Thanks!
Regarding the Control Panel, the easiest way to find it is the new “Charms Bar” in Windows 8. Charms Bar -> Settings -> Control Panel. This is incidentally where the native power button and search function are as well. The Charms Bar shouldn’t be hard to find as the straight out of the box settings open it way too frequently (mouse swipes, cursor in one of the corners, etc).
For me, I have it set up where I just put the cursor in the top right corner and it opens up.
See, I told you there were several ways to get to the Control Panel.
It’s also interesting how everyone has a different idea what’s the easiest way… I have Control Panel pinned to my taskbar now so it’s a single click.
As for it being old-fashioned to do a keyword search, as some (not you) have suggested, if you have more than a handful of programs, files, or whatever, having them well named and searching for them will always be more efficient than a GUI, and the GUI will only ever give you access to a subset of the features of the machine.
Point being, different people prefer to use computers in different ways, and Windows is probably the best combination of flexibility and accessibility out there.
I will agree that the Start screen is poorly designed for non-touch use at the moment, but it looks like 8.1 has fixed that. I’ll find out next month.
The full screen metro Windows 8 apps, the ones I’ve used, were not available on any other version of windows. The two examples I gave (the IM app and the BoA app) have no Windows 7 or lesser equivalents. There are certainly fullscreen programs in windows 7 and prior, but usually just video games. Most other programs don’t cover up the task bar, and they have a bar at the top with the buttons and such. Metro apps don’t have any of that, giving you more real estate with every app, and I generally like the way it looks.
I only use my laptop when I am out on the boat at work, and traveling. I don’t really need the apps that windows 8 has to offer on it. I use it very minimally for web stuff. I don’t do email from it. I’m not that concerned about speed because I just hibernate it and almost never do a full shutdown/restart like I do with my home PC regularly.
I also just like having windows 7 around on a computer because I have come across some homebrew applications/programs that just would not run on windows 8 for some reason. Things that some people consider “hacking” (like interfacing with an android phone, or integrating Wii remotes, or some such).
They’re trying to encourage (that is, provoke, not just accommodate) a convergence between desktop and tablet OSes.
Maybe they’re wrong, but they very definitely didn’t just do this by accident. About a quarter of laptops in my local PC world are now touchscreen, and the entry level pricepoint of touchscreen devices has fallen significantly.
I don’t personally like touchscreen laptops - I don’t want to put my fingers on a screen that I spend more than a few seconds looking at, but I don’t have any problems using Windows 8 with mouse and keyboard.
They should have made Windows 8 more configurable out of the box - I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect them to maintain more than one product line in complete parallel - and it makes sense for them to try to converge on a single OS that can work on different devices, but yes, they should have given people the option to have the start menu back, and boot direct to desktop in the first release.
They will already have heard all these complaints from their focus groups and beta testers - none of this is happening because Microsoft didn’t see it coming - it’s all part of a strategy. Maybe the wrong strategy, maybe a doomed strategy.
I like the start panel interface, even on a non-touch device. I actually wish the “Desktop” looked and felt more like the start panel.
Just my two cents…
(But my wife has the very same complaints you all do so I understand. I guess for some reason I just don’t put my mouse randomly on the edge or corners of the screen as much as most people?!)
They learned not to do that when Vista bombed and everyone kept buying XP. They didn’t want to have to rush 9 out like they had to with 7.
I’ve been defending Microsoft OS’s since 3.1. I even had some nice things to say about Vista.
Windows 8 is horrible. I have 8.1 RTM installed now, and it’s still horrible.
Yes, I know you can hide the horribleness, mostly. But the fact that you have to go to lengths to undo everything they tried to do in this release tells you that it’s horrible.
Anyone who has studied usability will tell you that touch screen desktop computers are not what you want. There’s the fingerprint issue, but even if you can solve that there’s a fundamental issue that stretching out your arm to touch takes more effort, is slow, and you’re not as accurate pointing with your arm outstretched as you are when it’s close by your side as it is when you’re using a tablet. It’s a non-starter except for kiosk applications and such.
