it is not. I’ve been using it w/ keyboard and mouse since it came out, without issue.
I never understood the outrage over the start menu thing. Who sits there and actually opens the start menu and does a hierarchical search for things on it? You hit control-esc and start typing in whatever you’re looking for, just like in Windows 7.
On the other hand, no one seems to notice how incredibly ugly Windows 8 is. They got rid of all of the nice aero design that made Windows 7 the best looking windows by a mile. They went with some sort of bullshit retro flat UI design that just looks awful, looks like something that came out of the 90s.
Does Windows 10 get some sort of aero-style desktop back or are we stuck with the flat, boring, lifeless Windows 8 design?
Edit: I know the reasoning is that all of those nice effects eat CPU and GPU time, which is important on a mobile device. But so what? They already have a “classic windows” mode in win7 that’s flat and ugly. Why not just design Windows 10 with both modes and then activate the ugly one for mobile devices?
In my opinion, it’s even worse than Windows 8:
That recycle bin icon looks straight out of Windows 2.0.
and guess what? Everyone else is copying it.