Windows 8 discussion

It actually gets worse. I put a 6200 in, replacing the FX5200 and this happened:

You might have gotten confused a bit with the model numbers and my cards. The FX5200 and the 6200 are nvidia cards. The FX5200 came out 2003 and competed with the Radeon 9000 cards. The 6200 came out a year later. Both were the budget cards of their series. I don't know what the earliest cards you remember, but both ATI and nvidia had cards with numbers in the thousands, then ATI started doing the xNumbers and then HD Numbers and is now back up with HD 7000s. So its important to distinguish between my nvidia 5000/6000 cards and more modern ATI HD5000/HD6000.

A Radeon HD 5550 will be light years ahead of the nvidia low 7000 series card you have now.

Julio: I have used MAC OS very briefly in the past but also things like the iPad and iPhone more recently.
I can say their phones and tablets are nice, they have the right idea (keep desktops and tablets separate)
But both for my personal and work related computer uses there is no way for me to go for either MAC OS or Linux, the applications and games I use simply would not work or would perform very poorly outside the Windows ecosystem.

SNGX & Archean: I know that there are multiple ways to create shortcuts and configure things so that it will behave better, but the point of my post was more to highlight the issues with Windows 8.
Maybe I was not so clear on one thing.
In Windows 2000 I get a very consistent and nice user interface without changing anything.
In each subsquent Windows version it gets worse, but in XP and XP x64 it's still possible to configure it the way I like it.
In Windows Vista (and less so Win7) Microsoft breaks away from this and creates a user interface which is not consistent, there are old menus everywhere that kill the immersion of a "modern user interface".
In Windows 8 it seems they just dropped the ball completely!

I'm still using Win8 and here are some more thoughts:
When I launch a picture from a folder of pictures in explorer it opens in metro.
But atleast for me there is no way to view the other pictures? I have to ALT-TAB back and select a new one…

When I open for example a PDF in Internet Explorer it opens in a PDF Viewer in metro.
But I see no easy way of closing the started PDF viewer.
It might not be in my best interest to keep sensitive stuff like invoices or my pay check open for anyone to see in the background.

In Internet Explorer it automatically makes allot of Words with uppercase letters, like the Word Word as you can see…
Dunno if it's a bug or future, IE10 also lacks spell checking, maybe because I selected Swedish input interface.

My Auzentech X-Meridian soundcard (C-Media 8788 based) does not work, and I can't install the Win7 drivers, even when choosing Win7 compatibility mode.

My Lian-Li card reader does not work, it is not even listed in device manager (it works without drivers in Win7)

I connected my DSLR via USB instead due to the above, it worked but the issue with displaying Pictures a few Points up was very evident.
Even more strange was that after I copied the Pictures to my desktop and disconnected the camera they where corrupted in metro, but the actual files on my desktop where not corrupted…

To lanuch something like PuTTY which I would normally put on my start-menu; click on metro, type "putty" click on "files" since "apps" is selected by default (or vice versa if your last search was for files and now you want to find an app) click on putty and get thrown back to the desktop which now shows putty ontop.
(You may replace use of mouse or keyboard to your personal preference...)

The "buttons" or what we should call them are very frustrating to click, more so if you have dual monitors.
But it gets doubly annoying in the desktop interface aswell, instead of clicking the Active open Winodows top left button you end up in Metro instead!

I don't know about the odd noise, but the I think rebooting the system before getting to Windows 7 is normal, because thats how it worked for me.

Unfortunately for me, sometime between about 9pm last night and now, my 200 gig hd I had Windows 8 on died. So no more Windows 8 for me, at least not on a system I see myself spending much time on. I did get it installed on that old celeron 2.4 with 512MB of SDRAM I mentioned somewhere above, but I suspect it will be far to slow to use.

I didn't have any problems after the first couple reboots. I thought I was going to have to use EasyBCD (although I looked into that a bit yesterday and I'm not even sure it will work in Windows 8) but just before I got to that step I got a boot menu on startup. I swear the first couple times I rebooted it just went straight to Windows 8 without the boot selection menu.