Right now, I’m struggling with trying to make a multi-monitor setup work well. Windows 8 keeps popping dialog boxes open on the wrong screen, and if one screen has metro running you can’t even find the dialog until you switch to the desktop. This happens so frequently that my plan of running metro on one screen and the desktop on the other has pretty much failed. It’s too annoying.
The start screen is a joke. By the time you’ve installed a few productivity apps you wind up with a sea of icons many pages wide, separating by nothing but typography you have to read to make sense of what you’re looking at. That might work for a tablet that’s up close and which has swipe gestures to page back and forth like an iPad, but on the desktop with a mouse or trackpad it’s really annoying.
I could make a very long list of what’s wrong with Windows 8. And I know the reason: Microsoft’s management is totally dysfunctional. There are too many competing factions, too many layers of bureaucracy, too much legacy infrastructure and management. You should hear the stories ex-engineers tell about working there. It’s a madhouse.
Microsoft needs a strong guy at the top with a vision and with the clout to see the vision carried out without compromise. A Steve Jobs. Someone who can articulate a clear vision for the product, and then crack heads when people within the company try to sabotage it to protect their turf. Until and if that happens, Microsoft will continue its slide towards irrelevance.
I’ll happily I’ll concede that Windows 8 has upset a lot of applecarts, but I do think, if we accept the general alternating pattern of Good OS, Bad OS, Windows 8 is the Best Bad OS they’ve ever released. Windows ME and Vista (for example) were tangibly broken - Windows 8 just contains a bunch of rather unpopular changes.
It’s a transitional beast, trying to bridge the gap between desk and tablet - a gap that may not in fact be practical or reasonable to span - and in the long run, may not be what many people even want, but if convergence is Microsoft’s end goal, I don’t see what else they could really have done.
Given that many new laptops have detachable tablet screens, and some tablets can dock with keyboards, it’s not unreasonable to want an OS that can do both, rather than needing two different ones.
Saying Windows 8 is designed for touch is ultimately nonsense, although nonsense that MS’s advertising is somewhat to blame for. It’s a fully functional desktop OS, if that’s what you want, and also (as far as I can tell) a fully functional touchscreen one.
If you don’t want to use either part of it, you basically don’t have to. On the vanilla installation, it’s one (1) click to get to the desktop, and you’ll never have to run a Metro app if you don’t want to. If, like most people, you customise your installation to your needs and tastes, you literally never have to see anything but the desktop.
That’s got shit to do with W8 and everything with SSD.
For balanced opinions, I wonder what people who have never used Windows think of 8? Are we having trouble just because we expect it to be like the previous versions? If we take it as a new OS, will it be better?
Also, can someone tell me if Windows 8 has support for high resolution displays (font scaling to more than 150%)? It seems, in this time of tablets and their own Surface’s 10" 1080 display, they need this, but I’ve never heard of it.
What was wrong with Vista anyway? In what way was it tangibly broken? I didn’t use it for any more than very basic functions so I wouldn’t know.
My copy of Vista does a lot of hard drive thrashing. And the UAC was awful to begin with, but gradually got better. Win7 has a better implementation of it.
The problem is I don’t see why we should take a bad annoying goal as a given. It’s sort of like praising New Coke as the best possible implementation of Pepsi. People didn’t want Pepsi.
I should say though that I haven’t tried Win8 yet. Let me see if I can list its advantages:
[li] Boots 7 seconds faster after controlling for hardware. Interesting, but underwhelming.[/li]
[li] Will probably be supported by MS out to a later date than Win7 will. [/li]
[li] And admittedly see this post: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=16691510&postcount=54 [/li]
[li] Also: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=16692616&postcount=66 [/li]
[*] So apparently there are some improvements to windows explorer, something which should have been optimized a decade ago.
for one: The security model was unworkable, for one thing - it tried so hard to be secure that it was constantly asking the user if it was OK to run this or that executable, which made lots of people turn off the feature, leaving it wide open to malicious code execution.
Mine boots in 8 seconds from a conventional hard drive. Win8 boot times are objectively faster…
Thats a fair comment, but I just think Win8 is where we are on Microsoft’s journey plan right now - it would have been this, or nothing - I can’t say much more than that, because on balance, I rather like Win8.