Whats going on with W8?

[Cerveza mas fina]

I just saw this on GAF

How serious is this for MS?

[G The Resurrected]

They have to find a way to make you pay for those yearly upgrades M$ wants. Windows Blu should be out in august. I think the Blu stands for Blue Screen of Death, cause that's all we'll be seeing if we don't update to it.

[archnemesis]

I predict that Surface and Windows Phone 8 will bomb. The regular version of Windows 8 will do fine once Microsoft can convince companies like Dell to push it. It's already the default choice, but customers can opt to get Windows 7 instead. They will also add a lite version of W8 as the OS for the Nextbox.

[Phoenix Dark]

re-name it the iWin8

[Freyj]

They have to find a way to make you pay for those yearly upgrades M$ wants. Windows Blu should be out in august. I think the Blu stands for Blue Screen of Death, cause that's all we'll be seeing if we don't update to it.

This makes so little sense from an Enterprise perspective.

[Cormacaroni]

I bought a cheapo Lenovo W8 laptop for my wife's business (just for a few specific things that we can't use Macs for) and holy shit, it is VILE

I think i've used most flavors of Windows since like 95 (ME and Vista being the exceptions) so I know my way around. I was LOST and FURIOUS for the first hour. it is so SHITTY. You can certainly accomplish things but only after great effort. It throws up these huge walls of total fucking shit at you. On a clean install, why do I need MY MUSIC MY VIDEOS MY MESSAGES etc taking up all that space on the start tile screen? I haven't GOT ANY. And the microsoft account thing is horrible. We can't use our regular Skype account that we use on every other device ever? Fuck that. I can see how it would work fine on a tablet but without a touch screen it is utter garbage

[fistfulofmetal]

your post expressed some severe reactions but the examples barely amount to some minor annoyances. mostly due to not enjoying change.

[Cormacaroni]

Windows 8: An OS for rational robots who enjoy change for the sake of it

[Positive Touch]

which is why i really enjoy it!

youll get used to being free of the shitty "my computer" interface soon enough

[Stoney Mason]

I said it back in the old threads. The problem is it offers nothing for the regular user that is worth upgrading for (Yeah it boots faster but that's not worth the hassle for most people). I wouldn't recommend any casual person switch to it that already uses Windows 7. Outside of tablet use, its a very strange product.

[Olivia Wilde Homo]

I'm guessing most people don't feel the need to change from Windows 7 yet.  W7 is a very good OS.

W8 is pretty good too.  A lot of the complaints sound like the same noise I heard from Vista where minor annoyances get cranked up to 11 for some reason, where little things turn out to be THE WORST PROBLEM EVER and I'm wondering what the fuck they're talking about.

[Cerveza mas fina]

I love the bootup time of 8. It ridiculous how quick it is.

[archnemesis]

If you're running it on an SSD then it's crazy fast.

[Diunx]

It's shit and no one wants it.

[Cerveza mas fina]

If you're running it on an SSD then it's crazy fast.

I can only imagine. I have a normal 7200rpm and Im impressed too.

[archnemesis]

There are a few other minor improvements, like the new task manager, but the average user will only notice the poor UI decisions.

[fistfulofmetal]

I like the side charm system however it's not perfect. I don't like that once I choose an option in the charm menu i cannot back out to the previous menu. but having those options on the right side is better to me than how you previous access them.

[Momo]

It's shit, no surprises here

[Polari]

It's amazingly bad, that's what's going on.

[recursivelyenumerable]

I think i've used most flavors of Windows since like 95 (ME and Vista being the exceptions) so I know my way around. I was LOST and FURIOUS for the first hour. it is so SHITTY. You can certainly accomplish things but only after great effort. It throws up these huge walls of total fucking shit at you. On a clean install, why do I need MY MUSIC MY VIDEOS MY MESSAGES etc taking up all that space on the start tile screen? I haven't GOT ANY. And the microsoft account thing is horrible. We can't use our regular Skype account that we use on every other device ever? Fuck that. I can see how it would work fine on a tablet but without a touch screen it is utter garbage

Huh? Is your problem that there are a bunch of apps pinned by default that you're not interested in? So ... unpin them then? The whole point of the start screen is that you can personalize it to show apps, websites, people, folders etc. that you care about.

[Cormacaroni]

I had one hour to set this piece of shit laptop up for someone else not very PC-literate to use for a very specific handful of tasks. So yes, I figured out how to unpin them but then I had to actually do that for like 5 screens worth of shit

That's just one of the problems I had with it but I can't be arsed listing all of them just so people can get all smug-face about how easy they are to fix. I don't give a shit, I'm never dealing with W8 again until that laptop needs to be fixed

Everyone in the office who uses it hates it too btw

[naff]

It's amazingly bad, that's what's going on.

