That’s the thing – the problem isn’t Win8 per se – the problem is Microsoft’s plan.
I agree, if you want a gui, that is the way to build it. And when the box has plenty of resources, the gui doesn’t get in the way. I just find that when I really need to get control of a box that’s screwing itself up, the gui just gets in the way and slows things down by consuming resources.
Hmm, I’ve never used them so I can say anything useful other than “neat”, but it is an interesting idea. If it’d lower the number of options I’d have to remember in order to get a command to do what I want, I could get behind that one.
Re the commands thing, if Microsoft implemented it they’d translate it, and the translation would change with every version.
Please, no!
Thank you. I was trying to explain to someone why I did not want a touch screen on my new computer and it was coming out as if I was too lazy to reach my puny arms out a couple of inches. I understand there are applications that can use information from other types of finger interactions (zooming and pan for example) but I don’t want to do that on an upright screen.
Yeah. And multi-touch doesn’t work well on a very large screen. You wind up using both arms instead of pinching, and your dexterity goes down. Plus, for touch typists having to constantly pull your hands off the keyboard is very annoying. It’s worse with touch than it is with a mouse, because often when touching a desktop monitor you have to shift your body which makes it harder to ‘reset’ yourself. And, if your monitors are fairly large, they’ll be far enough away from you that you’ll have to lean your whole body to touch them.
My office has a couple of large touch-screen monitors, and no one wants to use them.
Anyway… Has anyone tried using Win8 with a multiple-monitor setup? I use two monitors, and Windows 8 is driving me crazy. If I have a metro screen open on one monitor and the desktop on the other, Desktop apps will often pop their dialogs under the metro screen, so you can’t find them at all. Or sometimes something you do in an app on one screen will cause the other one to toggle to the desktop or to metro.
If I didn’t need to stay current on OS’s for my job, I’d have already re-installed Windows 7.
And don’t get me started on the ‘improvements’ Microsoft made to Office. They’re simply losing it.
Another problem with touch screens is that your fingers aren’t transparent - whatever you need to touch, you can’t actually see when you touch it. Designing for touch means making everything fat and simple - so you don’t obscure the whole of the touches control with your finger.
Which is why I don’t have a touch screen and hardly use the Modern UI Start screen or apps - but I still find Win8 a reasonably good and stable OS at it’s heart.
I’ve had Windows 8 for about 9 months now and all I can say is that I really work around it, rather than with it. I run it in desktop mode whenever I can, which is 98% of the time. I have a Vaio touchscreen, and for all the complaints about touchscreen laptops, I can’t imagine how much more annoying it would be without it.
It really looks like they just put the OS for a smartphone on a computer. Which I guess they did. I’ve considered switching to Mac but the two things holding me back are that you can get more hardware bang for your buck with a PC and I use Corel Wordperfect a good bit of the time and there is no Mac version.
spit take
I had no idea that was even still a thing. I think I remember the last time I used it (8th grade?)
I am not tech savvy at all. I recently had to buy my first new machine since '06. Jumped from XP to W8 and it took a while to figure out but I’m pretty happy now. I can’t seem to put a Truecrypt volume on my hard drive. Tried to put one in Picture Libraries and C drive. No go. I downloaded Tcrypt and it works fine for my external drives. Anyone got a fix?
Attorneys use it because there was an issue with word count in Word about fifty years ago. :rolleyes:
Parallels Desktop is your friend. Then you get more bang for your buck, too. You can still run Windows in the virtual machine for WordPerfect, and use the Mac for everything else. At the same time.
I run Windows 8 in Parallels quite a bit (no MS Access for Mac, no OneNote for Mac). Everything else Office (and office) related I run natively.
I also have Windows 8 on two HTPC’s.
In all of these cases, Windows 8 is tolerable.
However at work I’m on a Vista workstation. If I had to live with Windows 8 instead of Vista, I’d quit my job (or bring my MacBook to work).
I’ll be honest, I don’t even know how to get to the Metro screen anymore on my computer. And I didn’t even notice until reading this thread.
I suppose that could be either an insult or a compliment to the OS. Personally, I dislike it.
My office uses Word Perfect and Word although the vast majority of what we do is in Word Perfect. It’s easier to fix certain formatting issues in Word Perfect than in Word. Some government agencies use it as well, so we can’t be the only ones.
“Federal courts also require that case documents be filed in WordPerfect”
From link.
I believe the Arkansas courts also require it. I am told that Word calculated the wrong word or line count in a document, greatly annoying a Judge. 
Win8 is the reason I still have Ubuntu on my desktop. I was almost converted back into the MS fold until I had to help friends setup thier win8 laptop for Christmas last year. Now, between work and home I use Ubuntu, WinXP, 98, Server 2003, WAMP on a win7 server, QNIX, various flavours of Win7, Android and even an ancient version of MacOS for an antenna controller. I feel pretty confident manuevering around most OS and can figure things out with help from Mr.Google if I get stuck, and the feel of Win8 is just simply awful.
And… a coupla days ago Novell lost the appeal against Microsoft’s screwing of WordPerfect a thousand years ago.
Novell contended Gates purposefully abandoned a key piece of computer code from a beta version of Windows 95 that Novell intended as an integral part of its products for Windows.
Observers of the previous case may have been struck by the fact that it was a rare 11-1 jury case where the boldness of one lone juror vindicated Microsoft’s integrity.
Question, for those of you who would know:
Can a person who owns Windows 7 (the full-blown retail installation CD, I mean) go out and buy a Windows 8 PC, then reformat and partition the hard drive, and install Windows 7? Is there any meaningful hardware that is Windows-7 incompatible and therefore requires Windows 8?
(I’m a Mac person; if this is an ignorant question in either direction, just pardon my ignorance and help to dispel it, thanks)
PS: I’m still happily running MacOS 10.6.8 although the current official edition is 10.8.5 and the advance copies of “Maverick” (10.9) are getting reviews everywhere; and I see no reason yet to upgrade.
The only exception I can think of, that should be obvious, is that if the new PC you buy has a touchscreen, Windows 7 can’t drive it. Whether you consider this meaningful hardware is up to you
In my opinion, it would take less time and effort to get your Windows 8 installation behaving functionally like Windows 7 than to install the older OS, but plenty of people are doing it, and copies of Win7 are selling on eBay and other places pretty well. If you buy a custom PC you’ll probably have the option to have 7 loaded.
It might or might not. I have seen Windows 7 touchscreen laptops - I imagine that Windows 7 would recognise the touchscreen as a HID and that there is a moderate chance it might rustle up a basic driver and this would drive the mouse pointer.
(Not that this would be terribly useful for many applications).
Classic Shell works a treat for the most part and solves all my problems with Win8 but one. The keyboard layout keeps changing to a different country setting intermittently. I have it set to Irish. Apart from the switched @ and ", ALT GR + vowel no longer gives me the fada over the letter. I tweet regularly in Irish so it’s a pain in the arse.