JoshV this is like saying I love my new house but only once I repainted every room and hired a contractor to convert the basement in to a rec room when I could have just bought the house that was exactly that across the street for less money. The average user is not going to work out how to strip out Metro and turn the OS back in to Win 7.1. Its great you all are a little computer nerdy and worked it out or googled or had someone else fix it for you but you should never have to do that for a desktop OS. Its simply inexcusable. Based on that there is no way Win 8 is anything less then a debacle.
But there's nothing to strip out! You just hit the desktop tile when you log in and HEY IT'S THE DESKTOP and then you can STAY THERE FOREVER I genuinely don't understand how this is difficult.
Ask my wife Elyscape :) If they had reversed this and made Metro something you had to turn on if you wanted it then it would make sense. In addition as I have been given to understand there are certain things you can only do within the Metro interface? At least this is what I had read...
And people had crashes in XP, but that doesn't mean every crash is XP's fault. Why was the experience painful? They want people to use Metro. Making it opt-in would make zero sense.
Metro is basically just a re-done Start button, there are certainly some things that are easier to get to if you use Metro. It's search is very fast, if I want to get to the control panel, i just type 'con', and it's the first thing to pop up, pretty much instantly, but you can also get to it by the desktop. But other than that, it's windows as usual, granted I barely ever used the start menu from previous versions either. I usually use shortcuts and pin stuff to the taskbar.
There are some things you can do wrong. When you first try to open a PDF or PNG or whatever, you get prompted which viewer you want to use, and if you click through it without reading, it will default to the Metro version. And basically, the metro version, for a desktop, is always the wrong choice. But it's pretty easy to change it after you've done it wrong. Like I said earlier, I think metro, for a desktop PC, isn't the right choice, and I can understand folks bitching about it. But Win8 isn't just Metro, and its easy to bypass Metro.
tl;dr: I'm upgrading to an SSD as my boot drive in a week or so, and instead of Win7, should I consider upgrading to Win8 and ditching the metro interface? Considering the increase in RAM and SSD performance already, will the upgrade in OS make much of a difference, or will I be running into compatibility issues?
No compatibility issues that I know of, and the general desktop experience is vastly improved, so I'd say to go for it.
Isn't the general desktop experience more-or-less the same? I mean, there's some tweaks gone on, some performance improvements, but it's pretty minor stuff AFAIK.
Kinda, but there are a lot of really nice improvements. The file copy dialog is miles better, to start. For me, that alone is more than enough to justify the upgrade.
Primarily through nVidia being useless, which is what make's ATI having such a bad rep for drivers so amusing. As I recall SP1 for Vista was also delayed due to nVidia.
If it's not too much trouble, would you mind sharing a few of the things you like? I've been considering the upgrading but this thread (and some googling) has made me a bit wary.
I like the new copy dialog: I like the menu you get when you right-click the bottom-left corner of the screen: I like that, if I ever want to know the time, date, or day of the week (these are things I routinely forget) I can press Win+C to get this: I like that I can press Win+B to bring up the task bar. I'm fairly certain this is new to Windows 8, but it might be in Windows 7 as well. There's other stuff, but a lot of it's subtle, and it's not really coming to mind just this second. But, hell, I like some of the Metro stuff too. I like that you can do this: That's the LastPass app on the left there, by the way. I like the funky sharing thingie: I also like that spellcheck is built-in to Metro apps. I like that app settings are all in the same place: I don't like that nobody else is ever gonna find them. I like the Live Tiles. It's pretty cool to be able to hit the Win key and just see that, hey, I have a billion emails, a mention on Twitter, some Skype messages, and a broken IRC client. Also the faces of some of my friends whose names slip my head right this second. I like the fact that, when opening a file from any Metro app, I can get access to Dropbox or Skydrive or anything somebody makes the right interface for, and have it open like any local file: So yeah.
Thanks for taking the time to post all that, Ely! I'm such a geek... my favorite feature is the super handy menu with the device manager, programs, command prompt, etc. The file dialog is a close second, though. Hmm, I'm a little conflicted but I suppose I can always downgrade again if I really hate it.
The Windows-X super-admin shortcut and the improved file copy dialog are just pure sex. The one OH MY GOD feature, though, is that if your network connection flakes out on a long file copy it'll just pause and then YOU CAN RESUME IT WITHOUT LOSING PROGRESS. Robocopy for the masses!
The builtin doc viewer is pretty shit. Why can't I print the doc I am looking at? Also the metro photo viewer is pretty crap too.
You can. Open the charms (swipe in from the right, put the mouse in the right corner and move towards the center, or press ctrl+c) and hit devices, then hit the printer.