Word. I'm all for UI progress but not W8 bleurgh

[naff]

Touchscreen PC's are such a fucking stupid idea

[brawndolicious]

Touchscreen PC's are such a fucking stupid idea

On laptops it makes sense, but desktops have the screen too far away from your hands. It's just intuitive to hold your hand next to the screen and swipe to scroll around or just quickly tap to click something rather than spend a second to find the cursor.

[ToxicAdam]

I think another problem that Win8 has is that there isn't a lot of compelling reasons for people to upgrade their desktops/laptops right now. In fact, I would venture to guess that many people are on their last desktop machine and don't even realize it yet.

That will change once touchscreen laptops become more affordable. Where the cheapest ones are 300 and the rest fall in the 400-500 range. But will that happen fast enough for MS?

[naff]

Touchscreen PC's are such a fucking stupid idea

On laptops it makes sense, but desktops have the screen too far away from your hands. It's just intuitive to hold your hand next to the screen and swipe to scroll around or just quickly tap to click something rather than spend a second to find the cursor.

I can understand that. I still would rather Microsoft implemented a decent trackpad standard which manufacturers had to adhere tooo instead of the filth usually on win laptops. I don't want to smear my fingers around on my nice clean laptop screen

[benjipwns]

I was at a family gathering a couple weeks ago where people were complaining about the Start Screen and they asked me (since I know all about computers and thus can fix their Chrome just from them describing how it sometimes crashes) what it's for. I said "it's replacing the Start Menu" and everyone was all "what's a Start Menu?"

On my mom's new ultrabook or whatever I told her to just hit the desktop button or Windows key. Though I noticed she's been hitting the icons on the Start Screen I created for the few programs she uses. The one thing she can't handle is that welcome screen you have to move up or whatever before you login. She just mashes the Windows key.

I think another problem that Win8 has is that there isn't a lot of compelling reasons for people to upgrade their desktops/laptops right now. In fact, I would venture to guess that many people are on their last desktop machine and don't even realize it yet.

Yeah, I do wonder how much it has to do with anger at 8 or whether it's more about how close in release to 7 it is. Probably a bit of both. IIRC, Vista's adoption numbers were going up quite a bit right before 7 came out.

It's also weird how many "experts" think XP's seemingly endless life cycle was the norm in OS release cycles. (And don't know that Microsoft said years ago they were attempting to move to bi-yearly and then yearly release cycles.) So you get lots of "Microsoft rushed out (or will rush out) [X]."

[archnemesis]

The one thing she can't handle is that welcome screen you have to move up or whatever before you login. She just mashes the Windows key.

You can just hit the Enter key before typing in your password. There is no need for any mouse movements.

[benjipwns]

Did not know that, it's got a touch screen so I always just used my finger to make a swipe. She's afraid of the touch screen. (And not having it plugged in because the battery will get all used up!)

Thanks for the tip.

[Mupepe]

Or the space bar!

[MCD]

http://www.stardock.com/products/modernmix/

MS should implement this natively in Blue.

[D3RANG3D]

Microsoft just needs to implement that shit in for free.

[recursivelyenumerable]

re "ModernMix":

I wasn't expecting to like this since I'm mostly happy with Windows 8 as it is and don't see the need for stuff like emulating old versions of the start menu, but it's actually pretty sweet. You can set it up so WinStore apps run fullscreen like normal, but with the ability to basically turn the app into a desktop app (and back again) with a simple keystroke or GUI button press, which feels surprisingly quick and natural. This is ideal for me because again I'm happy with the default behavior *most* of the time (on my laptop), but occasionally hit a situation where I want to see something else at the same time and the snap view doesn't show what I'm interested in.

My biggest issue - which tbh is kind of a dealbreaker in terms of my buying this and keeping it installed, but since it's a beta maybe it'll be changed/fixed (or made optional to the extent it's intentional) by release - is that the recent apps thumbnail list on the left is (IMO) basically broken by this. It borks the switching animation (which I find makes the system feel smoother and doesn't slow anything down significantly, plus the non-animation here adds some weird flicker as well), and WinStore apps running in "desktop mode" still appear in the thumbnail list and switch to the app on the desktop, which I find disconcerting.

