Windows 8

scooby359

Please please please don't pay £25...

https://www.windowsupgradeoffer.com/en-GB

I used this last night to get a £10 discount voucher for Windows 8 Pro. It's for an offer they were doing for people buying new Windows 7 pc's but there's no verification process, so just fill in the gaps and get a free discount code!

£15 for windows 8 Pro!

skivenov

I'm going to be avoiding this one. For the last 15 years, generally, every other version of Windows has been a pain in the !!!!.

98 - 95 with bells on, passing it's sell by date for security and stability
2k - Solid, stable, dependable. Poor driver support to start with gave it a bad rep
Me - 95 with even more bells on - still a pain in the !!!!
XP - 2k with fuzzy bits. Still using it here, hard to knock.
Vista - Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh
Windows 7 - Hard to knock
Windows 8.....

CoolHotCold

scooby359 wrote: »

Please please please don't pay £25...

https://www.windowsupgradeoffer.com/en-GB

I used this last night to get a £10 discount voucher for Windows 8 Pro. It's for an offer they were doing for people buying new Windows 7 pc's but there's no verification process, so just fill in the gaps and get a free discount code!

£15 for windows 8 Pro!

It's £15 now, but what happens when you need to reinstall in the future and they start doing validation. Just because it doesn't do it now doesn't mean they won't in the future.

The risk is yours, £15 or £25, either way it's still cheap (For the moment)


Anyway, it's a massive upgrade from Vista and visually different from Windows 7.

vyle

I find the live tiles a pain because it makes it hard to see what the actual apps are. You just get variously sliding images of scenery mainly, which could be your photos app, travel, news, people.... at work I turned live tiles off so I could see what I was showing customers.

I dislike the lack of a start button, and how intrusive the start screen is... and apps forcing full screen is just evil. I've got six windowed programs over my two monitos right now... if I was using win 8 and had to use some of the apps, I'd have my productivity ruined.

I've found a lot of the computers at my work with win 8 on to be quite unresponsive. The pentium machines are practically falling over, and win 8 is meant to be so much lighter than 7, but 7 was relatively nippy on the same spec. Three computers also got some sort of terminal white screen error earlier on today, too.

Not sold. Yet. I like some of the features (right click to uninstall? Great!) but it's too early for me to join the party yet.

moneyuser

Pretty happy with my purchase.

Installation was quick and easy. Was a bit concerned there was no driver for my graphics card. Thought the upgrade assistant would've picked this up. Anyway I installed the win 7 driver for it and it seems to work.

I find myself moving between the desktop and Start screen. Still getting used to it but I don't see any long term issues and will probably use the Start screen more. Have unpinned most of the stuff as I won't be using them but have pinned my own stuff.

Don't like the long winded way you have to shutdown but created a shortcut to overcome that. Also was a bit surprised when I wasn't prompted to delete a file. Might have to turn that option back on.

Still lots to explore but so far it seems quick and smooth and I like it

nickcc

I found it a right pain to download and install, seem to have lost all my photos and other files and can't find office. Maybe they are there somewhere and I just need to look a bit harder. Also don't like having to enter a password every time I turn the laptop on especially as I couldn't sign in as I hadn't verified my user ID, seems a right load of messing so far

yangptangkipperbang

I must confess to being somewhat bemused by all the people who dash out/queue up/log on to get/buy the latest gizmo: be it Windows 87, Iphone 99, 4D TV, supercar or whatever.

Anything new suffers from teething problems - that may be design shortcomings or manufacturing problems with that new design. Of course it could not only have teething problems, it could be a complete pile of **** like Vista which is never going to perform.

Just reading Microsoft's own "warnings" about what you will have to re-load if you install windows 8 on your PC has certainly put me off.

Still, don't let me put you off - you all carry on doing Microsoft's evaluations and fault finding for them :rotfl::rotfl:

moneyuser

nickcc wrote: »

I found it a right pain to download and install, seem to have lost all my photos and other files and can't find office. Maybe they are there somewhere and I just need to look a bit harder. Also don't like having to enter a password every time I turn the laptop on especially as I couldn't sign in as I hadn't verified my user ID, seems a right load of messing so far

Have you tried searching for your files?

You can get rid of the password requirement by moving your mouse to the bottom left corner and right clicking. When the menu pops up, press run and type in netplwiz. When the user accounts windows comes up untick the box that says "User must enter username and password..."

prowla

Windows 8 is like Windows 7, but with some of the options taken out and a differently styled front-end and sideways popping out menu spliced into it in a not very elegant manner. The home screen and sideways menu look like they were designed for hand-held devices in a kindegarten and they don't look good on a hi-res PC screen.

IMHO it fits neatly into the "every alternate version of the OS is a dog" philosophy for Microsoft OSes.

chris-j

moneyuser wrote: »

Don't like the long winded way you have to shutdown but created a shortcut to overcome that.

What's long winded about going down to bottom right of screen, selecting Settings and choosing power options, I find it quicker than the old start menu on Win 7.
I have been using preview on older machine for a few months and find it has all benefits of Win7 stability plus the new interface has some nice touches.
One thing I really like is finally ISO support built in. I have all my DVDs archived as ISO files and on Win8 it automatically mounts them as a new drive without third party software. Finally Cyberlink software actually works well which I have never got it to do on Win7 or XP.