windows 8

someonesgottosayit

prowla wrote: »

Does your Windows 8 have translucent window borders?

Not any more it doesn't. I found it slightly irritating to go to the close button on a browser and finding a screen pop out. I've basically just turned win8 into win7. I can see the point of the same UI across phone/tablet/PC, but the UI is not for me.

closed wrote: »

the avast bsod mentions I could find were fixed a while ago

No, it wasn't. End of last week, when I put avast on, it looped into a "logging out" on startup. This was the latest version with the "patch". Even in safe mode it was impossible to remove avast entirely. I ended up doing a clean install.

prowla

someonesgottosayit wrote: »

Not any more it doesn't.

Can you get translucent borders in Windows 8?

someonesgottosayit

Dont you mean the stupid borders that pop-out when you move your mouse cursor next to them?

penrhyn

prowla wrote: »

Can you get translucent borders in Windows 8?

Nope they got rid of that, like the bloke who designed Windows 8.

Lum

prowla wrote: »

Windows 8 is not an upgrade, for any money.

What, not even coming from Vista or XP?

I agree that from 7 the gains may not be worth it for many people. Personally I'm rather enjoying the improved framerates in my games (my heavily modded Skyrim install is doing quite noticibly better) but for those who use it as a Facebook and banking machine, probably not worth it.

(And why the heck should you be expected to spend time on the new OS to change things back to better apps?)

Same reason people do with every new release of Windows.

Windows 95 comes out, people moan about the start menu and Explorer and start reinstating Program Manager and File Manager before eventually realising that actually these programs are crap and the new start menu is pretty good.

Windows 98/98SE comes out, no user interface changes worth mentioning people think it's a good OS

Windows ME comes out, I prefer not to talk about it.

Windows XP comes out, everyone moans about the Teletubby UI and new start menu, many people set the UI back to Windows classic and reinstate the Win 95 start menu.

Windows Vista comes out, everyone moans about aero and the new start menu, Classic Shell is written to reinstate the Win 95 start menu, many people install it, but nowadays most people agree that the Vista start menu is actually a pretty decent improvement. Many people also disable aero even though on most systems this hurts performance and battery life. 3rd party hacks are written to bring back the Win 98 theme with Aero

Windows 7 comes out, no significant changes, everyone thinks it's a good OS even though this is mainly because all the growing pains were had by Vista and 7 gets to benefit from the wealth of hardware support that Vista has finally accumulated over the last 3 years. All those 3rd party apps and hacks to make it behave like Win98 still get ported over though.

Windows 8 comes out, everyone is moaning about the new start menu again, free apps are written to reinstate the old start menu once more. I'm sure we'll see a Windows 98 theme written soon enough too!

prowla

someonesgottosayit wrote: »

Dont you mean the stupid borders that pop-out when you move your mouse cursor next to them?

No - I mean the edges of windows, which have changed from the rather elegant aero translucent/semi-transparent finish, with rounded corners. In Windows 8 you get a thick solid square-cornered slab of sky blue around your window, a bit like the Windows 7 scheme for a low-powered graphics card, but even worse.

penrhyn wrote: »

Nope they got rid of that, like the bloke who designed Windows 8.

Yep, but probably about 2 years too late!

Lum

prowla wrote: »

No - I mean the edges of windows, which have changed from the rather elegant aero translucent/semi-transparent finish, with rounded corners. In Windows 8 you get a thick solid square-cornered slab of sky blue around your window, a bit like the Windows 7 scheme for a low-powered graphics card, but even worse.

Mine is thin and purple.

Screenshot

Yes the default is pretty bad, but ever since 9x was replaced with XP the default theme has been terrible.

prowla

Lum wrote: »

What, not even coming from Vista or XP?

I agree that from 7 the gains may not be worth it for many people. Personally I'm rather enjoying the improved framerates in my games (my heavily modded Skyrim install is doing quite noticibly better) but for those who use it as a Facebook and banking machine, probably not worth it.



Same reason people do with every new release of Windows.

Windows 95 comes out, people moan about the start menu and Explorer and start reinstating Program Manager and File Manager before eventually realising that actually these programs are crap and the new start menu is pretty good.

Windows 98/98SE comes out, no user interface changes worth mentioning people think it's a good OS

Windows ME comes out, I prefer not to talk about it.

Windows XP comes out, everyone moans about the Teletubby UI and new start menu, many people set the UI back to Windows classic and reinstate the Win 95 start menu.

Windows Vista comes out, everyone moans about aero and the new start menu, Classic Shell is written to reinstate the Win 95 start menu, many people install it, but nowadays most people agree that the Vista start menu is actually a pretty decent improvement. Many people also disable aero even though on most systems this hurts performance and battery life. 3rd party hacks are written to bring back the Win 98 theme with Aero

Windows 7 comes out, no significant changes, everyone thinks it's a good OS even though this is mainly because all the growing pains were had by Vista and 7 gets to benefit from the wealth of hardware support that Vista has finally accumulated over the last 3 years. All those 3rd party apps and hacks to make it behave like Win98 still get ported over though.

Windows 8 comes out, everyone is moaning about the new start menu again, free apps are written to reinstate the old start menu once more. I'm sure we'll see a Windows 98 theme written soon enough too!

I'll stick with XP over Windows 8, unless hardware requires it (I guess that's what's meant by progress).

Windows 3 was a first attempt to put a GUI on top of the OS (Apple called it "putting lipstick on a chicken"). Windows 95 was definitely better than 3 (I remember running HP Dashboard as a program launcher with Windows 3). Windows 98 and ME were incremental improvements to 95, though 98 has issues with hardware support (and ME was really just released because they thought they had to do something in the market). XP was a whole lot better, quite good really, and Vista was an over-ambitious upgrade that was too resource hungry. Windows 7 was the first Windows release that I would call very good, and the viable 64-bit support made it a grown-up operating system.

