I’m finally getting around to replacing my rather ancient (2008 or thereabouts) HP desktop. It’s run XP for its entire life.
I have another laptop running Windows 7, which isn’t too bad. However, all of the stuff out now uses Windows 8.1. There have been quite a few horror stories about Windows 8, and I know at least one professional programmer who recommends strongly that I get Windows 7.
What say you geeks out there in SDMB land? Will I have a horrible time shifting from XP to 8.1? Are there routines that are easy in XP and more complicated in 8.1? Am really interested in hearing your experiences with this.
BTW, my spell checker had never heard of SDMB, and as a replacement, had one suggestion. “DUMB”. May it knows something I don’t.
I just did the same thing. I ran XP forever at home, and run 7 at work. Finally dumped the home computer and upgraded to 8.1.1 at the wife’s urging. Her reasoning: why go backwards? Might as well get used to it now, because that interface is the future, like it or not.
So far, I like it. Easy to learn, although some parts are not intuitive. I’m by no means a power user, and I’ve managed to handle the switch with a minimum of swearing and alcohol.
Windows 7 is quite good, and similar enough to Windows XP that it’s an easy transition. There was a great hue and cry about Windows 8, and my attitude was that people always bitch and moan about every change in interface no matter how beneficial. Then I used it. The prevailing sentiment is totally right, and is if anything a bit muted. Windows 8 is a disaster that you should steer clear of as much as possible.
Funny, I’ve had a windows 8 laptop for about 4 days now, and it’s been nothing but a breeze.
I’ve googled answers for things but I googled answers for things in win 7 too, and if I hadn’t been busy Lycos-ing at the time, I’d have googled answers for things in XP.
I love Windows 7 so hard. And I loved Windows XP super hard. Windows 7 is a great follow-up to XP if you are lucky enough to go that route.
We use Windows 2012 on our servers at work and it uses the same interface as Windows 8. While I am not on the servers for longer than a few minutes at a time, we’ve been using it over a year and it’s still clunky and awkward and not getting better for me. I haven’t had any experience with uh…“apps” or whatever non-standard new thing 8 offers, just the desktop and “Start menu” scheme are batty enough for me.
[QUOTE=Greg Charles]
my attitude was that people always bitch and moan about every change in interface no matter how beneficial.
[/QUOTE]
That seems to be Microsoft’s attitude also. The part they don’t get is that the benefits are not beneficial if I can’t figure out how to use it. I would complain a lot less if there was a reference guide to ease the transition. Or even better, why not make it better without changing the interface at all?
What’s the situation as far using either built in or third party options for stripping out all the metro stuff? Can you make 8.1 look like 7, and take advantage of the internal/non-interface improvements?
This is exactly what I did. Download the free version of Classic Shell and restore you Windows 7 type Start Menu.http://www.classicshell.net/
With Shell, I have created a complete Desktop screen with all of my icons and the classic Start Screen. I rarely, if ever, use the Metro screen.
Windows 8.1 is a vast improvement over 7 in many fundamental ways. It is much faster and more reliable, has a much more powerful task manager, has a better/more useful file transfer dialogue, a kick-ass right-click menu that pops up when you right-click the start button, among many other things. You never have to touch metro if you don’t want to, but it honestly is very handy to have a big screen pop up with search results when you type the name of a program or something. I use the email app to integrate my various email programs. Switching between apps and desktop programs is a breeze.
There are a few other technical things that 8.1 can do that 7 can’t, but I won’t get into it unless you want me to. Suffice it to say that the folks who are declaring 8.1 to be a disaster on an epic scale (like ME or Vista) are just flat out wrong. They might not like the metro UI (a somewhat silly criticism since you are almost never forced to use it), but the underlying architecture for 8.1 compared to 7 is miles better.
drewtwo99 is exactly right. I love Windows 7, but 8 is absolutely an improvement. Only major downside is a lack of media center, but that’s a feature few people will miss.
There’s a few things that take some getting used it, but there’s a lot of polish and improvements and, after the most recent major update, it is much easier to acclimate to on a traditional mouse-and-keyboard computer.
On touchscreens, it is absolutely a fantastic interface and I wouldn’t trade my Surface RT for an iPad or Android tablet. One thing to consider is that if you pick up a Windows 8-based tablet down the line, your apps, settings, and files will synchronize between the two effortlessly. I find this to be extremely valuable.
I’m running on a Windows 8.1 laptop right now, and it’s all fine. Windows 8.1 has some interface quirks, but the way people talk about it, you’d think was a lot more Kafkaesque than it is. You get used to the changes and you move on.