Now the problem is, my Win 8 hdd is dead, so I get a bluescreen on the start saying Windows can't find the files it needs (cause the drive is dead). But I can hit F9 to 'boot into another operating system', when I do that, it loads Windows 7. But I've lost my ability to boot into PC-BSD, so I'll probably have to fixmbr on 7, and then use EasyBCD again to get PC-BSD back.

I thought that Windows 8 hdd might be dying a while back (because hdd activity light would stay on on boot for a long time before leaving POST), but I checked it out with SeaTools and it said all was well. Maybe its a bad IDE cable, or something. I'm not quite ready to throw in the towel yet.

Edit: Good news everyone!
HDD is not dead, apparently in swapping out the video cards yesterday I partially dislodged the molex connector to the drive. I used the computer after putting the 'new' card in. Then used it several hours later. Sometime after that the connector worked out further, guess it lends some credibility to the thermal expansion/contraction helping work connectors loose. At the very least it reminds us to check the connections.

Edit 2: I saw Leeky posted a pic in the gallery of his Win 8 Metro interface. Here is my uninspiring one. Here is a slightly altered desktop to make startup/shutdown quicker.

It's because the max score has changed - it was 7.9 in Windows 7 and I believe 9.9 in Windows 8. I'll have to check tomorrow to confirm this though.

I thought that too. You are correct on 9.9 vs 7.9 (Vista was 5.9 I think). I also discussed this in the 18th post in this thread

If I can remember tomorrow I'll go back and see if the scores are inflated in 8. I've thought about this some (although I'm sure googling will provide the answer) and I don't think it makes sense to inflate the scores. I think the scores just allow a higher number because the hardware is expected to be better. It is a Windows Experience Number, so for Vista, if you get a 5.9 or in 7, if you get a 7.9 that is Microsoft's way of saying you are experiencing it as well as they imagined it could be. Now certainly this has its faults because putting Vista on the best hardware you can buy now is going to be faster than if you put it on a system that scores all 5.9s. But I don't think the WEI is intended to be a very sophisticated benchmark, its just a quick way to get a pretty good idea of how your system will do with whatever version of Windows.

CC - I'm sure you haven't read each of my posts in this thread, but in almost every one of my posts I've said the system running Windows 8 is an old P4 system. My primary system does have dual wide screen 22" monitors.

captaincranky: Yea, inflating the WEI index is very stupid actually.
It was hailed as a way to simplify the requirements of games and applications with Vistas release.
But if they change the numbers worth with each release of Windows it isn't going to make any sense.
Say Crysis requires a 5.0 (made up number)
In Vista your system only gets 4.0, so you upgrade to Win7 and there it gets a 5.0, and in Win8 it gets a 6.0.
Guess what, it's still gonna be too slow to play Crysis!

I also realized another thing with Win8
They reduced the startup time by doing a hybrid hibernation of sorts when the system is shutdown (You notice this because it takes a little longer to shutdown vs Win7)
But thus when you install security updates that require a reboot, and shutdown your PC for the night.
The next day you boot it up it will automatically reboot when you login.
And that "clean" boot actually takes atleast as long as Win7 does for me to boot...
It's a very small nitpick of course, but it might be worth to keep in mind that if an application really requires a reboot.
Then you really need to do a reboot, not shutdown your PC on day one and start it on day two and think "presto done"

That would explain why my main Pc refused to shut down after a few days if its actually not properly shutting down, but doing a hybrid sleep/shutdown instead.

Still, if you shutdown your computer it should be just that. I don't need a stupid hybrid mix when I have an SSD that's more than fast enough to make the difference that gives you totally pointless.

Also, as you touched on Per, its far too bloody hard to find the shutdown option. It reminds me of a similar approach Gnome 3 DE took on some distro's in its vanilla form where the shutdown option was hidden unless you pressed the shift button whilst clicking the menu. I mean come on, the power menu should be simple to find, and simple to use.

