Lol Microsoft

[Pray To Jesus]

Windows 7 is the shit. I spent a lot of time and configured so well, using help of 3rd party utilities. Every time I use my desktop Win7 machine, it feels like I'm getting my balls licked.

I am the rare 1% of consumers that love to be able to configure their systems.

1) Multiple monitors
2) Actual Windows Manager
3) Object Desktop
4) Nova Backup
5) Firefox with ~20-30 add-ons that increases usability of FF by 500%.
6) Lastpass Premium with Yubikey 2factor auth.
7) Google Authenticator
8) RAID 0 with Sandisk SSD (~Samsung 830) for main with ~450GB usable space.
9) RAID 10 with 4 2TB Hitachis.
10) More storage that's not raided. I filled up my chassis. I have 2 SSD and 6 hard drive in there. External storage hooked up to eSATA as well.
10) 3D monitor with latest Nvidia glasses.

 

[bradley]

Except Windows 95 wasn't shit.

Yeah, Windows 95 was the hugest paradigm shift in computing history. Microsoft might never equal the press and furor created by the official launch.

Windows 8: first Microsoft OS (since 3.0) to have totally lost my interest. Windows 7 is here to stay for me.

 

[SparkyJJO]

That sounds like something straight from a horror movie. :biggrin:

Yes, it is.

 

[notposting]

It's not really bad, it's just kind of kludgy and slow. Maybe it's the hardware, my wife and I both have Galaxy Nexus phones. But they're still dual core with 1 GB of RAM, both rooted and running CyanogenMod 10.1. Jelly Bean did help with the smoothness of some things, but it didn't fix the lagginess inherent in switching between apps and so on.

I've heard a lot of good things about how well Windows Phone runs, that it's more like an iPhone than an Android phone. Whereas with Android, it always feels like the hardware is one generation behind the software.

I'll say this, I am still on WP 7.5 on my Trophy...it's roughly Droid Incredible era hardware. Have seen some of the Android phone deals...amazing hardware...but the thought of giving up this up and going back to that just kills the thought every time. If it can fill your needs (research ahead of time) it definitely is a very capable mobile OS.

 

[Baked]

Reinstalled Win7 Home last night and applied RC1. Looking good so far. I just need to upgrade to 8GB RAM so I can play some games.

 

[Pray To Jesus]

Reinstalled Win7 Home last night and applied RC1. Looking good so far. I just need to upgrade to 8GB RAM so I can play some games.

8GB? 2010 called and wants it's RAM back. <3

If you're going to upgrade your ram, it would be better to go 16GB because RAM is very cheap. This is unless your system is so old that it can only support 8GB max.

If so, then you should be looking into doing a system upgrade.

 

[Bateluer]

8GB? 2010 called and wants it's RAM back. <3

If you're going to upgrade your ram, it would be better to go 16GB because RAM is very cheap. This is unless your system is so old that it can only support 8GB max.

If so, then you should be looking into doing a system upgrade.

Uh? He should be fine to play almost any games with 4GB of RAM.

I've upgraded from 2 to 4 to 8 to 16 over the past few years, and the only noticeable bump was from 2 to 4. Going from 8 to 16 just made me lazy, no need to close out the game of Civ4 or M2TW or Witcher, just alt tab and leave them be.

 

[IndyColtsFan]

Uh? He should be fine to play almost any games with 4GB of RAM.

I've upgraded from 2 to 4 to 8 to 16 over the past few years, and the only noticeable bump was from 2 to 4. Going from 8 to 16 just made me lazy, no need to close out the game of Civ4 or M2TW or Witcher, just alt tab and leave them be.

I noticed a big jump going from 4 to 8 on my work laptop too, but I didn't really notice much going from 8 to 16 on my home desktop.

 

[Fritzo]

Reinstalled Win7 Home last night and applied RC1. Looking good so far. I just need to upgrade to 8GB RAM so I can play some games.

I'm at 4GB and have to problems.

 

[Tommy2000GT]

I don't know why people hate on Windows 95. It was a major turning point from Windows 3.x and everything up to now has a GUI similar to Windows 95

 

[Train]

I don't know why people hate on Windows 95. It was a major turning point from Windows 3.x and everything up to now has a GUI similar to Windows 95

People hate change. 95 was a big leap from 3.1, people naturally resisted.