Basically, what I'd personally prefer is that apps running in "new UI mode" should behave and be treated by the system exactly as WinStore apps are now (so they should suspend/resume, be shown in the thumbnail list, but NOT be shown on the taskbar, etc.) and WinStore apps running in "desktop mode" should as much as possible behave and be treated exactly as desktop apps are now (so they should , be shown in the taskbar, but NOT suspend/resume, NOT be shown in the thumbnail list, etc.). I know some people like the idea of having a unified taskbar but I actually like having apps that suspend/resume be off to the left as it clears up the taskbar for more pinned desktop apps. I also think it makes sense for apps with completely different lifecycle mechanisms to have different UI for managing their lifecycles. If not for this issue I'd definitely pay the $5 for this otherwise very cool mod.

[MCD]

It made multi monitor usable for me.

Now I can have multiple apps thrown at my second monitor and can still navigate the start menu on my main or launch even more apps.

I reported the weird close behavior that still sits at the left bar to the support team. Let's see how this goes.

Unlike Start8 which I have no need for since I barely used the old start menu, ModernMix is truly a game changer.

Décor8 is nice as well, try it if you you want to customize your start menu wallpaper.

[recursivelyenumerable]

Some more thoughts on this I am cross-spamming from other forums:

I think one detriment of supporting something like this officially is that developers would then be expected to design and test for resizing to resolutions below 1024x768. One of the goals of the WinStore app model was to reduce the amount of stuff like that developers had to worry about (because they thought issues like this were one of the reasons developers were drawn away from PC and towards platforms like iOS).

Now I'm actually positively surprised by how well the apps do resize despite this.  I guess since the WWA/XAML frameworks and controls are designed to adaptively scale, the apps get a fair amount of sensible resizing behavior for free even when not designed or tested for it. However, obviously there are some significant glitches and brokenness here and there (look at the chart control in the Bing weather app for example), that would take extra work for the developer to fix (and remember the cliché that the last 20% of polish takes 80% of the effort ...) and while it's OK for a third-party mod to expose behavior like this, I think it's much too flaky for an officially supported feature (OK, the apps are flaky in some ways already, but this would make them EVEN MORE flaky).

Personally I think a good approach for an official feature like this would be to just leave it up to developers whether their particular app supports it or not, and hide/disable the UI control to change modes for apps that don't.  Then devs who don't want to worry about supporting resolutions under 1024x768 still don't have to, and devs who think their userbase includes a lot of people interested in using the app on the desktop can do the work to support it properly. (and people who really want to resize apps that don't officially support it can still use third-party mods to do it without putting an expectation burden on the developer ...) Additionally if apps know whether they're running on the desktop or not they can make some appropriate modifications to their UI - e.g. it's silly having both window chrome with a title that says "Store" and a giant header that says "Store" (well, tbh I think it's silly having a giant header that says "Store" even when the store is running fullscreen, but it's doubly silly on the desktop).

[MCD]

Know what's more broken with this mod? Dragging to close X apps no longer works, in fact, it kinda glitches something fierce lol.

This isn't a problem but having the option or hand thingy to drag down the desktop (because you can't make the desktop windowed so the option is still there) is silly or double silly as you mentioned.

[MCD]

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2013/03/11/flash-in-windows-8.aspx

MS is enabling Flash on both desktop and Metro IE for almost websites on Windows 8/RT.

[Mupepe]

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2013/03/11/flash-in-windows-8.aspx

MS is enabling Flash on both desktop and Metro IE for almost websites on Windows 8/RT.

Thank God

[Cerveza mas fina]

This should have been there at start but better late then never. Maybe Metro IE will be usable now.

[archnemesis]

They need to add a whole lot more features than Flash if they want to make Internet Explorer usable.

[MCD]

Update is up.

Porn sites working YES

[ManaByte]

Installed a GTX 660ti in my Win8 machine yesterday. Card works fine, games are running fine, but now the Sleep option is gone from Win8. Anyone know why?

[recursivelyenumerable]

Know what's more broken with this mod? Dragging to close X apps no longer works, in fact, it kinda glitches something fierce lol.

This isn't a problem but having the option or hand thingy to drag down the desktop (because you can't make the desktop windowed so the option is still there) is silly or double silly as you mentioned.

Yeah actually all the CoreWindow moving/resizing animations are borked with this. It seems to hook into the view state change events somehow and turn them into weird flickering things, wonder what's going on to make this work. I turned it off, while it's a useful feature to have it's not worth (to me) making the whole system feel janky.

[Squiddy]

Just a bunch of whiners, all versions suck until SP1/2 comes out.