Windows 8 discussion

I've added it to my laptop and my main working PC now, as the sole OS.

I'm actually quite impressed with it, though there are some minor annoyances…

1. Messaging only covers Windows Live ID and Facebook -- come on, add GTalk and other protocols already.
2. Mail -- Again, no option to add your own accounts above the usual suspects -- at least Google is supported here.
3. Google integration with address book (in People tile), Calender and mail is good. Can easy see myself using these features daily.
4. The right hand icon menu is a bit of a pain on multiple monitor setups like my working PC. Its a niggle more than anything.
5. I especially like the extra features now in task manager. The ability to see which apps are consuming the most resources is very handy, and its been long overdue.
6. Signing in with your Live ID is a nice feature, as is the synchronisation. It works well with my WP7 Lumia 800, and the two computers I'm using.
7. Networking and sharing (homegroup) is even easier when signing into multiple computers with the same Live ID. Setting it up was a breeze and I never even had to add the password on the second computer when joining homegroup.
8. The experience is nowhere near as nice on my Dell D630 laptop -- the resolution (1280x800) is just too low, and I'm finding using a mouse like on the desktop the experience is much nicer overall.
9. Big bonus for automatically finding my RAID array, and configuring it without me having to resort to finding the drivers like in Windows 7. Made adding the RAID super easy, as it should be.
10. Performance is the same as Windows 7 -- e.g. my Q6600 quad is steaming along with a 6.7 base score, and feels even quicker.
11. Despite the extra mouse navigating, and more pointing and clicking, the whole experience seems fluid on the PC, and effortless to use.

I said many times I was going to wait for release before making a final judgement. But I do see myself upgrading once it hits retail, as it is working much better than I thought it would. I have some reservations, but on the whole I'm far more impressed than I thought I would be, if I'm honest.

I touched on it above, but on a final note -- I don't think I'll be upgrading the laptop to W8. The experience is much better on the PC than it is the laptop. Its not hardware that's the issue, its just the interface feels like it needs "too much" work in typical usage without the mouse, and it also seems very disk I/O heavy as well on the laptop. I can definitely tell that my spare hard disk I've thrown in to install W8 CP is a 5,400RPM disk, whereas with W7 and Linux you don't notice it much at all.

W8 CP is installed on my SSD on my working PC. The laptop normally uses a 7,200RPM disk for W7 Pro, but I've replaced it with a 5,400RPM disk of the same capacity to try W8 CP without having to wipe the W7 install -- so I can swap it out if needed and be back up and running with W7 in no time.

To leeky:

1. I was disappointed in that too, I thought they'd support more. Think I mentioned that in one of my posts above. However I still haven't figured out how to actually chat with it.. I gave it my facebook info and all it seems to do is give me a tablet like interface to facebook. I don't see how to chat with anyone that is on...

2. How do you see more emails than just your unread ones? I didn't see how to get to my full inbox, let alone any folders I've made.

11. I'm not convinced it takes more clicks. Sure maybe some actions do, but other actions take far fewer clicks.

1. From what I can see, you can drill people via the People tile. Those that are online have a green line on the left hand side of their picture. If you select there picture, you can then select send them a message. At least that's how I've been doing it.

2. If you right mouse click anywhere on the mail page and the bottom bar appears enabling you to select folders, in much the same way you can select accounts. The folders options then details every folder in the added account, like all the labelled folders and account folders in Gmail.

11. I think it does, but I don't mind it, as long as it feels fluid.

Edit: I've noticed it does sometimes stick when shutting down, despite running on an SSD on my main PC. The last couple of nights its sat on the shutdown screen for several minutes before I've hard pressed the power button to shut it down.

I've also found that IE can sometimes become unstable when running. I'm not normally a user of IE, but I thought I'd give it a go whilst checking out the Consumer Preview. Google Chrome works fine though, so I'm switching over to that when it does.

Well, I've now returned back to Windows 7 on my main working rig.

The install developed issues with shutting down, and booting up, and kept opening up unidentifiable shell processes in the taskbar during use that seemed to be robbing all my CPU cycles.

Its behaviour was odd, sometimes it would start quickly, other times it would take forever and a day to load up. And after 4 days of it not shutting down properly, and that causing some file corruptions on my RAID I've decided to play it safe and revert back to my original W7 install.

Obviously this is a consumer preview, and not at all a finished release product, so niggles are to be expected, so I'm not going to pass further judgement on the problems due to this.

If I'm honest, the last couple of days the whole Metro UI has grated on me. I'm not sure what aspect of it doesn't sit with me, but it just doesn't feel natural. The way you have to interact with messages and the people tile feels totally disjointed. I should be able to call up a new conversation from within my messages tile, not go out of it, go into another one, find there name among hundreds of others and then send a message, if they're even online.

