For the early adapters what do you think of windows 8?

martin57

Like.

The new start page with ability to run apps etc.

Dislike

No start menu with scrooling program list. That is almost essential to me because when I install a program I can go to program folder in start menu in windows 7 click on the program and view what options are there and then send a particular shortcut option to the desktop.

A very long winded workaround in windows 8 where I have to go into the disk, open program files are go through the program directory and its sub folders to get what I want.

Sure a lot of these items are pinned to the start menu page in windows 8 but its very cluttered and I find I have to go through the time consumming event of deleting most of them.

I have heard of a third party utility to bring back the start menu to windows 7 but we shouldn't have to do that.

For the time being anyways window 7 is a far easier OS to work with, but will continue to build up my windows 8 installation.

Martin57

Johnmcl7

The lack of a start menu isn't an issue for me as they've added a power user menu instead which has most of the items I used when I went into the start menu on previous systems (control panel, computer management etc.) so it's actually more efficient as there's now one click access to these rather than a few clicks. I tend to use the run box extensively and that's available in both interfaces so that keeps my speed up and means no hunting around.

The part that stands out is the speed, I ran the release candidate on an older machine with a mechanical hard drive and it was quick but on a new machine with an SSD the speed is incredibly quick even when compared to my W7 SSD machines. Task manager has been massively improved and shows at a glance a lot more useful information about the system without having to use third party utilities.

My main issues are with the Modern UI, there's a lot of touch gestures that aren't obvious and the OS gives absolutely no indication what they are, there's no hints or graphic to show which part of the screen to pull or swing round. This is the first machine I can think of that came with a quick start guide to Windows and I do actually need it. I am running it on a touchscreen PC this time so the touch gestures do work a lot better than with a mouse but still finding myself sticking to the desktop interface. The touch interface also seems over simplified given the screen/resolution requirements, I'm sure it would be fine for Windows smartphones but I feel they could have made much more use of the screen space. It's also irritating that it tries to hide everything, for some reason I couldn't get the machine to update its software from the Windows store but I've no idea what the issue was. Whenever I clicked an application to update I'd just get an animation of dots going across the screen, no idea of the package size, download speed or the error that was killing it. As an IT person I prefer to see what is going on even though I realise these days that is seen as unfashionable.

John

RobTang

martin57 wrote: »

No start menu with scrooling program list.

Open start, right click somewhere, click "All Apps" in the bottom right.

Or Open start, then press ctrl-tab

It really does need a few good intro videos for the basics like Mac OSX does.

retiredin2011

once you realise that it is not windows 7 or XP it is brilliant.

penrhyn

I loathed in for the first couple of days, I now tolerate it. Waste of £15 to upgrade a desktop from Windows 7.
I'd be interested to know in which universe it can be described as brilliant?

retiredin2011

I'd be interested to know in which universe it can be described as brilliant?

My slightly insane universe.

Toxteth_OGrady

I adopted quite quickly but it took me a while to adapt

Bollotom

Toxteth_OGrady wrote: »

I adopted quite quickly but it took me a while to adapt

Before becoming adept?
I managed a whole day then went back to Vista. :cool:

custardy

Bollotom wrote: »

Before becoming adept?
I managed a whole day then went back to Vista. :cool:

:eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek::eek:

bobpat_2

Bollotom wrote: »

Before becoming adept?
I managed a whole day then went back to Vista. :cool:

I personally find it far better than Vista. There are a few niggles, but I am getting around these. Far far faster than Vista.

custardy

bobpat wrote: »

I personally find it far better than Vista. There are a few niggles, but I am getting around these. Far far faster than Vista.

To be fair,Vista is terrible compared to W7
So jumping from Vista to W8 (which i find faster coming from W7) is going to be a big improvement