windows 8

prowla

I mentioned elsewehere that I had used Windows 2; I really meant the first serious attempt.

Oops - I forgot about Windows 2000 - that was a step forward in sophistication in combining in NT Workstation; XP really put a nicer face on it.

The point about the fixes being proposed is that they are a mish-mash of unsupported 3rd party add-ons, which may or may not influence stability and may or may not be reversed as patches come out; it may be fine if you have a single machine but you can't be continually tweaking, re-tweaking lots of them. By contrast, Windows 7 is pretty much there out of the box; you may set some preferences, but that's about it.

And ah, yes - Windows didn't include a PDF viewer, so I guess the DOS-style one might be viewed as an improvement by some then.

Lum

I was sticking mainly to home user OSes, I only even mentioned Windows 2000 because that's where XP got it's hardware support from. This is also why I didn't mention NT4 and NT3.x well that and I would really rather forget NT3.x.

And yes a cacky PDF reader is better than no PDF reader.

prowla

Yup - XP was the convergence of the "home" and "business" desktop OSes.

I like your description as the "cacky" PDF reader.

Lum

Well I'm no fan of any of the metro stuff, it's all reduced functionality apps for people to smush around with their fingers. There's no getting away from it and I'm not going to defend it's existence on a desktop PC.

What I can do though is advise people how to remove it and put the familiar desktop stuff back. This way you get to take advantage of the lower price and improved performance of Windows 8, if you are prepared to put in a bit of work to sort it all out.

It's always good to have more options, if you are not prepared to mess around with it then Windows 7 is still available to you.

prowla

OK - I can go with that.

(Actually I got Windows 8 for nowt, and I think that's too much!)