Windows 8 preview

[Griffinhart]

It's more than just a UI application. Also, if you notice in the video, the classic explorer desktop can be treated as it's own window. Note this screen shot from the Winsupersite.com...

http://www.winsupersite.com/content/content/136340/win8_prev1_20.jpg;pv73a235be7c4f7014

Both the Classic Windows Desktop and the Win8 Twitter app sharing the same screen. The window's 8 app isn't subserviant to the classic shell. There is a lot more going on than the UI bieng a mere app on top.

 

[yinan]

Meh, I wouldn't call it ugly, but I do realize that comes down to personal preference. As for a desktop environment, I don't think I like it for that. It is being built to be a touch environment, that is for sure.



But let me guess, Win7 was super fast and amazing to work with

Yes. Vista was slow and clunky and did not crash all the time. Win7 beta was more stable than Vista final.

MS is continuing the pattern of

1. Crap (Vista)
2. Good (Win7)
3. Crap Win 8
4. Good Win 9

it looks like

 

[lxskllr]

Vista was just as fast as Win7, and I did the benchmarks to prove it. Anything else is just bullshit, and fud :^S

 

[Cogman]

Vista was just as fast as Win7, and I did the benchmarks to prove it. Anything else is just bullshit, and fud :^S

My point exactly. Win 7 is really just a tweaked version of Vista (Mostly just adding a nicer UI). Behind the scenes, not much really changed from vista to 7. Yet haters that have probably never even installed vista on their machine keep pushing this vista FUD. Drives me nuts, most of them are extremely ignorant.

 

[lxskllr]

My point exactly. Win 7 is really just a tweaked version of Vista (Mostly just adding a nicer UI).

I much prefer the UI of Vista; in fact I have Win7, but never installed it on any of my machines. It's all a moot point though as I'm pretty much finished with Windows. I'll keep the oldest copy around that I can get away with for the very occasional game I like, but otherwise, it's looking like Debian's my future. I'm hoping to score a free copy of Win8 somehow, so I can keep up with the tech for support purposes, but I'm not very interested in it myself.

 

[yinan]

My point exactly. Win 7 is really just a tweaked version of Vista (Mostly just adding a nicer UI). Behind the scenes, not much really changed from vista to 7. Yet haters that have probably never even installed vista on their machine keep pushing this vista FUD. Drives me nuts, most of them are extremely ignorant.

I installed Vista for awhile but after awhile of dealing with how it just FELT slow, I went back to XP. I had it installed for several months and wanted to like it, but I just couldn't.

Tweaked, generally equals made better.

And who really cares about benchmarks? It is how the environment feels that matters.

 

[Cogman]

I installed Vista for awhile but after awhile of dealing with how it just FELT slow, I went back to XP. I had it installed for several months and wanted to like it, but I just couldn't.

Tweaked, generally equals made better.

And who really cares about benchmarks? It is how the environment feels that matters.

In other words, "I have no solid data to back up my argument and I will ignore anyone that says otherwise."

This is a form of the placebo effect. You expected vista to be slow because everyone said it was slow. Even before you installed it, you had this expectation.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/mojave-experiment/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojave_Experiment

Microsoft's Mojave experiment is a great example of this. Vista had an average rating by participants of 4.4 BEFORE they had actually used vista. MS had them use Mojave (which was vista) and they gave it a rating of 8.5.

What sort of machine were you running it on? Certainly, if it was something with like 256MB or 512Mb of ram, then you would have felt somewhat sluggish.

 

[Griffinhart]

Cogman is correct. There was so much bad information about Vista it was deemed bad without actual proof.

A lot of FUD was spread about how DRM was going to kill windows performace. The news was all a buzz about a paper Peter Gutmann wrote about how it was going make Vista's performance miserable. The mainstream news ran with it. Of course the problem being that Gutmann had merely read white papers on Vista's designs and made assumptions for the rest. He wrote his entire paper without ever having run Vista and never backed up his "research" with any actual evidence. Today it's easy to see how wrong he was as this very same DRM, the whole ability to play Bluray and use HDMI, is in Windows 7 as well.

What didn't help was that most hardware makers were lazy and slow about Vista drivers. With Vista MS required hardware manufacturers to have both 32 and 64-bit drivers if they wanted to have the Vista compatible logo on it. The result were late, poorly written or non-existant drivers for many devices.

Two Examples:

Video Drivers early on were bad. They caused Vista to have noticably worse framerates than XP did with the same hardware and settings. 7 months later, however, the very same hardware the problem was gone. All due to poor drivers. Several enthusiast sites proved it.
http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/amd_nvidia_windows_vista_driver_performance_update/default.asp (for example)

Another example. I had an HP 1012 laser printer. A very common consumer laser. No 64-bit Vista drivers for years. By contrast, Epson had drivers even for ancient scanners. Suddenly though, when Windows 7 came out, there were drivers for both Vista and 7.

Vista's issues were all due to outside issues and incorrect perceptions.

I have a sinking feeling that Windows 8 might face the same perception feelings though, as people hate change and you know that both Apple and Google will work overtime fostering negative perceptions about Windows 8 since it will be directly competing with them in the Tablet market in a much stronger position than earlier versions of Windows.

 

[Cogman]

...
I have a sinking feeling that Windows 8 might face the same perception feelings though, as people hate change and you know that both Apple and Google will work overtime fostering negative perceptions about Windows 8 since it will be directly competing with them in the Tablet market in a much stronger position than earlier versions of Windows.

Well, at very least, Win 8 won't suffer from the driver issues that plagued Vista. AFAIK, it should be pretty much the same driver arch as Vista/7. The ARM version of 8, on the other hand, MIGHT see these problems depending on where it gets put.

 

[yinan]

In other words, "I have no solid data to back up my argument and I will ignore anyone that says otherwise."

This is a form of the placebo effect. You expected vista to be slow because everyone said it was slow. Even before you installed it, you had this expectation.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/mojave-experiment/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojave_Experiment

Microsoft's Mojave experiment is a great example of this. Vista had an average rating by participants of 4.4 BEFORE they had actually used vista. MS had them use Mojave (which was vista) and they gave it a rating of 8.5.

What sort of machine were you running it on? Certainly, if it was something with like 256MB or 512Mb of ram, then you would have felt somewhat sluggish.

Quad Core 6500 I believe 4 GB RAM. Even my slow boxes are fast. I do nothing low end.

 

[Cogman]

Quad Core 6500 I believe 4 GB RAM. Even my slow boxes are fast. I do nothing low end.

Interesting, I had a similar setup and didn't have that experience at all with vista.

 

[Perryg114]

So what is ARM?

Perry

 

[Cogman]

So what is ARM?

Perry

ARM is a computer architecture. It is ran very differently from the x86 architecture (AMD/Intel's uArch) it is essentially one company that licences out their processor design to whoever wants it. ARM processors have been fairly low power, and thus are found in things like phones and other embedded devices.

If you think of it like this, computers operate by decoding byte streams into instructions like

add 1 and 1
subtract 2 from 3
multiply 2 with 5

there are many ways to do this and approach the way the stream looks. x86 is one way and ARM is another. There are many others out there.