Plug in a USB flash drive. Instead of having a proper desktop autorun dialog box that pops up and will sit there in the background forever if you feel like it, you'll get a metrified one that can't be ignored (since clicking outside of it will close it). There are other subtle Metro things here and there that can't be ignored...
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I really hope this "Metro Look" doesn't catch on
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Plug in a USB flash drive. Instead of having a proper desktop autorun dialog box that pops up and will sit there in the background forever if you feel like it, you'll get a metrified one that can't be ignored (since clicking outside of it will close it). There are other subtle Metro things here and there that can't be ignored...
You must have bought the boxed version. 🙂
And honestly, why do you think that changed? Every time I've built a box, I've bought an OEM licence for XP or Vista or whatever. If I was going to build another box tomorrow (and my Q8300 really is crying for an upgrade), why would I suddenly stop doing that? (And yes, I have an iPad... sorry Redmond, but I made my tablet bed, and you're not in it, especially when you don't offer cellular-enabled tablets)
The problem is that I'm so insulted by Windows 8 that I don't want to throw any more money at PC hardware and lust for an iMac. Between that, the uglification of Office in 2013 (ALL CAPS menus?), the abrupt slaughter of Windows Live Messenger, etc. I just have no faith in Redmond anymore.
As for people who aren't enthusiasts, they stopped buying Windows upgrades a decade or more ago. Most people get the new Windows when they buy a new machine, and that's how it's been for a long time now. And that's how it should be, at least back when (see: Vista) new versions of Windows had heftier hardware requirements than the previous release. Enthusiasts had no problem meeting those requirements (my late-2001 P4 Willamette with an ATI 9800 Pro ran Vista no problem...), but non-enthusiasts with Intel chipset graphics and 512 megs of RAM were asking for trouble. Again, how has that changed?
The real problem facing this industry is that most PCs in the field are good enough. We live in a world where my aunt is running a quad-core Yorkfield and only does light consumption tasks. Those systems will never be replaced except if the hardware fails (luckily for the industry, hardware from large OEMs like Dell is not the most durable these days). And so, Microsoft doesn't get to sell another OEM licence for the new system. The days when 6 month old systems had to get more RAM to run the current version of Office are long gone...
lopri
Elite Member
The absurdity of Windows version segmentation has been well documented throughout the history. (Just like the market-defying CPU pricing practiced by AMD/Intel over decades) At the time when Vista debuted, Ultimate was the only version that had every new feature included and guaranteed portability. (IIRC even x86 versions and x64 versions were separate purchases except for the "Ultimate" SKU, I could be wrong on this) That was the last Windows license I have ever purchased - I have since moved on with Technet subscription.
My point is not whether there is an OEM version existed or people could/do use upgrade versions. Those options were always there. My point is that people will no longer pay $$$ for Windows without giving it a second thought, i.e. evaluation of values.
I could care less about the "industry" and its suffering. What I care about is my wallet and my intellectual curiosity. On topic, my views on Metro interface are largely positive for tablets and phones. I think it's an innovative approach with lots of potential. MS' initial execution was a fail, but if they can get their act together, it can evolve into a much better interface. (not on Desktop, though)
My point is not whether there is an OEM version existed or people could/do use upgrade versions. Those options were always there. My point is that people will no longer pay $$$ for Windows without giving it a second thought, i.e. evaluation of values.
I could care less about the "industry" and its suffering. What I care about is my wallet and my intellectual curiosity. On topic, my views on Metro interface are largely positive for tablets and phones. I think it's an innovative approach with lots of potential. MS' initial execution was a fail, but if they can get their act together, it can evolve into a much better interface. (not on Desktop, though)
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TheSlamma
Diamond Member
I do agree with what you are saying and I think it is fine for the home.. but I think in an enterprise it's still going to have a big backlash of long time holdouts.
Right now I'm trying to picture an employee sitting at a desk for 8 hours doing touch interface and remaining ergonomically correct. And how touch is going to apply wo processing, call center and finance departments, etc.
On to laptops (not tablets) the monitors are so thin now they bounce around like crazy and have a horrid experience.
And last the App store Environment from both MS and Apple are complete nightmares for the enterprise and their IT departments. It's wonder for the consumer market, but it's unmanageable in an enterprise. With Apple your only option is Apple Configurator which must be plugged into a mac to pull the token back, the aftermarket and cloud MDM's can't do anything with it. So it's not just power users being dumped, it's business's with over 20 employees too.
Actually, I plugged in 3 last weekend, along with an external USB hard drive. Not all at once, but 2 at a time. Each time, i got a notification window out of the top right corner asking me what I wanted to do with the device. It appears you can set individual devices to act in different ways upon being plugged in.
Regardless, if you open the file explorer first, you see the drives appear as you plug them in.
Enterprise isn't likely to see 8 - even if it was universally lauded as the greatest thing ever. Not all enterprise's have upgraded to 7 yet. They hate upgrading and only really do so when forced. Plus, it appears 9 is already on the horizon. With a new on just around the corner, why would any enterprise commit to 8 at this point? They typically spend a bare minimum of 6 months testing, if not 12. RTM of 8 hit in August, so in mid february they'll hit the 6 month mark. With a potential big update in may, why would they update now?