Aye, you can use the power button on the tower, but given that I spend all my time telling those less knowledgeable about computers NOT to turn a computer off by pressing the power button because pressing it and holding it is not the way to do it -- I think all of a sudden jumping ship and telling those same people running W8 to do it in the interest of efficiency is madness.

As I said before, I jumped back to W7 after it started failing to shutdown, and on the last occasion it corrupted several files on my RAID. I'm sure the retail version will fair much better though.

I'm also pretty sure my Windows Index score was the same as W7 as well. Having checked the upload I did of my overall index score, W8 is 6.7, and my W7 Pro x64 is 6.8 overall. Seems stupid to "inflate" those scores, as it won't make software run any better and will make the whole index score pointless when checking if your system is suitable for certain software with index scores on them.

No, like I've been saying, I don't think the numbers are inflated. I tried to explain why (post #68) but perhaps I didn't do a good job. All I think they are doing is raising the artificial ceiling for the highest you can achieve. I'll edit this post after I run the WEI test in both OSes. The HD score might change because I'm running it on a different physical HD, the other scores I expect to be the same.

Edit: Posting results in new post rather than editing this one with results because this is no longer the last reply in the thread.

captaincranky: I love reading your posts
As for the WEI score I ran it in Win7 now aswell and SNGX is correct, the scores are not inflated.
The top attainable score changes tho, it is 7.9 in Win7 and 9.9 in Win8
That is totally illogical since if you have a system that scores 9.9 in Win8 it would score 7.9 in Win7 and I guess Vista is limited to 6.9 or 5.9

Results:
In order of top to bottom presented score (Processor, RAM, Graphics, Gaming Graphics, Primary HDD)
Windows 7: 3.4, 4.5, 3.1, 3.2, 5.5
Windows 8: 3.4, 4.4, 3.2, 3.2, 5.3

Discussion:
I ran the assessment with the 'stock' drivers for the 6200, ie - the ones that Windows automatically installs. Then I updated to the 296.10 driver and re-ran the assessment. When doing this in Windows 8, screen corruption occured after running the assessment, so I rolled back the drivers and re-ran.

So in all I ended up running the assessment 7 times (3 in Win 7, 4 in Win 8). I noticed some variability in the scores between each run. Graphics would be a 3.1 sometimes and a 3.2 sometimes. Processor in Win 7 increased from the lowest score it ever had, 3.0, to 3.4, that is quite a difference, but it does match up with what Windows 8 scores the processor. My best guess here is the 3.0 occured as something was happening in the background unrelated to the WEI assessment.

HDD score is different between 7 and 8 because they are on physically different drives.

Conclusion:
WEI score has some natural variability in the scores, typically 0.1. Max possible score in Windows 7 is 7.9. Max possible score in Windows 8 is 9.9. The hypothesis of WEI being inflated from Windows 7 to Windows 8 as a result of the higher possible score is false. The score doesn't increase beyond the natural variability seen from repeatedly running the WEI assessment on the same hardware on the same OS.

All Microsoft did was increase the artificial ceiling that the hardware can score, they did not give your old hardware a higher number to make you feel better.

It is not totally illogical. It is the Windows Experience Index. As I said above:

So putting Vista (using this because of 5.9 vs now 9.9) on a system with today's fastest hardware will still get a 5.9. But I don't think the regular Windows expierence, the 'feel' of responsiveness, isn't going to be much different than a system with all 5.9 hardware. The biggest problem, as pointed out above, is gaming. So you guys are right, its a flawed system for gaming, but I think its pretty valid for how Windows 'feels'.

I'll give it a shot. I ran the test several times, my CPU score went from a 3.0 to a 3.4 in Windows 7, nothing changed, back to back assessments without rebooting. As you said, 8 has less crap running in the background than 7, so the chances of something screwing with 7's CPU score are higher than that in 8.