Upgrading Win 7 to Win 8

[pzkpfw]

Holy crap, they've even made Minesweeper suck.

[pzkpfw]

My Canon LBP 5000 Colour laser, which worked fine in Windows 7, is now killing Windows 8.

Can't currently use Office 2010 apps (Word nor Excel) as they hang when trying to enumerate printers.

Sigh.

[James Deuce]

*Gnnnhhhhhhh*

[Scuba_Steve]

Holy crap, they've even made Minesweeper suck.

dude you sure you were playing minesweeper before??? That games always sucked

[Akzle]

you poor bastard.


anyway. as an aside, the old man (and he is old, and so: grumbly about things that change) needs his computer re-jigoed. it's running XP, so i'd probably install that again. (clean format), but his wifey wants office '10. the specs for office 10 say it needs silverlight.
wtf is silverlight, and how much resource is it going to waste running in XP (sp3?)
can office 10 be hacked to run without it
better, can office 2000-2007 be hacked to read docx?

(this is, of course, assuming i can't convert them to linux and open office)

[Scuba_Steve]

you poor bastard.


anyway. as an aside, the old man (and he is old, and so: grumbly about things that change) needs his computer re-jigoed. it's running XP, so i'd probably install that again. (clean format), but his wifey wants office '10. the specs for office 10 say it needs silverlight.
wtf is silverlight, and how much resource is it going to waste running in XP (sp3?)
can office 10 be hacked to run without it
better, can office 2000-2007 be hacked to read docx?

(this is, of course, assuming i can't convert them to linux and open office)

Silverlight is MS's version of a Flash clone shouldn't be much in relation to resources, as for the rest? Don't know. Don't like office, don't use office, don't want office.

[jim.cox]

wtf is silverlight

To quote micro$oft: "Silverlight is a powerful development tool for creating engaging, interactive user experiences for Web and mobile applications. Silverlight is a free plug-in... "
Free download, doesnt use much resource

can office 10 be hacked to run without it

Unfortunately not

better, can office 2000-2007 be hacked to read docx?

There is a compatibility pac for the old versions of orifice that allow it to read write docx - again a free download

(this is, of course, assuming i can't convert them to linux and open office)

Open office works not too badly on XP if they cant cope with Linux

[G4L4XY]

For pete sake, check to make sure your printers etc support windows 8, don't upgrade to find out it's not going to work and have a big cry about it, check first or forever hold your piece

[oneofsix]

For pete sake, check to make sure your printers etc support windows 8, don't upgrade to find out it's not going to work and have a big cry about it, check first or forever hold your piece

WTF shouldn't that be the other way round, it is up to the OS to support the printer and printer just supports the ink and paper. Sounds like typical Microsoft upgrade issue, they decided no-one uses that model printer any more so drivers/ support no longer required.

[pzkpfw]

Update 1: Man, it was so jiggered, that simply opening the "Devices and Printers" window from Control Panel (and boy I "love" how that is now started), was causing Control Panel (Control Panel!!!) to hang. The way to fix that was to kill Windows Explorer through task manager (that made Desktop AND Metro vanish). In 7, that comes back in a moment. In 8, I seem to have to Ctrl+Alt+Del to log-off/log-on to bring it back. Anyway, I google a bit, and it seems killing the print spooler service can fix some of these hangs, so I get a bit further. (Would your Nana, whom Metro seems designed for, do that?) I uninstall the driver (sort of; accessing it seems to kill Windows) so I can reinstall. I'd googled up a forum comment about how running installers in compatibility mode can help. But, when running the installer, it never sees the USB connected printer. I try again and again, turn off, unplug, re-plug. Never works. I cancel install and resign myself to connecting the printer to my old XP "server" (which is a pain to keep on as its fan is so loud), to be accessed as a network printer. Then I notice that the printer has re-appeared in my devices list. Everything has stopped hanging. It actually works. I have no idea at what stage it got re-attached. I did my best to uninstall (short of regedit hacking and file deletion) and never completed the re-install. Perhaps while I was plugging it in and out, while installing the printer driver, in the background Windows saw it and (re)installed something itself. Without telling me.

Here's where everything got working again, but I'm still left sour about the experience.

Comment 1: The printer worked fine in 7, with a proper 64 bit driver. I don't think it was unreasonable to expect it to keep working in 8 (and hey! it seems to, eventually...). I did research, and it seemed a common comment that 7 drivers would work in 8. For that matter, if it would be more common that things don't work in 8 - good luck to Microsoft getting Win 8 into the Enterprise. Who wants to dump all their Lasers just to update their OS?

Comment 2: Yeah, I like Minesweeper for a brief moments distraction. A quick start-play-stop-get on with work thing. The new one wants to do stuff like connect to XBOX live to put my scores on the internet, or some shit like that that I am not interested in. So I'm delayed playing by telling the darn thing to piss off when it asks me to log on (because I don't have Windows set to automatically log me on everywhere. Screw that.) When a game is completed, fireworks go off, like I'm some 5 year old who needs a cheap thrill. Fuck off.

Comment 3: Office 2010 needs Silverlight? That's new to me. What for? (Also: Silverlight is dead. Microsoft is stopping development of it; with HTML5+JavaScript being preferred for the application space Silverlight was for.)

[Akzle]

There is a compatibility pac for the old versions of orifice that allow it to read write docx - again a free download

Open office works not too badly on XP if they cant cope with Linux

you're a good bugger innt ya. (must spread rep...)

chur.

((i know OO runs in winblows. i find, even with a static PF, if i set teh process to lower priority it is glitchy as hell, but if it's normal priority the memory usage creeps up the longer it's open... spreadsheets particularly, and i dont think windows has the ability to set memory allocation and CPU priority seperately...))

[SMOKEU]

I might actually give Windows 8 a miss for a few more months for some of the bugs to be fixed before I make the change, and for drivers to become more mature (I can only get beta drivers for my motherboard for 8).

[jim.cox]

I might actually give Windows 8 a miss for a few more months for some of the bugs to be fixed before I make the change, and for drivers to become more mature (I can only get beta drivers for my motherboard for 8).

I intend to give it a miss entirely (and that is despite having a tablet pc) - I just hope our clients do the same

[pzkpfw]

I intend to give it a miss entirely (and that is despite having a tablet pc) - I just hope our clients do the same

I would not want to be IT support right now.

(Though I suspect most enterprises are not going to jump quickly to 8... so that provides some breathing room. My last employer only just got everyone onto 7.)

[Gremlin]

We haven't got a single client solely on 7... still a few XP boxes here and there for little things (like a spare desk with RDP links elsewhere). Funnily enough, they work fine don't they?

Have hit a snag trying to RDP forward printers from XP x86 to 7 x64... Microsoft would have you just connect up the printer to install... yeah, when it's in Wellington or Christchurch