Windows 8

**flyingcrocodile46** · 29th July 2012, 16:28

Originally Posted by Brian d'marge

widows will have to do something....Pc prices coming down..lunux coming of age
my computers all run linux, rock solid ,stable....except commercial software such as catia and solidworks etc...and that is ,can be a big deal breaker,,,im ok but it is a pain
I hope these large companys lose the protectionist stance ...and let the power of the people improvethe product, can see signs in window they are trying.....apple,,yes well
stephen

The Android platform has started to move toward PC level performance and provides compatibility with windows office via apps developed in the wild. With the development of cloud computing and such taking over a lot of the computing functions, the market for lower powered devices such as tablets is likely to boom. I 'm watching with interest

**avgas** · 29th July 2012, 16:44

Originally Posted by Akzle

you can make windows 7 look and behave like XP quite easily. (except the start menu...

) that asides... there's not too much, underneath all the shiney shit, that's really really changed since 95. (excepting new hardware, bluetooth, ie)

As someone who still has to work on Windows 95 and Windows NT machines (Some of my control stuff is 25 years old!)........lets just say your fond memories of these OS's are misplaced. They are shit. Things are light years ahead of them.

Windows 95 - Plug in any new hardware and not only do you have to find the driver cd, find the driver file on the cd, reboot the cd and try again because and API hasn't loaded or you need to update windows installer first. Then re-attempt the driver install only to find once again you need to reboot the machine after the driver has installed. Then after the reboot for no reason at all your whole system goes to 16 bit colour because the driver you installed has a letter similar to driver which remotely sounds like your graphics driver. So then you disconnect the device, reboot again, get your graphics sorted, plug in the device, it re-detects and installs. You reboot one final time to finally get it working.
But after then it works fine

Don't forget that MSCONFIG was designed as a tool to fix windows 95 bugs so that the consumer didn't have to send their PC back to Microsoft HQ.

And windows NT was great. Unless you wanted to do anything outside 1280x1024 with 32 bit. Not to mention the MILLIONS of error reports you would get, that would eventually result in you combing the harddrives trying to find a missing file......because the search function was worse than a blind man who slept half the time.

No I will be very thankful for the day I never see 95, and NT ever again. XP SP2 ownwards were ok - but I am even getting sick of fixing XP machines where some fool has deleted all the systems files.

To drag this back on topic. Been a few month running 8 on my main PC now.
Its OK, nothing special over 7 - may be a little faster but the new metro screen slows me down anyway. Only major catastrophe so far has been when 8 tried killing off flash. Which killed my browser for a day or so.
However 8 has really lost that windows charm for me. Its not really structured anymore. They have made it Mac like - and computers have always been logical in my mind, not artsy. Metro is for metro's, the "hide-everything-that-isnt-related" thing is pissing me off and overall I enjoy using 7 more.
Looks like I need to start migrating as much as I can from Windows to Android and Mint. Would be handy if wine could load every windows application on planet.

**Akzle** · 29th July 2012, 17:08

Originally Posted by avgas

Windows 95 - Plug in any new hardware and not only do you have to find the driver cd, find the driver file on the cd, reboot the cd and try again because and API hasn't loaded or you need to update windows installer first. Then re-attempt the driver install only to find once again you need to reboot the machine after the driver has installed. Then after the reboot for no reason at all your whole system goes to 16 bit colour because the driver you installed has a letter similar to driver which remotely sounds like your graphics driver. So then you disconnect the device, reboot again, get your graphics sorted, plug in the device, it re-detects and installs. You reboot one final time to finally get it working.
But after then it works fine

you mistake me. i never said they were good. i just said they haven't really improved much in the last 15 years and/or only really catching up to the linux distros of the 2000s.
and i think you suck at installing shit. i never had that much of a problem. i got a 95 box to run h4xored 98se bluetooth driver's once.
i wasn't sure that 95 used the API call structure....?

3.1 was great, 95 was shit. (and so too the patches they "fixed" 95 with) 98 was buggy as hell. 98 se hid most of those bugs where people wouldn't find them, 2k was a vast improvement on nt 4.0 (which was better than 95, even for desktop users) while still using basically the same core technologies. "me" was as much of a joke as vista. mce was actually pretty l33t for a microsoft product.
i'm not sure if they've done away with the "registry" in 7, but holy hell. that was an ugly bit of programming. and i think it was only in 7, after people hacking the registry (since 98) to get the damned "recycle bin" off the f*cking desktop, that windows have FINALLY put a damn checkbox in for it.

linux solves the microsoft boot sector problem.

...And windows NT was great. Unless you wanted to do anything outside 1280x1024 with 32 bit. Not to mention the MILLIONS of error reports you would get, that would eventually result in you combing the harddrives trying to find a missing file......because the search function was worse than a blind man who slept half the time.

this is a hardware thing. the hardware of the day wasn't flass. i had a matrox video card (AGP bro!) that has 512 MB shared memory across it's four monitor outputs. asides. (very precise for photo editing, not so good for gamerz) NT was designed as a "server/enterprise" edition. not for desktop users. CLI does not need high res or true color.
and if you look under "administrative tools" in XP you'll find a lot of the old 16/32 bit tools that are hangover from nt 4.0

...Looks like I need to start migrating as much as I can from Windows to Android and Mint. Would be handy if wine could load every windows application on planet.

go mint and run VMwarez. install your windows inside linux and pwn the f*ck out of it. with newer hardware you just give a core to the vm box which is usually more than enough for a stripped out windows shell to run pretty much anything.

