Windows 8 - anyone here tried it, or thinking about it?

[Ian]

Re: Windows 8 - anyone here tried it, or thinking about it?

I guess it's been a year since I got my Win 8 desktop. I still wish I'd ignored the saleman's pitch and gone with a Win 7. We've acquired one more desktop and two laptops since then all with Win 8. It all cases we've installed Win 7 emulator software and have been happy. Once in a while, something will open in a Win 8 format and after brief cursing we'll change the association.

Today I ran into a new problem. We've been traveling for a couple of weeks and staying at different hotels with my Win 7 laptop and my wife's Win 8 notebook. She has had frequent problems connecting with WiFi getting a "limited connectivity" message despite a a strong signal with the result that she can't get online at all. Googling the problem reveals that it's a widespread issue. In a very limited number of reported cases people have been able to rectify it by updating to 8.1 but we can't do that if can't connect.

If I had the option to trade all four of my Win 8 machines for Win 7 I wouldn't hesitate.

I did an informal survey of about twenty members of our ski club who have Windows 8. Without exception, every single person has loaded a third party program to revert it to a Win 7 type display.

The nice thing is that you can do that (make Windows 8 look like Windows 7). I thought I would miss the Win 7 detailing of the windows (transparency, etc.) but I now switch from my desktop (still Win 7) and my laptop (Win 8.1) and just don't think about it.

It will be interesting to see how Windows 10 will be received when it is released in 2015.

Ian

[JSR]

Re: Windows 8 - anyone here tried it, or thinking about it?

'Full fat' Windows 8.1 is running on small devices now because Intel has entered the low voltage/power CPU market with its Atom processors. Windows RT runs on ARM-based processors which dominate this sector. But there is no sign that Intel will become dominant at the expense of ARM and the finger-friendly aspect of Windows 8 and its app ecosystem is engineered to be hardware independent. It's not quite there yet (some less well written apps or some more complex apps are still not compatible with all versions of Windows) but in the end I believe you will see branding of Windows covering laptop, desktop, tablet and mobile devices regardless of hardware and without much distinction apart from the legacy desktop capability. It's already like this with Android, which runs seamlessly on both Intel Atom and ARM-based hardware.

Ian

[Ian]

Re: Windows 8 - anyone here tried it, or thinking about it?

The smaller the device the smaller the battery and so the lower the ultimate battery capacity. There is currently no way around that. One idea would be to use a large capacity external battery when you need to.

Android devices can be operated using a mouse. I've used a bluetooth mouse. When enabled you see a very familiar mouse pointer I think a keyboard can be used too but I haven't tried this.

Ian

[JSR]

Re: Windows 8 - anyone here tried it, or thinking about it?

I get that, and battery technology is advancing all the time so it will be something that'll eventually be overcome.

External batteries are one option (I have an Anker external battery charger that'll happily charge both of my tablets at the same time), but the manufacturers of these tablets have decided that you will charge via the only USB port - meaning that to use an external power source means you have no USB port available to anything else.

I would have thought that, knowing the limitation of modern battery technology, they wouldn't build-in such a ridiculous limitation.

I know Android devices can use a mouse. I have a 24" AIO Acer DA241HL here - which has Android installed, and comes supplied with a 2.4GHz dongle and wireless mouse/keyboard (not bluetooth, oddly). Trouble is that this setup only really works for software designed for it - which isn't really the case with Android (or Apple) apps, as it's not intended as a content creation device. There is software that has been designed for it (Softmaker Office for Android HD effectively turns your Android device into same as a desktop office solution), but using traditional Windows is just a better experience for content creation.

[patmoore]

Re: Windows 8 - anyone here tried it, or thinking about it?

Windows 10 is out and so far I'm a happy camper. I upgraded all my Win 8 machines and after a few days, did the same thing to my Win 7 machines.

The jury is still out on Edge but I think it'll be fine once the kinks are out. Organizing bookmarks is a cumbersome process and done much better with Chrome.

By default Edge uses Bing as a search engine and changing to Google isn't intuitive. I put together a short video explaining how to do it.

[ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpZYcIIVUtA&feature=youtu.be"]

Video

[/ame]

[JSR]

Re: Windows 8 - anyone here tried it, or thinking about it?

I've upgraded my two non-essential tablets so far, but haven't had much time to get to grips with them. Windows 10 looks okay now that I'm familiar with Windows 8.1.

However, the upgrades were not without their issues. One tablet got part way into the upgrade and then the screen turned into static. Couldn't see anything to figure out what was going on, and didn't want to risk rebooting in case I corrupted the upgrade.

I left it for a bit, but nothing changed, so I risked the reboot. Afterwards the upgrade continued and everything seems to be working fine.

The second tablet got part-way into the upgrade and then just froze. The upgrade % stopped increasing, and nothing seemed to be happening. Again, I didn't want to risk corrupting the upgrade by rebooting so I left it for ages. After awhile, I forced a reboot and, as with the other tablet, the upgrade finished fine and all seems to be okay.

As a result, I'm not about to risk upgrading my main machine (my laptop) just yet. I have far too much work on to risk the upgrade freezing again and maybe next time it will be corrupted. So, for now, I'm continuing with Windows 8.1 on my main machine.

[JSR]

Re: Windows 8 - anyone here tried it, or thinking about it?

I just noticed that Microsoft have chosen to ruin the functionality of OneDrive on Windows 10. My OneDrive is due for renewal soon, and I've been agonising between keeping Dropbox, or switching over to OneDrive. The always visible filenames (even for online files) - what they call "placeholders" - had just swayed me to abandon Dropbox in favour of OneDrive.

Now that functionality has been removed, I see no advantage of OneDrive over Dropbox, so it looks like I'm sticking with what I know and not renewing OneDrive.

Why get rid of what was a great feature of OneDrive on Windows 8.1?