Windows 8 Thread

[Cyborg]

I'm going to withhold judgment because I believe that Microsoft will fix the issues. Without gamers, they have nothing. I also like the idea of Xbox live games being playable.

[Aklyon]

Without gamers, they have plenty of office buildings.

...That don't update immediately, if at all.

[doctorfrog]

I'm going to withhold judgment because I believe that Microsoft will fix the issues. Without gamers, they have nothing. I also like the idea of Xbox live games being playable.

This is the thing that I will be doing. But I won't begrudge others from dogpiling over W8. Hatin's part of the fun, I get it.

[Volatar]

I'm going to withhold judgment because I believe that Microsoft will fix the issues. Without gamers, they have nothing. I also like the idea of Xbox live games being playable.

This is the thing that I will be doing. But I won't begrudge others from dogpiling over W8. Hatin's part of the fun, I get it.
[/quote

Good attitude to have.

[BobTheJanitor]

Without gamers, they have plenty of office buildings.

...That don't update immediately, if at all.

The company I'm with (fairly large business, in several states in the US, I prefer not to name names since you never know who's reading) still runs their entire enterprise on windows XP. And that's a relatively recent change. When I joined up with them about 6 years ago, they were running on win 2k. It was just within the last year that they actually upgraded to using IE 7. So yeah. The chances of them upgrading to win 8 any time soon are somewhere between 'not bloody likely' and 'hell no'. Big companies don't care about flashy new O/S tweaks. They want to run their specialized internal software on a platform that they know is stable. They don't care too much about support lifetimes either, because they've got their own IT department who can keep the ancient O/S chugging along tomorrow just like it did today, and that's all that's important. When a change is going to impact compatibility with programs that thousands of people have to use every day to keep the money machine running, that change is going to be very long in coming. And win 8 looks like way too much of a change in the glitz and glamor department, versus a change in the usability and stability department, to ever interest most businesses.

And if they can't get businesses on board, and they can't get gamers on board, they've pretty much lost a huge chunk of their income. What's going to be left are the curious hobbyists (a number so small you can ignore it) and the OEM pre-installed sales. Those are still a pretty big part of the money. But I wonder how many people are going to go back to Dell and say 'I don't like this, can I get windows 7 instead?' That's the main question. Grandma and grandpa getting their first PC aren't going to care. And previous terrible versions of windows like ME managed to do okay on OEM sales. But I guess we'll see.

And then of course, there's this.

[Aklyon]

I don't remember Win95 being too bad, though I don't remember much of it anyway. So that picture seems pretty accurate.

[KingIsaacLinksr]

I don't remember Win95 being too bad, though I don't remember much of it anyway. So that picture seems pretty accurate.

Yeah, my parent's first PC ran 95 all until a couple of years ago when we finally put it out of its misery for being useless xD. Man that thing was ancient, and the OS ran just fine.

[BobTheJanitor]

I don't remember Win95 being too bad, though I don't remember much of it anyway. So that picture seems pretty accurate.

It's been a while, but if I recall it pretty much got all the criticism that gets leveled at any new windows version. Too much decoration, not enough function. People were far too used to their program manager and their file manager and this newfangled start menu didn't make sense. But yeah, I'd say that's the weakest point of that argument. It really only fails by comparison to 98, which took everything it did and did it better.

Of course, I'm still miffed at win 7 for all the dumb little functionality changes they made to it. I'm having to run like 3 different UI tweaks that all make it function more like 98/XP did. I wish I could find something that makes the lock screen work like XP's did, but apparently that's impossible. But I digress.

[keith.lamothe]

3.11 was great and stable for me. 
95 was a crash fest that I barely managed to get under control. 
98 still had a fair number of crashes but I was able to get almost all of it sorted out into a workable truce. 
ME was a disaster.
2k was _awesome_, no more crashes! And XP was a good next step after that.
Vista... I used Vista on my main workstation for about a year and a half, iirc, and I didn't really mind it. 
But 7 has been a far more pleasant experience.

