In 1994 we go so good at driving home the point that you should not just cut power to a computer willy-nilly, that 20 years later people are still afraid of doing anything that even looks like that. Once I read that article, I completely stopped caring about where the software power button is.
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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.
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Hibernation is desirable in a lot of cases, though. Installing updates requires a full reboot, but I have yet to find anything else that does. Older Windows versions would get corrupted and crash if you didn’t do a clean reboot periodically, but I haven’t seen that happen since Win95.
The large startup and shutdown speedups are based on a lot of smoke and mirrors, though. The biggest one being that shutting down the computer actually logs you out and then hibernates. Furthermore, if you dual boot, part of Windows 8 loads before you can even choose to boot Windows 7. If you always reboot rather than shutdown, and use an OS selector that skips the startup screen, the change is much less dramatic.
I’ve not seen them crash, but I’ve often seen them get a lot slower. It’s much better than Windows of old, but not great.
Also, my dog jumped on my keyboard, apparently made the computer try to go to sleep, but it failed. I had to do a hard shutdown, and Windows 8 went into recovery mode when I came back. I lost all the files in both user folders, as well as some files needed for boot. I get losing the file that was being accessed, but not losing whole folders.
I’m lucky I still have a copy from my Windows 7 partition before I upgraded.
Is the installed size of Windows 8 comparable to windows 7? I mean the hard drive space it takes up. Can anyone running 8.1 tell me the size of their windows folder?
The Metro UI interface is clumsy and frustrating to use on non-touchscreen devices, but you can choose to boot directly to desktop mode and never see Metro UI afterwards.
There are a number of third party applications that will restore the start menu. I use IOBit’s Start Menu 8, but ClassicShell, as recommended by **Beauregard Porkypine ** is also a good option.
It will take you all of three minutes to do the above and the learning curve between XP and 8 is trivial.
I just got a new laptop running 8.1 and I’m getting used to it now. Other than the Metro interface (why are you trying to shoehorn a mobile OS into Windows? If I wanted my computer to look like Android I’d have installed Linux) and the non-intuitive locations of things like the power options*, I can’t really complain. Plus, the search feature is genuinely useful. I hear that 8.2 will offer an old-style Start menu, and I will go back to it.
*Not that anything in previous iterations of Windows was intuitive, but at least you knew where it was via years of experience.
From a user’s point of view, the tablet style interface is a lot different. Underneath the hood, they made very few changes to the existing OS. Aside from tablet support, the only real major change was security and authentication.
The stuff that you see and touch changed dramatically. The stuff that you didn’t see didn’t change much. There’s much more to the OS that you don’t see than there is that you do see.
In what ways? They added some things to Windows 4.0 (95) to make 4.1 (98), like a new driver model (that wasn’t widely advertised and hardly anyone actually used), USB support, ACPI, and some networking stuff, but the only real internal change they made were related to floppy and hard drive interfaces and making the registry stuff a bit more robust. The rest of the existing OS stayed pretty much the same. All windows 4.x operating systems are structurally the same, and are different than both windows 3.x and the NT series of operating systems.
Again, what do you think is so dramatically different? They changed a lot of internals between NT 4 and NT 5 (2000). Those internals stayed mostly the same for NT 5.1 (XP). There were minor improvements to a lot of things, but no major changes except to the UI.
Actually, IMHO, the version numbers give you a much clearer indication of what’s going on inside the OS than anything else.
What major changes were made to the kernel?
That does seem to be where they made the most noticeable improvements in speed, and I’ve never really considered those to be significant. Windows plays too many games when starting. I’ve started my Windows box and my Linux box at the same time. The Windows box comes up to a user interface much faster (see, it loads faster!) but that’s just faking you out. It’s still doing a lot of stuff in the background. The time from power on to loading a web page is nearly identical on both machines. But most folks would say the Windows machine loaded faster because it presented it’s user interface much sooner.
Once they are up and running, I don’t notice any significant difference in speed between my Windows 7 and my Windows 8.1 box when they are doing the same things. There may be some minor differences, but they aren’t significant during normal use.