The discoverability issue is why Windows 9 might be quite exciting. Microsoft has tended towards a major overhaul followed by a UI tidy-up. I hope by 9 they'll have found a better way to meld Metro and the desktop, rather than just treating it as another Metro app and calling it a day.
I like the aesthetics of the doc viewer, but it's really light on features. No scroll wheel support? Really? I've stopped using the mail app for similar reasons, despite liking the aesthetics and the general UI layout on that app as well. Too much basic functionality missing. At this point, I've gone back to just doing everything on the desktop, and treating Windows 8 like Windows 7 with a full-screen Start menu. The Metro (or whatever they are calling it now) portion of the OS has some elements that I like in it, but after getting over my initial enthusiasm and actually trying to use it on a daily basis, I've concluded that it's just not up to snuff as a functional desktop UI. Almost all of the Metro apps are in the same boat. Pretty much every single aspect of that portion of the OS has basic usability issues. For example, want to download a file to a new folder from a Metro web browser? Too bad--you can't. You'll have to launch the Desktop, and open File Explorer, and browse to where you want to create the new folder and create it, and then go back to the Metro web browser and save the file. This was the last straw that got me to go back to using a desktop browser. Also, the new Charms menu? Did anyone ever consider that its activation zone overlaps the location of basic Windows UI elements like scroll bars, especially when everything runs full-screen as it does in Metro? It's a problem even on the desktop when you run full-screen programs. Accidentally activating the Charms when trying to do basic stuff in Photoshop has become, like, a regular daily annoyance for me. It's utterly mind-boggling that stuff like this ever made it through testing. Fortunately the desktop portion mostly works great, and has some subtle improvements that I really like (such as the new Task Manager). Although the Windows Update that ran this morning broke my mouse wheel compatibility with Chrome. I have it set to scroll one page at a time in mouse settings, but it now only scrolls one pixel at a time on most Chrome pages, rendering it sort of useless.
OK that is kinda retarded. Why isn't that an option when I do a right click? Everything else is there open, save, find, ect.
Everyone I know that had Vista had this problem. Like yeah, my computer sucked at the time. However, our home desktop did not.
It was just buggy as hell. I'm not saying that my opinion is the be-all-and-end-all. Windows 7 was a better OS and I intend to stay with it as I find Windows 8 to be gimmicky and unnecessary.
For those who dislike the Start Screen arstechnica has an article covering various third party replacements. I'm tempted by StartIsBack because I wouldn't mind ditching hot corners and getting back the old Start search, before the categorisation system. On the other hand, without gadgets I need the Start Screen for some stuff, and full screen Start is better than tiny menu Start.
So I'm trying StartIsBack (based on the arstechnica review), and apart from the fact that the installer doesn't play nice with DEP (in 2013? Fucking come on!) it's pretty much perfect. Or as perfect as Metro allows. No more tabbing between categories on the Start Screen I can selectively disable hot corners I can get my desktop peek back I have faster access to the Shutdown menu (minor, but WIN-I is damned awkward) I can still get to the Start Screen through CTRL-WIN Logging on goes straight to desktop It can be installed on a per-user basis The only downside is the desktop is still a Metro window, when what I really want are Metro apps to be windows within the desktop. As far as I know though that's impossible (in any useful sense) given the current setup.
Damnit, I thought I knew them all. I've been running across an annoying issue I haven't been able to find the root cause of. Every so often I'll get the keyboard language button appear in the taskbar offering me en-GB and en-US, except en-US isn't installed and if you go the keyboard language menu to remove it you'll see only en-GB is listed. I have to add and then remove en-US to get rid of the button. Except it comes back some days later. One more StartIsBack, you can enable the Start Screen as a Metro-only zone, so no more desktop apps cluttering up the Start Screen because they don't contain a setting as to whether their icons should be on the Start Screen or not.
Try this. Control Panel -> Language -> Advanced settings [on the left] -> Use the desktop language bar when it's available. My guess is that's gonna be checked for you right now, in which case you should uncheck it. If it is checked right now, I got no idea.
Next time it happens I'll try that. I'm pleased to say the developer of this app is very responsive. I whinged about the DEP thing, because I hate that, and it was promptly fixed. Thumbs up!
Ok, finished my upgrade weekend. Parts of the upgrade: 256GB SSD 8GB of RAM (doubling what I had in the machine) 27" monitor Windows 8/64 Pro You know that classic RCA image of the guy being blown away by his speakers? Yeah, that's me, right now. I open up Photoshop in about 1 second. Any Office app is open practically before I touch the button. Installed the Classic Start Button, and I'm a happy camper. The Metro interface is fine, but I'd have to train myself to use it, and I just don't have time for that crap.
