I’ve had Win7 for over 2 1/2 years and not a single crash.
(Intel i5-8G RAM)
Maybe it’s because the Charms Bar is invisible until you mouse over it? It’s generally hard to find things that are invisible.
I never really understood the idea of burying something like the power button under a two mouse gesture, three click combo, that a lot of people apparently have to google to even figure out, in the first place. It’s not like turning off or restarting your computer is some esoteric function that you’ll hardly ever use.
The start button was there on the screen. The charms bar, like some other features, is invisible until you move the mouse over the right part of the screen.
This is bad designing. You should be able to see what features are available. Making them invisible forces you to memorize both what features you have and the places on the screen you have to mouse over to access them.
A good design is obvious and intuitive. It does not resemble a puzzle that needs to be solved.
I always had the start bar invisible until I moved the cursor to the bottom. Now I move the cursor to the right and it brings up the charms bar. There are a lot of things to bitch about regarding Windows 8, but that’s just not one of them.
Exactly. I got a Win8 PC yesterday, from what I’ve seen so far, it’s not even just the right side of the screen, it’s the upper and lower rightmost corners only–moving to the right edge only doesn’t seem to do anyway. I only really found the menu because I was just setting it up using a temporary crappy optical mouse on carpet which bounced around the pointer quite a bit, and at one point the erratic movement popped it up.
Up until now, the primary method of “family tech support” has been to just click on the available menus and see what options are available. Now, apparently, I also have to flail the mouse around the screen to see what might be hidden.
And it doesn’t help that the “help” menu that might have served as an introduction to how to get around happens to be in that menu as well. I have since found that I could have started typing “help” in the start screen and it would have brought it up–but again, I had no indication that just typing crap with a screen up would bring me anything but grief (speaking as someone who has knocked down an entire cities worth of internet customers when I typed “reload” in the wrong window, I really don’t find the idea of typing things when the focus isn’t clear to be a good idea).
And perhaps I missed something, particularly since I never used Win7, but I didn’t see any particular improvement in the UAC from my Vista experience. First thing I installed was a MMO I play, when I ran the launcher, I got a “Sure you want this program to modify files?” question from UAC. I said yes, and then next time I ran it, same thing. Same on all subsequent program launches. I couldn’t find any way to say “never ask me again for this program.” When I went to the UAC control center, I was in the recommended position at the 3rd of the 4 notches. I moved it down to the second, but that didn’t stop it. So I turned UAC off entirely.
Exactly. You’ve had one day. Think leaning curve. The buttons are in different places, so it does get some getting used to, but it’s not that bad.
Funny, the HP laptop we bought for my husband a couple of years ago had a screen malfunction about two months after we bought it. We were informed by HP that the screen is not actually part of the covered warranty, but they would be happy for us to ship it to them and have them replace the screen for about $250.
We declined, and we won’t be buying an HP laptop again. Glad your experience was different, but my experience with PC laptops has not been particularly good.
HP sucks, but PC’s are fine. I think it does matter who makes it. If you scroll up to page one, you will see my problems with Toshiba. (spoiler alert = I want every last Toshiba employee to be mauled by a dipsomaniacal grizzly bear).
But I’ve had luck with other companies - jut not HP or %$(#!! Toshiba.
Addendum to above: I used to have this little dell netbook that I abused both physically and by trying to run stuff on it that it was decidedly not rated for. The damn thing was like the little engine that could.
Again, hardware matters. And not just the base specifications. Some companies build stuff great - some don’t. There’s more to a PC than the operating system.
But you needed to set it up that way, it was not the default. The default was “always visible”. I hide my bottom bar as well, but it’s by personal choice and I don’t set it that way in computers I share.
really? You know you can change the defaults, right?
My whole point in previous posts was that I do think Windows 8 has problems, but bitching about how the default settings are different is just whining.
Changing defaults in an established product IS a problem. Imagine a car maker putting the gas pedal on the left.
Go back to Windows 3.1, then.
Look, I get it. I really do. I think the whole “Metro” thing is bullshit, and I will make fun of windows 8 because the out of the box interface want’s you to use it as a smart phone. However… too many of the complaints are just whining.
There is no start menu anymore on the bottom of the desktop. Get the fuck over it. The functionality is still there. The control panel and the power button are still there. They are not hard to find. Complain about something else. I may be on board with that.
Honestly, if finding the damn power button on a machine running windows 8 is giving you problems, how the hell are you going to figure out where it is on an Apple machine or an Android smart phone?
It’s pathetic whining.
As evidenced by the fact that I did.
But lots of computer users have zero interest in monkeying with that. Is that so difficult to comprehend, oh Mr High And Mighty “anybody who doesn’t like having things changed on them is an idiot”? Many of those have zero interest in having an Apple machine or an Android smartphone. You should see the looks one of my current clients gets: he brings his personal-property Apple tablet to meetings, in a company where only another member of management knows the difference between RAM, HDD and graphic card. For those people, computers are tools, and tools they don’t even like. And for many people who like computers, we want to be in control of them inasmuch as possible - grabbing the standards and turning them inside out takes away any control we had, we’re suddenly back to square one.
When a product has been designed so very badly that the frigging controls are hidden, I have to wonder where else the product is screwed up.
Sure, I can learn to do the little ritual to bring up the controls, but the point is that it’s very, very poor design to hide the controls in the first place. It’s like MS deliberately tried to make Win8 as hard to learn to use as possible.
Products should be easy to use, and easy to learn to use.
The whole lot of you should go back to Win95.
Or… dare I say it? … Windows M.E.
nah, I won’t wish that on anybody
I’m an XP guy myself. 