We just went to 7 here last year. I don't foresee us updating to a new OS until 2015/6 frankly or possibly 17. But it will have nothing to do with how good or bad they think 8 is. In the last 12/13 years, we've seen all of 3 OS's from MS. Be tween 2012 and 2016 - we could see 3 or 4. Makes it substantially harder for an enterprise to choose when to upgrade. Makes me think it won't happen until important programs stop running in their current version of windows.
As for the App store, I won't swear to it, but I recall reading an article in the late summer/early fall that says it can be disabled with a policy setting. Easy method to remove it from the enterpise.
And that's my point. That notification in the top right corner, you can't leave it sitting there for a few minutes. It just goes away. (And yes, I just tried it again now on my test W8 system. I did nothing, the notification went away in 10-15 seconds) Or some other notifications that show up in the middle of the screen, if you click on anything else, the notification goes away.
If I do the same thing in XP/Vista/7, I get a proper dialog box that will happily sit buried under a gazillion windows for a few minutes until I want to deal with it. Or that will happily sit while I go to the washroom after plugging something in, etc.
Point being, the new metrified autorun functionality is worse, and I don't know of a way to ignore it. Just like the super-tall wifi network picker. Etc.
BrightCandle
Diamond Member
I actually prefer the new autoplay notification that disappears. If I plug something in but am not ready to do anything with it I ignore it and then click on the drive in computer to chose what to do with it. I had a lot of instances on W7 where I would be closing stuff and I would end up with this dialog that had been sat under everything for a while, it just didn't seem right.
Its not like there isn't a way to do the same function another way, there is you just double click on the drive in My Computer (or well just Computer as its now called)
Its not like there isn't a way to do the same function another way, there is you just double click on the drive in My Computer (or well just Computer as its now called)
darkewaffle
Diamond Member
Most of the computers at my place of work still run XP and we have some compatibility issues even going to 7. Business adoption of anything past XP is going to be glacial no matter what.
Also lol at feeling "insulted" by your operating system.
The purpose of Windows 8 isn't to make "everything touch!" it's to make it so that they don't have a repeat of WinXP running on old tablet computers (which was pretty awful). Touch input isn't going to take over, but it's an important segment of the market now. Microsoft wants their OS to take that into account, that's all it is. It really doesn't take more than a few minutes to grasp how things are organized now, and even less if you navigate with your brain instead of muscle memory. It's not illogical, it's just new.
Also lol at feeling "insulted" by your operating system.
The purpose of Windows 8 isn't to make "everything touch!" it's to make it so that they don't have a repeat of WinXP running on old tablet computers (which was pretty awful). Touch input isn't going to take over, but it's an important segment of the market now. Microsoft wants their OS to take that into account, that's all it is. It really doesn't take more than a few minutes to grasp how things are organized now, and even less if you navigate with your brain instead of muscle memory. It's not illogical, it's just new.
KentState
Diamond Member
The difference in the enterprise environment is the move to virtualization and the SAaS model. More and more apps are becoming less OS dependent and more towards the web browser. Even staples like Office and Dynamics GP are going to a 100% web platform. I'm seeing a huge increase in terminal servers for legacy applications.
coffeejunkee
Golden Member
Did you try organizing it? Pro-tip: ctrl + mousescroll down, and as usual: right-click everything.
I think it's partially true. I agree with nearly all of that honestly. However, after using a Surface a while now, i've got to say that those who feel that this OS was totally geared towards phone/tablets and touch with the traditional desktop being largely ignored aren't too far off. There ARE some nice additions to the desktop, don't get me wrong. Personally I don't care about the start button at all.
Still, allowing people to bypass the start screen to go right to desktop would be a good idea for those who'll be don't 90+% of their work there. It's an incredibly easy fix, i just hope it gets addressed. If they want you to use the start screen as more of a dashboard - that's fine. But it still needs a dedicated clock for one 🙂 and you should still be able to go straight to desktop. Anyone using this in the workplace isn't going to be using apps for real work. They'll be using desktop programs. MS needs to admit this to themselves. No one at MS is writing Office 2015 or Windows 9 in a C++ 'App' while working in windows 8. It's not conducive to production.
Those aren't really criticism's, they're just realities. One of the things I meant early about this being all phone/tablet/touch is somethine i noticed in the desktop of the surface. Pretty much all aspects of the OS have gotten touch updates. Holding your finger down equally right click for one. An issue I have though is that they don't tell you this. Just like navigating the new OS in general (no start button, charms, closing apps, switching, etc). It's actually all very easy to do, but they never bleeping tell you how to do it. They make you figure it out. I've said it before - a short intro video would have gone a LONG way towards peoples angst towards the system. It's not that the methodology changed that really got to a lot of people, it's that it changed and they didn't tell you how it changed.