98 was an easy transition from 95, it looked identical. 2000 was easy as well.

ME legitimately sucked.

XP was resisted. So many people called it "Fisher Price interface" I can recall people on this very forum swearing off the new interface (and calling for the death of M$, never forgetting to use the dollar sign in place of the S, of course), MS appeased them by allowing you to switch to "classic interface"

There was a large gap of time between XP and Vista... people of course resisted change, people hated on the interface.

7 was an easy transition because there was nothing new or drastically different from Vista, similar to how 98 followed 95.

8 is resisted because it breaks from traditional Keyboard and Mouse only input. It's actually well thought out. If Apple had developed a way to merge tablets and PC's into a unified, cross functional UI, people would be hailing their ingenuity. MS does it and people call it stupid before they even try it. 8 DOES change the way you interact with a computer, but MS also spent billions of dollars on research to find the right way to make it usable and productive. If you spend time using 8 the way it was intended to be used, you start to notice you move around alot faster.

Similar to how people swore off Longhorn's UI, people hate on the new start screen, which makes so much more sense then a button that basically evolved from a glorified context menu. The same people who bothered to tell us how much they hated XP and switched to classic mode, are probably the same ones buying the 3rd party add ons that basically bring back the start menu (http://www.stardock.com/products/start8/)

Some of the complaints I hear about 8 are laughable. "I have to go to the corner!" , hmm, where was the start button? Oh, in the corner, and you had to go the extra step to click it.

Mostly, it just comes down to... people hate change. They want new things, but they want them to act just like the old things.

 

[SparkyJJO]

I think the biggest thing I hate about 8 is how it takes so many more steps to get to things I use a lot. Computer management? Sorry, you have to go to control panel (and NOT from the start screen mind you), administrative tools, to get to it, instead of the shorter route right click computer > manage like from XP onward. Oh, there is no right click context menu within the start screen or all programs, so you can't get the shortcut properties or modify/clean up the software-installed mess, and that stuff is hidden buried in your hard drive appdata folder someplace (again, more clicks to get there vs a simple right click). Plus a bunch of other nagging things.

Sure some of the nagging interface issues could just take a little getting used to, I get that. But some of their choices are just dumb. Oh, and a lot of the color schemes and start screen backgrounds (that you cannot customize to your own by the way) are rather ugly IMO. I like the color green, but the shade of green they chose isn't the most appealing.

So far from what I've seen under the hood Windows 8 is pretty darn good. For a touch device, the interface works well. But some of those interface choices totally suck for a power user or sometimes even a standard KB/mouse setup.

 

[vshah]

i will eventually upgrade to win8 from win7, because the non-start page improvements are actually really nice. love the new copy dialog, task manager etc. I'll eventually give in & upgrade, and get start 8 to get rid of the new start page.

 

[sandorski]

Just recently built the rig in my sig and went with Win8. It seems perfectly fine for my use, I even kinda like the idea of the tile interface, but I rarely use it. Basically I use it the same way I used Win7/Win XP 64/Win XP. I never really used the Start button much anyway, everything I used would go to the Taskbar or Desktop. That said, if I hadn't watched a few 10 minute vids on Youtube about Win8, I'd probably be here ranting about how awful it was. Knowing just a handful of Win8 tricks/tips makes the transition near effortless.

 

[MarkXIX]

Funny thing I was talking to a colleague today and they said they are switching to a Macintosh because he does not want windows 8 in the future.

I wonder how many people will be switching to Apple computer systems now that Microsoft put out that turd of an operating system.

I find this comical. I've been using Windows 8 for some time now and I see no issues with it. Hell, I stay in desktop mode 95% of the time anyway, which is not an issue. Luddites.

 

[zerocool84]

I find this comical. I've been using Windows 8 for some time now and I see no issues with it. Hell, I stay in desktop mode 95% of the time anyway, which is not an issue. Luddites.

Yup, it's seriously not bad. It's not like you have to use the metro ui screen anyways.

 

[MaxPayne63]

Mostly, it just comes down to... people hate change. They want new things, but they want them to act just like the old things.

probably 95% of the changes between versions of windows are completely invisible to most users. So it's natural to wonder, 'Why the hell am I paying $100 for a different UI?'

 

[zerocool84]

probably 95% of the changes between versions of windows are completely invisible to most users. So it's natural to wonder, 'Why the hell am I paying $100 for a different UI?'