Personally I don’t think it’s faster or more reliable.
Windows 7 is really windows 6.1. It’s Vista with all of the annoying crap fixed and un-annoyified.
Windows 8.0 is Windows 6.2. It’s the same underlying OS converted to a tablet style user interface.
Windows 8.1 is minor fixes to Windows 8.0 and a little less pushy about the tablet interface.
It’s still Windows 6 underneath the hood. The user interface has changed dramatically, but it’s not a whole new OS. They didn’t rewrite the stuff that you don’t see (well, some, but not the vast majority of it).
Microsoft likes to say that every OS they come out with is faster, and they usually have some hokey crap justification for it. But then all of the users think that it is faster overall even though the main reason it’s faster is because it is running on newer and faster machines. Windows 7 is the only version that I’ve noticed is truly faster overall than its predecessor, and that’s because Vista’s crappy performance was noted as one of its major drawbacks and so Microsoft put a huge amount of effort into making Windows 7 almost as fast as XP. In my experience, every other Windows OS has been slower than its predecessor when run on an identical machine.
If you only use the tablet interface to Windows 8 then yes, it is faster, but that’s because it’s a stripped down, butt-ugly interface designed to run on a tablet. When you run the desktop interface on Windows 8.1 it’s no different than the desktop interface on Windows 7.
The good news is that if you want to get back to the desktop in Windows 8.1 it’s simple to do, and from there you can just run it like a Windows 7 box and you really won’t notice the difference.
I run XP, 7, and 8.1 and use all three on a regular basis. If your choice is 7 or 8.1, going to 8.1 is no big deal (IMHO). It’s easy enough to avoid the iPad interface if you don’t like it.
I was prepared to install Classic Shell, but I found that once I switched to the Desktop and changed file associations so things were opening in regular windowed programs and not metro apps, I didn’t need it. I ended up liking the Metro start screen more than the old start menu. (And about a week after I got this computer, 8.1 came out and it brought back a visible start button and let me boot directly to the desktop, which fixed my biggest annoyances.)
I question the statement that this the ‘interface of future’. Windows 8.0 release was such a
disaster that Microsoft is backing off on the ‘Metro’ interface and returning more to the desktop. Each release since 8.0 has done nothing but push it further into the background. Mostly, they are experiencing problems from their enterprise users who simply do not have the time or money to train everyone to use the new interface.
While the ‘Metro’ interface may still be around somewhat, more and more they are returning to the old desktop.
First off, let’s be clear, 8.1 is a big improvement over 8.
I’m getting used to the new format. The only thing that pisses me off is that you can’t turn the computer off from desktop. I also don’t like the fact that they force you to log in at start up.
Wrong. Microsoft and their version numbers are screwy, and for whatever reason they have numbered 8 as 6.2 internally, but functionally it is an entirely new operating system. Or, at least as much as many of the other “incremental” jumps were.
For example, windows 95 and 98 were both 4.X versions of windows, but were fundamentally different in important ways. 2000 and XP similarly were 5.X and very different from one another in many ways (definitely more than just UI tweaks which you seem to imply).
You can’t just look at a microsoft version number and conclude much of anything.
Windows 8 is just about as fundamentally different from 7 as 7 was from XP. There were major changes done to the kernel. It is NOT the “Same underlying OS converted to a tablet style.”
And FYI, I bought a new computer in 2012, an Alienware, that came preinstalled with Windows 7. I upgraded to 8 and dual booted for a while, and clocked measurable speed performances for several tasks, most starkly was bootup and shutdown time.
This is general questions and when you go around saying things like “windows 8 is only faster because people are running it on newer hardware” you are spreading false information.
Or even just press the physical power button on your computer. Every single other modern electronic device is turned off with the same button used to turn it on, and there’s no reason computers should be different. (Note: ancient desktops that had a hard switch for the power button are not modern electronic devices. Note 2: Unless you’ve gone into the settings and changed what the power buttons do, but that’s your own fault.)
As for Windows 7 vs 8.1, I can’t improve upon drewtwo99’s arguments, so I won’t try.
By default, I think that makes Windows 8 go to sleep/hibernate, rather than shut down (at least, it does on laptops) - this behaviour can be configured, and maybe hibernation isn’t all that undesirable in many cases.
Me too mostly, except to say that the 8.11 update adds a Win32-style title bar to Modern UI apps, so you can just close them by clicking the red X - and running apps now also appear on the taskbar.
