The unofficial Windows 8 thread

Not a complaint as much of just an oddity. When I alt-tab normally, only the currently running applications show up. When I alt-tab out of League of Legends, a dozen other windows show up. Skype, Snapped Desktop, Immersive Background, a bunch of blank ones. What's up with that?

Aaarghdamnit, I got off work tonight and came home, went to play my GMR turns, and my display driver is freaking out so hard that it crashes and there goes Civ.

Same thing happens in other games.

All I did today was set up GPG/Kleopatra and play some games on DOSBox! Graaaaaaaah.

Tried updating drivers (new driver version was released on the 17th). Now I'm going to try wiping and reinstalling drivers, then I'll try wiping and reinstalling old drivers.

I think it's more likely his GPU is overheating.

It was GPU overheat... due to a driver issue.

So hah!

This is my hypothesis, because A: the computer is less than a week old and B: as soon as I fully purged the drivers and reinstalled the old ones, the problem went away.

It's a laptop, not a desktop.

This guy wants to be Yahtzee and isn't, but he makes some good points.

The graphics problem is back! Yaaaaaay! Or wait, maybe the other thing.

Bonus: This time, it's not heat related! I know this because I have been monitoring GPU and CPU heat.

The driver definitely takes a shit, though, because every so often it'll be like "Hey, your driver stopped responding, but then it recovered". And if I try to play Civ, it just crashes outright with a driver error.

Happens with the OEM driver, the previous driver that I was using just fine, and the new driver.

Fuuuuuuuuuuuck.

RMA. Driver crashing and recovering is the fault of the GPU, not the OS.

When my graphics driver was failing like that, it was the SSD going bad.

Are either of these problems that you might expect to show up suddenly in a laptop after about a week of use? It was seriously running perfectly for that week, and then bam.

Can't even play Awesomenauts, and that's a 2D game.

Also, if it is either the GPU or SSD, is there any way to comprehensively test that in the same way that memtest does for RAM?

A failing SSD should be much more likely to cause issues in general, not just gaming.

And yes, working perfectly before shitting the bed in a specific way (driver crashing, line/color ghosting) is what GPUs do, even after a week.

BOOM, HEADSHOT.

GPU shits itself within a quarter second of running the Burn-In test on FurMark.

I guess I get the distinct pleasure of RMAing this laptop... how do I even do that, with a laptop bought off of Newegg? I guess I probably got an email saying what was up, or I could call Newegg CS in the morning.

edit And before I forget, thank you to all three of you, Elyscape/Pogo/Dean. :)

If you're within 30 days of purchase Newegg will take care of you. Best is to call them. They'll email you a shipping label, you take it to UPS store, it goes back and they replace it.

If you ask they'll even take your cc#, ship you a new laptop now, trust you to ship the old one back, and if you don't within 30 days they'll charge you for another laptop.

Aw, crap, it wasn't bought through Newegg, it was bought through Amazon.

Hopefully Amazon will treat me right. /sigh

Lenovo tech support had me take the battery out and hold the power button for 30 seconds. What exactly is that supposed to accomplish? I'm familiar with the 30-30-30 reset for routers, but this wasn't that...

I didn't know there was anything like that for PCs, but on a Mac what that accomplishes is a hardware driver reset of some sort. Apparently it's a solution for bluetooth and printer recognition problems.

On Macs it resets the SMC. It probably reset the BIOS on your Lenovo.

Having used Windows 8 now for a couple of months, I feel a lot like I did when I "upgraded" a XP system to Vista. It works okay, but I don't really see any significant improvements over Windows 7 and parts of the interface are damned annoying. I've yet to see a Metro app that wasn't a huge step backwards from their desktop versions in terms of customization and options, and I hate how discovering how to do things simply is a matter of google searches and guess work. As an IPad user, all their tablet integration crap does is make me appreciate the simple elegance of Apple's system.

It only cost me $15, but if I could go back in time I'd tell myself not to bother.

No, he's an idiot, anyone who claims win8 is unusable is completely incompetent. It's just friggin 7 with a fancy start screen. I've had none of his issues other than initially being annoyed at the lack of a close button on metro apps. (which they tell you how to do when you watch the tutorial that shows up when you first install it.) Same with his inability to find the control panel, he's an idiot, just type from the start screen.

The discoverability is an issue, I'd agree, but his hyperbole hurts his case.

You guys forget your computer using skill is way above the average person. We get by fine fine because we know all the little tricks to get the most out of a crappy OS. But, for a normal person it's a complete nightmare they get completely lost with such a radical and pointless change like metro.

The guy in the video claims to be some sort of uber geek with multiple OS's under his belt, and he came across as an idiot. If anything a good deal of the Win 8 settings changes are great, like for example, the control panel, you know now it has a string path? If I want to point someone to a particular control panel setting, I can just give them something like: Control Panel\Hardware and Sound\Power Options\System Settings, and they can just cut and paste that in the control panel path field.


Part of the problem is people seem to get hung up on Metro. Windows 8 != Metro. I use Windows 8 every day at work and at home. I use Metro almost never outside of my Surface. If he wanted to argue that Metro was unusable on desktops, fine, I'd pretty much agree with him, or like that UI consultant he quoted, if she had said, Metro is for consuming content, and not producing it, I'd buy that too. But Win 8? It's just Win 7, but leaner and meaner.

Speaking just about Metro, it's not hyberbole, as far as I'm concerned. Metro is awful with a mouse, at least.

Classic Shell fixes it right up. For a typical user, though, Metro is what they see first, and it just fucking sucks as a desktop UI.

I have this horrible feeling "Metro shock" is going to be a mass pop-culture/news phenomenon for months. like Vista except that nerds won't be able to relate to the suffering of the non-nerd masses who didn't know this whole story (and the fact that you can get rid of Metro) months ago.

I'm prepared to relieve the suffering of my friends and aquaintances; I have a flash drive with the Classic Shell installer on it with me at all times.

I may let them suffer a bit first, though. :)

I've been using Windows 8 since shortly after it shipped and other than launching apps from the Start screen I've found it's pretty much Windows 7 with a flatter-looking GUI. There's no need to get rid of Metro because it comprises a tiny and inoffensive slice of my Windows experience.

Er... If you lop off "\Systems Settings" you can paste that string into the location field of an Explorer window in 7 and it takes you to the right place.

Edit - the proper Win7 equivalent would be "Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\Power Options\System Settings", and it doesn't work. Which is actually really stupid - if I can't copy/paste a path from the location bar then it really shouldn't be in there.

I don't think I'll get Windows 8. I'll wait until the next OS from Microsoft comes out. 8 really seems to be geared toward touchscreens.
It seems like every other OS sucks. 98, was good; Me sucked. 2000 was good; (I believe there was one in here but I forget what it was called). XP was good; Vista was just... I don't think I even have to go there. 7 was good; and it looks like 8 is less than what I would like for my PC.
I could be wrong though.

There was nothing between 2000 and XP and Vista was great.

98 -> XP -> 7.

This has been my experience as well. I've had it for a month or so now with my new PC and have marginalized metro so much that i don't see it much. Windows 8 is much like a windows 7.1 when you do that.

Exactly, which is why I get so annoyed at people bashing windows 8 for being unusable, or claiming that windows 8 is only for touch screens. The desktop is still there! It's almost the same damn thing as 7, except it runs better. Sure, you have to marginalize all that metro crap, but it doesn't take very long, it's not like the thing doesn't have a desktop button on the metro UI on startup. (even my Surface does, though for that case, I'm not sure what the point of that is, other than a way to dig in and delete files?)