With the upgrade needed on my daily system I'm going to give some serious consideration into whether my needs might be better suited with a new Mac instead. Having got back to Windows 7 I almost feel relieved now -- like its all over and I can just get on. Sure W8 is different, and in some ways its much better, but the question I find myself asking is, "is it too different?"

It remains on my laptop, but it runs like crap on it, despite meeting the hardware requirements needed to run W8. The shutdown function does work however, but it seems to take forever to load, and the lag between application and tile launches is very noticeable.

My girlfriend has it on her Acer Aspire One (D250) netbook with one gig of RAM and she likes it. Although maybe the performance in Windows 7 Starter was so horrible that any improvement in speed is a huge boost. I also have the same netbook with Win 7 Starter on it, but I have 2 gigs of RAM and don't seem to have any usability problems.

To balance this out, I don't think the problem is W8 on the laptop, I think the issue is highly likely to be a failing hard disk, after further investigation last night. I noticed it was making rather strange clicking noises. I'm yet to find a suitable application installable in Windows that would test it for me however, so I'm open to ideas guys?

My original 7,200RPM laptop hard disk still has W7 on it, so I'm not bothered should this hard disk fail, but I think that is the cause of my problems. Its Santa Rosa Core2Duo 2.2GHz CPU should be more than enough for W8, the only thing the laptop really holds back on is the video RAM, its only 16 MB or something. :haha:

As for the hard disk under warranty problem -- it will only be an issue if there is void tape over the hard disks outer panel, or on the hard disk cage. I'm yet to own a single laptop that uses either method, so as long as you take care and do not damage anything (including the screw heads) then they'd never know you had swapped out the hard disk.

Every laptop I've owned for the last 8-9 years has had the hard disk removed and a sector by sector copy made before sending it off for repairs, as they always say they could wipe the hard disk, so back it up before sending it. I'm yet to have any come back for doing that, and I'm quite open about doing it when speaking to them.

I use SeaTools for Windows. First I run the Short DST and then if it passes that I do Long DST. If it still passes and I still suspect something is wrong I run long generic.

I think... if you don't have a Seagate branded drive attached to the system you can't run the short or long DST, but you can still do the generic tests. Typically if it fails long DST it will fail long generic.

Today is the first time I tried to boot back into Windows 7 on that machine. At the boot selection menu I choose 7 and the screen went black with the mouse cursor on screen. It sat there a while and I almost turned the machine off, then I heard some hdd chattering and just left it sit there. After 5 minutes (maybe longer) it restarted. Then it booted straight into Windows 7, no boot menu screen.

Windows 7 worked normally and there were some updates that required a restart. On the restart it booted into 8 (well its not finished booting yet) and said "please wait..." and then that changed to "Attempting repairs..." it was on that screen about 15 minutes. Then it said it couldn't fix it. My options were to shut down or go to advanced options. Naturally I choose advanced.

Advanced said I could load another OS, or I could continue to Windows 8 CP. I picked Win 8 CP and it rebooted. Then it booted back into Windows 8 (no boot menu) normally. So got a bit of a scare, but I think all is well again. Dual boot is screwed up, but I may be able to use EasyBCD to get it back. I'll update when I try that.

I've never really trusted Microsoft when it comes to dual-booting, especially if you're dual-booting their own OSes.

As an update to my own experiences of W8, the hard disk on the laptop was faulty, it failed yesterday. So I've now put the original Hitachi hard disk that contains my W7 installation back into it. So that concludes my investigation of W8 for now.

I've been impressed with how it recognises existing hardware, as well as my peripherals, and it definitely got bonus points for seeing my RAID as soon as I got to the desktop on the first run. -- in comparison, even W7 needs drivers before it even realises my RAID exists, as well as a couple of other pieces of hardware in my main working PC. W8 recognised everything without needing any interaction or extra drivers from me, so in that respect its very good.

I still can't but think that on desktops and other non-touchscreen devices it needs a start menu though. The option to show Metro would be cool, like maybe a quick start icon similar to the way they've always had the "show desktop" icon in the taskbar, or even just a icon pinned to the taskbar, so users can use the start menu, as well as the tiles if they want.

As it is to be expected, it still had many quirks that I'm sure will be resolved by the time it hits retail. It is a pre-retail "testing" release though, so some issues are understandable.

I'm not saying Metro is crap or anything, but there are times when having the traditional menu available would make sense when your using the OS on a device without a touchscreen.

This is my second day on Windows 8 Consumer Preview.
My initial thought 5 days ago was to not even give it a try, which I think is a good thing because that put my expectations really low.

But now that I have cheated myself I can give my opinion.
I installed it on the system in my profile: a C2Q 3.6Ghz with 8GB RAM
I removed the RAID card and installed on a clean formatted Intel X25-M G2 80GB SSD.
WEI score is 6.8, it would be 7.4 with a faster GFX card.

