Windows 8

Intrinsic

Intrinsic

Person of Whiteness
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Just installed and think I'm going to have to do some reading on the web.... but, is there any way to change the tile icon for programs? For instance the tile for Steam is that ugly gray box with the steam icon in the middle. Can I just point it toward a .png or something that is a full size tile? For whatever reason I keep wanting to use the right mouse button as 'back' in the store.
 
Gorehack

Gorehack

Lord Nagafen Raider
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Just got a new laptop for work with windows 8. It's...gonna take some getting used to.

It feels like a 17" cell phone.
 
brekk

brekk

Dancing Dino Superstar
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Alkorin_sl said:
In ways that Win7 isn't? Why? I've heard the taskbar finally extends to multiple monitors, but there must be something else?
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That's the main thing. However I rumming, Actual Multi Monitor, with Windows 7 for an even better taskbar experience.
 
Intrinsic

Intrinsic

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Toxxulian_sl said:
Win 8 is amazing with two or more monitors.
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I get to have Metro on one monitor and desktop on the side two, but as soon as focus shifts to the 2nd or 3rd Metro goes away and it is desktop on all 3. Maybe there's a setting I'm missing that makes Win 8 better with multi monitors.
 
S

Silence_sl

shitlord
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I'm going back to W7 this weekend. I used W8 here and there when it was in beta, and full time since it was released for peasants at the end of October. W7 was rock-solid since day one, but W8 is just full of random shitty little bugs, so off it goes.

I'm not really sure what MS was thinking when they pinched out this steaming loaf, but jesus, what a huge step back for them in so many ways.
 
M

MsBehavn_sl

has an outie
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Intrinsic_sl said:
I get to have Metro on one monitor and desktop on the side two, but as soon as focus shifts to the 2nd or 3rd Metro goes away and it is desktop on all 3. Maybe there's a setting I'm missing that makes Win 8 better with multi monitors.
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I'm having this issue to. Also, the alt-tab "window" bugs out with some borderless/windowed games when you alt-tab it ends up showing every metro app that's open in the background where as normally they're hidden.
 
Gaige

Gaige

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Silence_sl said:
I'm going back to W7 this weekend. I used W8 here and there when it was in beta, and full time since it was released for peasants at the end of October. W7 was rock-solid since day one, but W8 is just full of random shitty little bugs, so off it goes.

I'm not really sure what MS was thinking when they pinched out this steaming loaf, but jesus, what a huge step back for them in so many ways.
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I've used it since beta on my main machine without any issues - and in a lot of ways it's faster than Windows 7.
 
brekk

brekk

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Over the last week the shop where I work has gotten two customers complaining about their Windows 8 PC's, and 3 more asking about downgrades. One of them bought hers at Staples on a credit card and think she's gonna go through her CC to fight the charges and return it for a full refund.

We have not yet dealt with one person who actually likes it.
 
Alkorin

Chancellor Alkorin

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Yeah, but why are they complaining? Do they have reasonable technical issues, or are they just whining because something's changed and they don't want to learn?

Win8 isn't all that horrible. People complained when Vista did away with some of XP's familiarity, and that slowly died down. No one cares that Win7 doesn't look and feel like XP at this point. At some point, no one will care about Win8 not looking exactly like Win7.
 
spronk

spronk

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win8 is extremely unintuitive, until you figure out the whole corners-are-hidden-important-buttons thing you can get frustrated, seemingly stuck in full screen metro apps. Its also really bizarre switching from full screen metro apps back to old style win7 desktop windows based on whether its a native metro app or not, it is far from seamless or elegant and very clunky.

Its a decent start to a new UI, but just a lot of little shit that would never have gotten past Apple designers that can make the whole thing frustrating. Why doesn't hitting escape a bunch of times in metro apps take me back to home? Why did they remove a start button from the desktop task bar, I went and bought start8 because I'm so used to it. I don't think I really like full screen mode for most of my apps most of the time, and it feels badly done in the current iteration for most things. When I bring up my metro home, the apps "area" has a horizontal scroll bar but it cuts off the app names until you scroll, it all just feels so amateurish, like a bunch of college kids did it.

That said under the hood things seem a lot better than win7, so I'm sticking with it. You get used to the UI changes pretty fast, within a few hours I don't really notice the change from w7 anymore.
 
S

Silence_sl

shitlord
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Alkorin_sl said:
Yeah, but why are they complaining? Do they have reasonable technical issues, or are they just whining because something's changed and they don't want to learn?

Win8 isn't all that horrible. People complained when Vista did away with some of XP's familiarity, and that slowly died down. No one cares that Win7 doesn't look and feel like XP at this point. At some point, no one will care about Win8 not looking exactly like Win7.
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My issues are with bugs, not the UI. I have Metro effectively hidden from use, and I won't cover ground that's already been covered a billion times already. Anyway, the bugs that I can't hammer out are unreliable network and disc transfer speeds. Sometimes I'll get full speed, other times I'll get some maddeningly slow fraction of that. This morning, I was getting 3 MB/s to a disc that's good for 150+. Sometimes a reboot fixes it, sometimes it doesn't. The cause is the OS, and not the usual suspects of drivers or AV/AM, and the same goes for network transfers. I never had a problem with these things in W7. There's a litany of other small bugs that pop up here and there that simply aren't extant in W7. And really, the only problem I have with W7 is the random rebuilding of the thumbnails cache...which happens more frequently and takes longer to rebuild on W8.

This thing could have sat in the cooker for another 6 months while they fixed bugs. As it is, I'm not sure if they fixed any bugs at all in their quest to get it pinched out.

Beyond that, people didn't have a problem with Vista's UI up on release, but it's piggishness.
 
Alkorin

Chancellor Alkorin

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Hmm. Interesting. Definitely sounds like a driver issue, which is the plague of MS upgrades. No one's ever ready on time.

I've seen this with some systems in Win7 (until the drivers caught up) and Win8 as well. My main system seems fine at this point, but Intel controllers are very common and I'm not surprised that some thought may have gone into the driver by now. I've seen some sketchy network performance, but for the most part, everything seems fine. Driver issues usually sort themselves out in a short enough amount of time if you're using popular hardware. I reinstall my OS enough that I wouldn't care about going back to Win7 in the interim, though. I suspect you're probably in the same boat.

With respect to the UI, yes, people did have a problem with it. People have a problem with UIs when they change because familiarity is a big part of confidence when it comes to using computers. I had clients refuse to upgrade to Server 2008 because of the UI (because UI matters on a server, right?), and it was the same with XP -> Vista, 2000 -> XP (even though they could just use Classic), 98SE -> NT/2000, etc. etc. etc. In general, if you're the kind of person that wouldn't even understand how to post on a forum like this, change is Bad. Some of my clients are these people.
 
W

Wolfen_sl

shitlord
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I installed Win8 on an older HP Slimline PC just to see how it would run it. It has an AMD X2 4400+ processor and 4gb ram. It actually runs it very well. I'm sure the greatly reduced use of Aero helps greatly, but overall, it is very useable.
 
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