**Scuba_Steve** · 29th July 2012, 17:32

I see the game devs aint impressed with Win8. Starting with Valve's Gabe calling it a "catastrophe for everyone in the PC space", now Blizzard's Rob claiming "it's not awesome for blizzard either"

**pete376403** · 29th July 2012, 19:44

Originally Posted by Akzle

i'm not sure if they've done away with the "registry" in 7, but holy hell. that was an ugly bit of programming.

Registry is still there in W7 Ultimate so I assume the other flavours also have it.

**Gremlin** · 3rd August 2012, 10:11

Downloaded Windows 8 Release Preview last night, as I was in the mood and we had a spare laptop with decent hardware.

Install process looked much like Win7, until you got to account creation and it was downhill from there. Normal start menu gone, replaced by Metro. Figured out how to get out of it, only to find there was no more start menu.

Then I realised that since going to Win7, I've actually been using the start menu heaps, as you just type what you want, instead of playing hide and seek with options. Now Microsoft decides we're not using it much, when I was using it more

Just about all of the metro interface is useless for business use. All of the metro links wanted you to log into your Microsoft account, extremely cloud based, even down to login options (which is trick for MS, fucken irritating and somewhat scary). Took me a while to figure out how to get into Control Panel (wait, never found that) and found a related link to get Computer on the desktop. Obviously, I'm a heavy user, run a lot of different software constantly. It's a tool for me, not a toy.

While Microsoft keeps going down this track I'm more and more happy we're (and none of our clients) are on software assurance. At this rate 8 is going in the Vista pile and we'll see if 9 is any good. Part of me even wonders if this is going to signal the death of Microsoft as people run away to flavours of Linux. We're extremely Windows based, Exchange servers, active directory, it's uh... what businesses doooo. Trials of Linux for users didn't go well at all. The changing for the sake of change is ridiculous. Users just want to work, not love their fucken OS and play with it all day...

oh well, rant over. I'm off to fix/upgrade computers. This last week or two has been the season for viruses and broken computers.

**oneofsix** · 3rd August 2012, 10:27

I thought having to play with the OS all day was the attraction of Linux, also why it struggles to get market share.
Windows trying to be hip, one bad OS, fix the fuck-ups, the don't works. Thinking about it, every second release is like a gamma release, a bit better than a beta, bugs mainly sorted, but actually a market tester.

**Gremlin** · 3rd August 2012, 10:32

Oh, then I realised that after 5 minutes of playing, I was spending all my time trying to get Win7 back. Decided to leave it stock to see how quickly the boss gets annoyed (he hasn't played yet). Hardly a good mark of an OS if you spend your time trying to get something else.

**SMOKEU** · 3rd August 2012, 10:40

Originally Posted by oneofsix

I thought having to play with the OS all day was the attraction of Linux, also why it struggles to get market share.

It's because of the lack of OEM Linux distributions.

**avgas** · 3rd August 2012, 10:49

Originally Posted by Akzle

go mint and run VMwarez. install your windows inside linux and pwn the f*ck out of it. with newer hardware you just give a core to the vm box which is usually more than enough for a stripped out windows shell to run pretty much anything.

Ha would love to - but really need to find a way to completely port things over to linux rather than just ductape it to a VM.
The UX problems I faced with linux in the past are fast dissolving. But unfortunately all the driver/api and reg issues that I need for my work still exist.
regedit is still in 7 and 8 and Vista.

Really need to get my head around Mint properly. The alternative is stepping back into the Mac, but I wan't to leave that moment for when I am senile and no longer have my own thoughts.

**avgas** · 3rd August 2012, 11:15

Originally Posted by Akzle

i think you suck at installing shit. i never had that much of a problem. i got a 95 box to run h4xored 98se bluetooth driver's once.

Its one of the perks of my job. Taking piles of shit and try and make it work.
But the driver install issue I explained below was the wondrous 1995 Matrox Millennium 1MB "64bit" card. This combined with an AWE32.

Most stuff at the day (graphics/sound) you just set the type, set the IRQ and DMA and your away. That first Matrox card of mine was like going to a dentist who's hooked the drill up to a V8.
Got there in the end. Turned out they had released the product globally - and put the wrong driver CD in there. It had a driver that conflicted with SB ones. So once the matrox was installed, and I then installed the AWE it then fucked the Matrox.........and back around the circle we went.

Hindsight in tech is a wonderful thing. Taking new gear to run on old stuff is good fun. But when 95, 98 and XP were brand new, pain usually ensues. Vista onwards have been the only windows op systems where I haven't had to dig around the back to get things to work straight away.

95, 3.11, DOS and OS2 all I did was dig around the back. But it was educational back then

ME was the compromise of only having to install 50% of the crap on the machine.

**flyingcrocodile46** · 3rd August 2012, 18:50

I am not sure if 8 is going to deliver anything worth the hassle. One feature I would like is the ability to single touch multiple page docs, (incl ebooks and mags) to have them fill the screen and allow pages to be turned like a book (by touching the corner of the page and swiping across the screen). That would be cool.