Positives:
The new Task Mamanger is nice, it's not a replacement for Process Explorer but it does do a good job.
The start screen which shows system information like the current time.
The ability to pause file transfers (One reason I use Total Commander)
The fact that Flash is not supported by the Metro version of Internet Explorer (Edit: MS backpedalled on this )
The OS feels very fast and snappy, especially at bootup (The SSD plays a big role here too of course)

Negatives:
Metro.
Let me explain my thoughts, with Window Vista I was surprised by how many menus where still ported directly from Windows XP.
This changed (but only a little) with Windows 7.
For me this totally breaks the immersion, the OS feels unfinnished to me.
I was expecting Microsoft to rectify this as time goes on.
What we get now is an interface that jumps back to the normal desktop when pretty much any activity is performed:

Plug in a USB Stick or HDD? normal desktop to copy files.

Launch Wordpad or Notepad? normal desktop

Create a VPN connection? Click the computer icon in the taskbar, get greeted by a Metro interface that allows you to do nothing, give up, open the "network and sharing center" create the connection and if you want to change it in any way click "change adapter settings" which brings you back to a Windows XP interface.

Windows Messenger: I'm not sure what's it supposed to become like in the final version but right now it seems that to text my friends I need to scroll through a giant list of names that covers my whole screen, if this is what Metro is about then I'm afraid MS has lost it.

I'll leave it at that, pretty much anything I do makes me annoyed at the totally convulted user interface.
There is a reason I absolutely love Windows 2000, it is a streamlined operating system where everything fits in place.
Obviously that OS is way too old to be used (Planned obsolescence)
For that reason Windows XP x64 (Same as Server 2003 x64) is my OS of choice.
It is a system that after allot of tweaking becomes very stremlined and which looks good, very few menus look out of place.

For work I actually use Windows 7, and that is because it allows me to do CAD/CAM work much more effectivley.
The user interface is Windows 7 is good and offers nice productivity.
For example the search dialog box in the "start menu" which allows me to find mails, files or programs by simply typing a few characters.
In Windows 8 I need to be in the Metro interface to search by typing since there is no start menu, but it's just gonna throw me back to the desktop when I find what I need so what's the point?

If Microsoft are too stupid to see that the Metro interface is of no use at all to systems which have a MAK (Mouse and Keyboard) as input devices and thus disable Metro and bring the normal Windows desktop interface that we have come to love in the well over past decade that we have used it then I absolutely do hope that they ruin their company and go bankrupt.
Oh, and I loathe Apple and would not touch their system with a 10 foot pole but atleast they have the brains to keep two separate branches for their tablets and desktop systems.

Finally I have to admit that yes, I had to ask google how to shut down my PC running Windows 8.

Per, quick question, have you ever tried a Mac?
If you want streamlined and mostly consistent UI, many agree you are better off going Mac.

I use Windows and OS X on a daily basis and still prefer Windows (with its pros and cons), but anyhow, just wondering if you have given other OS the chance?

I thought I had an nvidia 6200 in this system. Turns out I had a FX5200.

Today, I was thinking that maybe I'll put a non HP OEM PSU into this so I can make use of my 7800GS AGP card. When I discovered I was using a FX5200 and not the 6200 I thought I'd put the 6200 in and see if there is a difference.

Well that was the start of about 30 minutes of frustration. I put the 6200 in and booted up. Immediately noticed screen corruption on the splash screen. The little dots that move in a circle made 1 revolution and then I started getting corruption. Shortly after that it rebooted. Next boot made it a bit further then rebooted again. Next reboot I got to the boot menu screen, selected Windows 8 and a few seconds later it rebooted. I attempted to do the F8 trick to boot into VGA mode, but that has been removed from Windows 8.

So, I had to remove the 6200 and put the FX5200 back in. That worked, and I then uninstalled through device manager. Put the 6200 back in and it booted up fine. Even had drivers (as quoted above, 8 didn't detect the FX5200). This was all likely a result of me breaking a cardinal rule of working on computers - I put the side back on the case and screwed it in before testing to make sure it worked.

I was anxious to re-run WEI. Something surprising (to me) happened. The 6200 actually scores quite a bit worse on gaming graphics. 2.0 vs 2.7.
Aero score went up from 2.1 to 3.1. Aero seemed to be working fine before, so I didn't really notice any difference with the 6200.

Next up was Solitaire. Yep, its still unplayable. I'd say its marginally better with this card (although WEI score disagrees) but it still is too laggy to play. I'm not sure yet whether or not I'll put the 7800GS in, seems like its a waste of power unless I'm going to do some light gaming on this. But curiosity might get the better of me and I'll go ahead and do it.

Per - Shutting down does seem to have an excessive amount of steps, but by setting the power button to shut down you can make it happen with the press of 1 button.