Security, stability

 

[iGas]

Missing 3.11, NT, 2008 r2.... You know...

Also missing Windows 1.0 & 2.0 which was absolutely garbage. Windows 3.0 was pretty good, and so as NT 3.1, NT 3.5, NT 3.51.

 

[monkeh624]

I think the biggest thing I hate about 8 is how it takes so many more steps to get to things I use a lot. Computer management? Sorry, you have to go to control panel (and NOT from the start screen mind you), administrative tools, to get to it, instead of the shorter route right click computer > manage like from XP onward. Oh, there is no right click context menu within the start screen or all programs, so you can't get the shortcut properties or modify/clean up the software-installed mess, and that stuff is hidden buried in your hard drive appdata folder someplace (again, more clicks to get there vs a simple right click). Plus a bunch of other nagging things.

Sure some of the nagging interface issues could just take a little getting used to, I get that. But some of their choices are just dumb. Oh, and a lot of the color schemes and start screen backgrounds (that you cannot customize to your own by the way) are rather ugly IMO. I like the color green, but the shade of green they chose isn't the most appealing.

So far from what I've seen under the hood Windows 8 is pretty darn good. For a touch device, the interface works well. But some of those interface choices totally suck for a power user or sometimes even a standard KB/mouse setup.

For computer management, move your cursor to the bottom left hand corner, then right click -> computer management. Windows key + X opens the menu as well.

 

[PingSpike]

Any one that is saying windows 95 was solid did not do any real tech support. I did tech support in a Novell windows 95 environment and it sucked ass. Not until windows 98 SE did it start to pan out. Windows 2000 was even better with Novell but by then we switched to all Microsoft and then moved into active directory. Windows 95 was a crap OS.

9x was never really that great. IIRC the NT codebase had two huge advantages with regard to stability. I think it forced programs to run in a contained memory space preventing them from taking the whole PC down if they crashed. And when a program was installed it forced its dlls back into the install directory allowing multiple versions of a dll to exist for different programs. In 9x programs would overwrite dlls with different versions in the system directory causing all kinds of fun problems.

That said, 9x was a huge improvement over its predecessors and brought about a whole new way of doing things. That doesn't mean it wasn't a painful operation sometimes or that it couldn't have been done better. But in Microsoft's defense...there was a lot of new stuff going on.

 

[moparacer]

9x was never really that great. IIRC the NT codebase had two huge advantages with regard to stability. I think it forced programs to run in a contained memory space preventing them from taking the whole PC down if they crashed. And when a program was installed it forced its dlls back into the install directory allowing multiple versions of a dll to exist for different programs. In 9x programs would overwrite dlls with different versions in the system directory causing all kinds of fun problems.

That said, 9x was a huge improvement over its predecessors and brought about a whole new way of doing things. That doesn't mean it wasn't a painful operation sometimes or that it couldn't have been done better. But in Microsoft's defense...there was a lot of new stuff going on.

I remember paying $199 for a retail copy of 98SE just to get away from 95...

For me it was almost like a cure for cancer. I could actually use my computer for a few months without having to format and reinstall the OS.

 

[Stone Rain]

Windows 98 was the second most stable OS I've ever used, ironically enough. And the first most is a Linux variant that came out 10 years later, lol. I never used 95, though, so I have no comparison.

 

[Train]

Also missing Windows 1.0 & 2.0 which was absolutely garbage. Windows 3.0 was pretty good, and so as NT 3.1, NT 3.5, NT 3.51.

I'm not sure 1 and 2 could even be considered windows OS's. They were more like optional GUI's that ran on top of DOS.

And even back then people were like "power users use the command line!"

 

[ShawnD1]

9x was never really that great. IIRC the NT codebase had two huge advantages with regard to stability. I think it forced programs to run in a contained memory space preventing them from taking the whole PC down if they crashed.

That same logic was why I switched from Firefox to Google Chrome. One browser window crashing or freezing should not take down the entire thing.

I'm not sure 1 and 2 could even be considered windows OS's. They were more like optional GUI's that ran on top of DOS.

And even back then people were like "power users use the command line!"

95 and 98 ran on DOS as well. NT, 2k, and XP were the ones that didn't have the option of "restart in DOS"
My 80386 with Windows 95 started in DOS. Windows would be started by typing "win"