Windows 8 is just a puzzle; the desktop PC support has been chucked down the pan, the tablet & touchscreen support is an unknown, and the mobile phone interface won't exactly have Apple quaking in their boots.

I've just been doing some expenses on a Windows 8 machine, and each time I uploaded a PDF, it kept chucking me back into the full-screen DOS-like PDF viewer, which I then had to exit from and get back to my desktop display. (Ah - the "modern" interface that looks like a DOS application on a CGA screen.)

The fact that they fired the product chief suggests that Microsoft aren't that impressed with it either.

prowla

Lum wrote: »

Mine is thin and purple.

Screenshot

Yes the default is pretty bad, but ever since 9x was replaced with XP the default theme has been terrible.

Yuk!

And why should the default be bad, why should that be acceptable?

And why should you have to download 3rd party unsupported freeware/shareware to stop it being "pretty bad"? One of the approaches suggested for doing the windows borders warns that it may cause the OS to fail authentication.

The sculptured blue default of XP is OK, but I usually change it to the silver one.

Lum

prowla wrote: »

Windows 3 was a first attempt to put a GUI on top of the OS (Apple called it "putting lipstick on a chicken").

Not quite. Few people remember Windows 2 or Windows 1, and for good reason, they wern't a lot of use. Windows 3 was the first GUI for DOS that was actually useful.

Windows 95 was definitely better than 3 (I remember running HP Dashboard as a program launcher with Windows 3). Windows 98 and ME were incremental improvements to 95, though 98 has issues with hardware support (and ME was really just released because they thought they had to do something in the market).

Agreed, but my point was that when 95 first came out it was slated by many for much of the same reasons still being shouted about today, it's bloated, it's hardware requirements are too high (specifically that it really needed a 486 and even then it ran like a bag of spanners if you had less than 8MB RAM, and a lot of folk only had 4)

XP was a whole lot better, quite good really,

Indeed, even though it was only a marginal improvement over the business oriented Windows 2000, it finally got rid of DOS and attempted to introduce some actual security to the home user (though it failed at this since it encouraged home users to run as admin). It largely avoided Vista-style hardware issues since it would work well enough with Windows 2000 drivers. But again, when it came out it was slated for being bloated and slow and needing 512MB to run well, compared to 98 where 512MB is the maximum it could handle without manual hacks.

and Vista was an over-ambitious upgrade that was too resource hungry.

Vista was doomed to fail from the start really. XP had been around for so long that it had become entrenched in peoples minds that this is what a computer is like. It's failure was assisted by some optimistic minimum specs but was mainly caused by two things that were there to address specific failings in XP

The first was requiring more and more drivers to run outside of kernel mode. This was brought to a head on XP after figures showed that half of all XP BSODs were caused by just two companies, graphics card manufacturers nVidia and ATI. The new driver model made it a lot harder to write drivers, but also meant that those drivers were less likely to take down the entire OS with them. Lots of companies struggled to have working drivers ready for Vista's release, despite having been given years to prepare. The end user just saw that half of their hardware no-longer worked.

The second was the much loathed UAC. The main purpose of this was to stop software developers from writing software that requires the user to run as admin by making such software annoying to use due to UAC prompts. This backfired as users blamed Microsoft but really admin-requiring software should have gone away when Windows 98 did.

There were also some compatability issues with the 64 bit version.

It was a painful period for a few years, but over time the hardware manufacturers finally fixed their drivers, the software developers mostly stopped requiring admin rights, to the joy of sysadmins all over the world who now can actually prevent users from installing malware-ridden unauthorised software, and the software developers also started getting their 32bit apps working well with the 64bit OS, paving the way for...

Windows 7 was the first Windows release that I would call very good, and the viable 64-bit support made it a grown-up operating system.

And this is where I start to disagree with you. Windows 7 really isn't that different from Vista SP2. It's had a bit of tuning and a bit of debloating and a fancy new taskbar, but the only reason it appears to be good is because it's benefited from all the time 3rd party companies have taken getting their act together to work with Vista. If Vista had not existed and we'd gone straight to 7 we would be seeing buggy unstable graphics drivers, apps throwing UAC prompts all over the place and crashing on the 64bit version.

Windows 8 is just a puzzle; the desktop PC support has been chucked down the pan, the tablet & touchscreen support is an unknown, and the mobile phone interface won't exactly have Apple quaking in their boots.

The lack of a "classic start menu" tick box is a problem, one I've addressed in the other thread. XP and earlier always gave the option to revert back to the classic Windows 95 interface if you wanted, but it's not strictly true to say that the desktop has been ignored.

The new task manager and file copy dialogues are examples. When you are merging two large folders, instead of prompting you to skip/overwrite on a per file/folder basis as and when it finds them, it presents you a list of all of the conflicts that you can scroll through and tick which ones to keep and which to skip, then it goes and does it all at once. This is a vast improvement over the old one where you would start a copy before lunch, come back and find it's done 3 files then asked what you wanted to do with readme.txt.

I've just been doing some expenses on a Windows 8 machine, and each time I uploaded a PDF, it kept chucking me back into the full-screen DOS-like PDF viewer, which I then had to exit from and get back to my desktop display. (Ah - the "modern" interface that looks like a DOS application on a CGA screen.)

Windows has never come with a PDF viewer before, so just install whatever PDF reader you would have installed on XP or 7, problem solved for no additional work.