In my experience, even non-geeks learn this trick pretty quickly, and they don’t say that Windows loaded faster, because they’ve learned from bitter experience that even though you can SEE the Start button, you can’t DO anything with it yet. They learn that this is a good time to go for a cup of coffee. For decades, the top item on my wish list has been for Windows to give a message box saying, “Windows is now finished starting up. You may now get to work.” - because until I get that message, my only way to know whether or not bootup is complete is to try clicking stuff - which just slows it down even more.
I heartily concur with this post. I had XP for years both at home and at work. I have been working in Win 7 at work for years and have a Win 8.1 laptop and Surface RT.
Windows 8.1 Start screen kicks freaking butt over the old digging through Start Menu options, filtering out the Read Me shortcuts, app uninstallers, etc… Commonly used programs get pinned to the Start Screen or task bar pretty much as before. So, why the whining? I don’t know.
Throw in a few little things like ISO mounting being built in and no prompting when recycling files confirming you want to do that. You still are prompted when a delete action will be permanent. One less annoying click that has always annoyed me.
Get a handle on the Charms bar’s contextual awareness and you will find it to be an intuitive tool.
My opinion is that the 8.1 update fixed everything wrong with 8.0. (Which, admittedly, was quite a bit of stuff.) The Metro/Windows App mode is no longer a “mode”, those apps can be put into windows and dragged around just like anything else.
The start menu is still gone, but IMO the start screen is just as good-- it might require a bit more manual effort to organize, but once you’ve organized it you’ll find it a lot easier to find your programs. And if you really hate the start screen, just pin all your apps to the taskbar and pretend it’s OS X. It works fine that way too. (And of course Windows-key -> start typing application name still works exactly as it did before.)
That all said: it doesn’t improve on a lot over Windows 7. The file copy system is more sophisticated and handles duplicate files much smarter. The Task Manager has been revised and is a lot more useful, but of course few people ever even look at that. It seems like the OS boots a bit quicker, although I haven’t stopwatch-ed it. Whether or not you like the Windows 8 “look” better than you like Windows 7’s Aero is probably a matter of opinion-- I’m perfectly ok with it.
Anyway, I’d say buy a 8.1 laptop but arrange for the possibility of downgrading if it turns out you really don’t like it. Still, give it a chance.
I think the problem is that Microsoft added Windows key -> type app name to launch apps in Vista, and by the time replacing Windows 7 came around, they probably just assumed everybody used that (or pinning to the task bar) instead of the Start button.
I think it’s an age/experience divide: if you work at a software company writing the OS you probably don’t use it in the way that, say, a middle-aged secretary at a church uses it. And the thought that some people would have completely skipped Vista and never learned its improvements probably wouldn’t even have occurred to you-- after all, people upgrade as soon as the new version comes out, right?
So for people who skipped Vista (and in some cases Windows 7) and never learned the “new way of launching apps”, I wager removal of the Start button was a real shock. For people who adopted the Windows-key program launching and pinning apps to the task bar as soon as those features were available in 2007, then removing the Start button is kind of a “duh” thing. Why wouldn’t you? It’s not like anybody used it anymore.
Anyway, I could be wrong, but I think that’s probably some of the cause of the consternation over Windows 8.
This was pretty much the case for me - I went straight from XP to Win8 at home - and the shock of not having a start menu was pretty severe initially, but I was determined to give it a fair try and use it without modification for at least a fortnight.
I very quickly discovered that my previous use of the Start menu had been a horrible, inefficient thing. I had a great many installed applications and launching them from within the Start menu had meant navigating across multiple nested, scrolling/collapsing columns to try to find the thing I wanted. In fact, this had already become such a chore on XP that I had taken to the habit of creating themed desktop folders containing all my application shortcuts.
Interestingly, this is not a million miles away from the way I use the Win8 Start screen - I hardly bother with Live tiles - I hardly use any Modern UI apps - my Start Screen contains themed collections of application shortcut icons. My Start Screen is a Start menu - it’s just easier to navigate than ever before - and for anything I only use rarely, I search for it in the same screen just by typing.
The other key thing that I think put a lot of people off Win8 is that they didn’t seem to realise that they are not obliged to use Metro/Modern UI apps at all, if they don’t want to.
I sincerely thank you for totally validating my suspicion that M$ cares more about selling more new stuff, and is not at all interested in what their current user base wants.