Windows 8

Sean_sl said:

Brekk, why in god's name were you trying to work with IE10 instead of just installing Chrome or Firefox and being done with it?

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Because Old People.

The chrome icon looks nothing like their "internet button" that they have clicked on for 10 years. Until you work with people who can't open ANYTHING because the icons are not in the same place on their desktop you just can't understand. I've had tons of people tell me they had no idea what the icon was named or what it looked like - they just know to use the "top right" icon to do their work.

Got a free copy from work because I have to do compatibility testing for the one customer that is moving to IE10.

Added Start8 by Stardock and honestly this OS is great.

I don't miss the start button one bit. Just hit the windows key and start typing what I want. Fucking great. Ignore Metro apps until they get their act together. Other than that, as a power-user/admin I use it for both my work laptop and at home for gaming. Then again, with access to both Dreamspark and MSDN I didn't pay a dime for it, so there's that.

Funny story, my old boss actually had the IE icon on his parent's desktop spin up a VM to have them surf with. Perfect way to keep them from getting (keeping?) malware.

brekk_sl said:

Oh and Start 8 blows, it changes the functionality of the windows button, so when you start an app that runs in metro its much harder to jump back to the desktop UI.

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Why are you trying to use metro apps?

my parents pc has been running win 8 for a few weeks now, its hilarious when an app launches in metro mode - neither can figure out how to get out, so they press the power off button to reboot. Other than that it works ok, I removed the IE icon and put chrome in the same spot, they miss the menu bar ("son, how do I copy and paste?") but otherwise it is pretty much the same. But yeah, god help them when they open an attachment or something and it launches an app in metro mode, they are stuck.

Fortunately google allows you to view most things inside chrome, and you can just slowly change the Open With... app on photos, videos, music, PDFs, etc. Great thing too is uninstall all the Adobe shit and use SumatraPDF.

Even on my home PC I fucking hate it when I launch something in metro mode, they really need a "turn off all the metro shit" option. Start8 is also way, way better than Pokki, the latter occasionally just hangs or doesn't respond when I ran it, ended up getting a second Start8 key.

I haven't even looked at Windows 8 but if you have to disable much of the new stuff to get it to look and act like Windows 7 what do you gain by going to Windows 8 over 7 formostusers?

Borzak_sl said:

I haven't even looked at Windows 8 but if you have to disable much of the new stuff to get it to look and act like Windows 7 what do you gain by going to Windows 8 over 7 formostusers?

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It's "faster", more secure, better file system, and honestly I haven't changed or disabled anything in my use of it. The Start Screen is just a huge Start Menu bar to me and I rarely ever used the start Menu for anything in the first place. Just about anything relevant to my daily use is a pinned icon on my taskbar to begin with, so I rarely ever see the new Metro stuff as is. I keep a few things pinned on the Start Screen like configuration programs for video/audio stuff, but hitting the winkey and mousing over to them is no slower than I'd have done in opening the start menu and clicking on it there.

People really make a mountain out of a molehill about the Windows 8 Metro stuff. For all intents and purposes it functions identically to Windows 7 out of the box, it just has a slightly different perspective.

Also it has a way better game suite than Windows 7!

I'm looking at installing this to at least see what it's all about. I have a PC that's a few years old though with a core 2 duo CPU. I get the following when looking at the compatibility:

Your processor doesn't have NX turned on or might not support NX
Setup will attempt to turn on NX during installation. If your processor doesn't support NX, the installation will be cancelled and your PC will roll back to the current OS

I'm not sure what this is, but after doing a quick google it appears I can still run Windows 8, but I don't want to start if I'll have issues. Any have any info on this?

Alkorin_sl said:

Win8 is nowhere near as bad as Vista was. If you think it is, you're doing something incredibly wrong.

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The only problem Vista had was being a bit resource heavy, but if you had a decent system that wasn't an issue.

So, through MSDN and my university I can chose between Windows 8 and 7 for free. Mostly use the PC for gaming. Thoughts?