8? 8 is dead to me   (kidding, will see how it goes, but definitely not feeling any need to upgrade, 7 is working just fine)

[Cyborg]

3.1- Lots of fun
95 - The blue screen of death becomes a meme
95v.c - we are introduced to USB devices and the most stable version of the OS
98 - no real improvements over 95v.c, I had to restore this one several times
Windows me- sucked. It was the vista of its generation and really shed light on why we needed the nt kernel.
2k - the epitome in the Windows line, nothing has been better before or since
xp - for everybody that never heard of 2k. Introduced a stable, standard gaming platform. Introduced the Barney's playhouse gui.
Vista - I was one of the early adopters, and it had so many hardware compatibility issues as well as gaming crashes. I reverted to xp. I still have an extra copy of xp that I purchased around here just in case I need a gaming computer up and running fast.
Windows 7 - some peculiarities with multiprocessing, but you get benefits also. I noticed that some of my old software does not run as well. Overall, stable, and a worthy successor to xp with the upgraded DirectX. Unfortunately, I think we would all still be on xp if it supported the latest gaming. Windows 7 didn't actually make anything easier, more pleasant, easier to find, so on and so forth… It's just different. And that's probably going to be the case for Windows 8.

As a side note, Linux is a lot of fun except in the following scenarios:
gaming compatibility
occasionally hardware compatibility

If you could fix those two things and make it standard, you would have a winner. Unfortunately, that community has no interest in standards because they value their independence over functionality. A real shame, and it will probably be second banana until they decide to pool their resources into creating a true platform.

[BobTheJanitor]

Windows 7 didn't actually make anything easier, more pleasant, easier to find, so on and so forth… It's just different. And that's probably going to be the case for Windows 8.

I just want to take a moment to rant about that. I hate that MS likes to take something that works, and which everyone is mostly used to, and then do it in a different way. I work a helpdesk job, so this really annoys me. I don't know how many of you have had to walk a user through accessing their network settings in various versions of windows, but each one makes it wildly different. And there's absolutely no improvement. It's giving you the same information, it's just adding more pointless steps along the way to find them. And I despise the fact that windows gives you an option of either a 'standard' control panel or a 'classic' control panel. Because I never know which one someone is using. And I don't know if they can't find the 'network and internet' icon because they are oblivious, or because they're on a different control panel. Windows XP was just about the simplest and most straightforward to deal with. They just complicated it from there, by making it more 'user friendly'. Yeah, B.S. You know what's user friendly? Consistency. When some lawyer has been using one version of windows for years, and she's entirely used to it, it doesn't matter that the interface isn't perfectly directing her to what she wants immediately. She knows which buttons to click to get to it. That's all that's needed. When it upgrades and everything has been moved around to make it 'EASIER' suddenly she can't find anything.  It's like this horrid ribbon interface in new office products. For decades it managed to stay pretty consistent. You know generally what you would find under 'file' or under 'view'. Now they put the most used options in a giant ugly cluster@&#$!* of Playskool my-first-buttons at the top of the screen, and if you need to find an option that they haven't decided is important, good lucky buddy.

And that's my biggest worry about windows 8. It's like that execrable ribbon concept writ large and splattered all over the OS like filth on a bathroom wall. Now no one will be able to find anything they need, once again, and if the so-called engineers at MS haven't decided that finding out if you have a valid IP address or even have your NIC properly installed is important enough to make it easily accessible, I'll be directing users through 27 confusing steps clicking on similarly named shiny drop-shadowed buttons to get to it.  I loathe the idea, and I especially loathe that I will soon have to support the odious thing.

[Aklyon]

The ribbon is in Explorer in 8, as far as I've seen, yay

[KingIsaacLinksr]

I agree with the Ribbon bit, that was and still is a stupid idea. The fact that I have to hunt through four different ribbons for that one setting I need is ridiculous. It doesn't seem to have a very good structure to it. But we're stuck with it because Office is the dominant product on the planet and pretty much everyone uses it for work or school.

As for the 7 rant, hmm..idk, I find that I can't use XP anymore because there are things in 7 that work and make sense and that XP just does not have. Like searching, which actually works more often than not. Searching for something in XP makes me want to bash my head on the wall it is so awful. There are other things, but they aren't coming to mind because I don't have an XP desktop to check but yeah. XP is just too jarring these days to use.

[Cyborg]

The ribbon does suck.

[Aklyon]

I agree with the Ribbon bit, that was and still is a stupid idea. The fact that I have to hunt through four different ribbons for that one setting I need is ridiculous. It doesn't seem to have a very good structure to it. But we're stuck with it

LibreOffice!

...because Office is the dominant product on the planet and pretty much everyone uses it for work or school.

Only the people who actually have Windows 7. My school was perfectly fine with XP and pre-ribbon office.