Interesting thread guys, little bit of everything in there, even a good old-fashioned flame war. IMHO darkewaffle is absolutely correct. MS clearly wanted to homogenize the OS experience to boost their Surface venture. One of the reasons Outlook won majority market share as a mail client was that it was bundled with Office when Office had very little competition. Most people used it as a mail client just because it was included in the Office package, which in turn drove Exchange server sales. MS rode that to the top of the mail heap. They are trying to do the same thing here, get people used to the Surface experience in order to make Surface tablets more appealing.
In that regard, removing the Start menu was almost mandatory. Had they included it, the Metro (Modern) interface would likely have fallen quickly by the wayside as people would continue to use Win8 exactly as they did every Windows OS since 95. Removing it forced users to at least consider Metro, try it out, get used to it. Yes, users like me installed the open-source "Classic Start Menu", but the strategy still worked. My kids PREFER Metro, they zoom around with the Touchpad I bought for the desktop just like they were on a giant iPad. So at least for my family, the strategy worked.
Here are the benefits as I see them :
Cheap - 39 bucks for the upgrade
Super-fast boot time (takes my comp just a few seconds to show the login screen)
Fastest OS yet (FPS in games went up across the board for me compared to Win7)
Metro take some getting used to, but my kids use it like they were born to it.
Classic Start Menu is open-source, free to install, and helps out oldtimers like me.
Windows + X
Great with a Touchpad (from Logitech)
Windows Defender rolls all security into one package (first OS my ISP does not require an external AV + FW to be installed on).
BM.
Sure man, whatever floats your boat.
ViRGE
Elite Member, Moderator Emeritus
Skipping the rest of your points (which are mostly fair comment, though some of us oldies will never agree with your kids on metro's useablity), this one seems rather out-of-step with what every benchmark I've seen says.
Has something changed? Because every test seems to show that game FPS scores don't change at all from win7 to 8.
I originally had an asterisk along with an explanation next to that point which I subsequently removed before posting simply because it made my long post very long. My comment wasn't completely fair because I was comparing a brand new install of Win8 I had just done against a 2-year old install of Win7. Both were very fast (each on a dedicated SSD), but without question the Win7 install had 2 years of junk built up even with fairly rigorous regular cleaning.
When I benchmarked the games, I did it using FRAPS, and saw a mild improvement with Win8. It was an improvement across the board, with every game I tested. But again, the Win7 was a long way from a fresh install, so hardly a fair test. I did leave in the "for me" just in case someone called me on it ;-)
DD.
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They could have left it in, but made it so that the ordinary end-user, the everyman who buys a new PC every four years, wouldn't think to try to reactivate it.
When Windows 95 came out, there were people who didn't like the new UI and wanted the old Win 3.1 Program Manager back, especially businesses with employees trained on it. Microsoft anticipated this, and set Windows Explorer as the new default UI, but left Program Manager in the Windows folder if you wanted to use it. All you had to do was change one line in the config.sys file, and you could make Windows 95 work just like Windows 3.1, but still have all of Windows 95's other improvements.
They could have done that, and in fact, a hack to restore the Start Menu was available until they ripped it out right before Win 8 was released.
Sure, but there are few Metro-only apps. IE, for instance, with it's no-menu, total-screen Metro approach, is also on the Desktop. In fact nearly every app that I know of has a desktop equivalent. And even if they don't (Jetpack Joyride for instance), you can just create a desktop icon and launch them the old-fashioned way. If you wanted to, you can completely and utterly avoid Metro.
At any rate, Win8 for me was a good upgrade. The boot speed improvement alone made it worth the 40 bucks. I could live without Metro, but it is fun zooming around in it with a Touchpad. There are a few things which irk me, for instance closing windows in Metro. You have to grab the app and drag it to the bottom of the screen, a nice big X would have been appreciated, even one which is off-screen until you bring up charms (would that have been so difficult?). The lack of tabbed browsing is another, why am I forced to use my entire screen for a single page? I liked Win7 right and left snap-to, and would often have 2 windows up each taking half the screen.
As far as I know, you can't install Jetpack Joyride outside of Market. My point was that the reason MS did away with the Start button was to force people to use Metro.
Yes, for closing apps, ALT + F4 is currently my preference. But it is too bad, because I have my hand on the TouchPad, and not on the keyboard. It just seems to me to be somewhat questionable strategy to have gone through 20 years of Windows OS's where you could navigate almost exclusively with the mouse, and now with their most modern, you are forced to go back to a key combination which I remember using way back in the Windows 3.1 days. I like Win8, but try closing an app using only the Touchpad. You have to position the cursor at the top of the screen, then hold down the right-mouse button (which for a Touchpad means push the right side down), and finally, without lifting your finger which is holding the right side down, use a different finger to walk the application down the screen until it disappears off the bottom. You end up using your 4th finger to hold it down, and the index finger to do the walking. It is very awkward. I just think a simple charms X would have been so much simpler.
With a mouse, I just hold the left button and drag down - not an issue really. Even easier with a touch screen - just drag from above the screen downward. If that's the only way to do it on a touchpad - sounds annoying, but hasn't really been an issue for me with a mouse or touchscreen.
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