Windows 8 (Ate)!!!
NWCCTV
Posts: 3,629
So, As an IT guy I always try to stay up with the latest trends. However, I am reluctant to jump to Windows 8 and am just wondering if anyone has upgraded yet and what your thoughts are. I read a lot of good things about it months ago, but lately have heard more horror stories. I and most of my clients are happy with Windows 7 and some are still on XP. I just want to know others thoughts on the product,
Comments
I loved Windows Mobile phones, back in the day their 'voice command' was far better than Siri.
As an IT person myself, I have to use all the mainstream Smile, and time tested solutions. Maybe, just maybe in a year or so I'll endorse W8.
But I also learned my lessons with MS ove the last 20+ years. Like 'never switch to a never VS version in productive environment before the first Servicepack'
And with those OS-versions I do have my personal theory. MS has 2 teams - I guess - developing alternating Versions.
It is like clockwork. One version is usable, the next is not, but some sort of test.
think win 98 and then ME. win XP then Vista, now win7 and win8. (I am leaving out the server-versions on purpose, things are different there)
One works, the next brings in features nobody needs or wants.
I think win7 is pretty solid and nice. Like XP it will have a long live. But win8 is just horrible. Like Vista or win ME.
It is a test how to integrate touchscreens and windows. It is also a test to get a single code-base running on x86 and ARM.
Since I am a somehow a freelancer I work for a couple of companys at the same time, but I work for most of them since a couple of years.
What I hear from ALL of their sysadmins is basically the same... replace XP by win7, leave out Vista and win8. Just skip it.
just my 2 cents
Enjoy!
Mike
- I forgot - jazzed put it nicely in shortspeak ... windows ate my computer...
Agreed on skipping W8 because it is not for workstations, their distro channel has no problem with it because it drives 'consumer' sales.
Thanks to a lightning strike last year (Divine intervention?) my wife switched over to Mac (and hasn't looked back) and I've switched to Mac and Linux and have been having a great time not really missing much.
I'm not sure what our corporate plans are. I'm having trouble picturing Windows 8 as the desktop in a large corporation. We've been talking about "bring your own" and virtual desktops.
Personally, I'm interested in it, but don't know if it's worth the money to switch any of my computers over (I don't have access to the freebies). The newest computer I have is a laptop that is at least two years old. Don't even know if it will run W8. I'm coming to the end of this contract and we'll see what the next one has. I'll bet it's W7.
I doubt if more than a few percent of businesses will ever use Windows 8. Many are still on XP and the rest are using Win 7 and probably will be for the next decade. I have a friend that's an IT manager and they absolutely hate to switch operating systems.
SimpleIDE works well, and it makes perfect sense to work on Win 8.
IMHO, the big deal going on right now is a single UI fad. Lots of stuff is getting changed, and not always for the best, to better operate across a lot of different devices. Tablet, phone, laptop, etc... I'm very interested to see whether or not that can make sense. Microsoft is "all in" on that idea right now, attempting to build out trendy hardware and leverage their application / mindshare. Win 8 is a test bed in that respect, and it's also app-store capable too.
On that note, will anything Parallax end up in an app store? Just musing and curious.
I personally am not dealing with Win 8 right now. I think we will have a machine for application testing, but that's about it. I'll fire it up later next year to explore the UI changes to see whether or not it's really more productive or not.
http://classicshell.sourceforge.net/
I can now buy a computer that gives me all the power of a PC from a few years back http://apc.io/latest/ for 50 dollars or so. Not to mention a bazillion other such devices.
Now MS want me to use Win 8 which as far as I can tell is over 100 dollars if I want to buy it for the machine I am typing on at this moment.
My guess is that MS is basically doomed.
I don't get the touch screen desktop model. Ergonomicly,and due to aging my big monitor is more than an arm's length away - no reachy, no touchy!!
Yep. About Office, who actually uses that and why? Office was all about word processing and printing nice documments on your laser printer. No one does that anymore. Seems to me that now a days anyone who has something to say has a WEB page to say it on and uses the appropriate tools to do so.
As for the stupid touch screen thing. I discovered that I love it on my little Samsung Galaxy phone, with two thumbs I can do all I need there. But as soon as you move up to the ten inch tablet format all that arm waving becomes a serious chore.
Win 8 is doomed.
Personally, I hate Word, but I have to use it from time to time.
-Phil
Excel was cool because you can import your charts to Word.
I maintain that we don't need any of that anymore. If we ever did.
Yep. $100 buys one a TON of computing power. But...
We are not the target use case. Many people just want applications they are familiar with. Power of the default, inertia and all that. Business drives a ton of this as they just have globbed onto lots of application software, have woven it into their processes and it's all going to chug along for a good, long, time.
MS could completely botch it multiple times, and arguably they have at least twice in a row in the past, and not even nudge that massive bloc of users, who by and large, just use the computer to get things done, then go off and do other things more important to them.
I'm regularly stunned at how that dynamic works. It's worth a lot just to buy in, which is what most people do. Early on, while that bloc was forming, Microsoft used a lot of tactics to insure it formed, and were successful. Now that we are here, the state of things means that inertia is king.
Personally, I'm looking hard at an Android PC or maybe a Linux machine at some point in the future. Right now, I am busy enough to just deal with the Win 7 machine I use most of the time.
Re: PDF
Well, for basic presentation, yes publishing to HTML makes a lot of sense. For anyone who actually wants to do layout and design, it's still crappy. PDF is excellent, though it does not require Microsoft at all these days, nor Adobe, unless high end publishing is needed. (3D for example)
The other area that's difficult is the lack of higher end authoring applications. There is quite literally a ton of specialized software that's not very available, if it's available at all, outside of Windows. CAD, and I mean mechanical CAD not electrical CAD, is one such case. One product I work with a lot is Windows, Linux, MAC OS capable, but the Windows version is the better one, though Linux is no slouch. Couple that with legacy business stuff, and it's extremely costly to move away, so people just don't.
Now, the real trend I'm watching for is how people continue to build up. One doesn't have to start with Windows now, where before that was harder, and if they do build up non Windows, they will have several advantages. We shall see how that all plays out.
Thanks
I'm sure it will at some point. We have at least one contributor who seems willing to post SimpleIDE for Mac when the time is right.
Installed a boatload of programs - openoffice, acrobat pdf, some browsers, the proptool etc. First had to negotiate Internet Explorer which was weird but the first download was Firefox so in more familiar territory from that point on. Most programs that would have put an icon on the screen and/or an icon on the start menu, now put it on the touch menu. So to get an icon on the taskbar, right click it on the touchscreen menu and select "pin to taskbar".
In "desktop" mode it looks and feels like standard windows. So the touchscreen menu is more eyecandy and the first thing I do is click the "desktop" button.
So the Proptool is on the taskbar now, and it works right out of the box, including the FT232 USB to serial which I think is part of Win8.
One *very* nice thing is that it turns on within about 10 seconds, which is a lot faster than my XP machines.
The new box is nice. Eagle is autorouting PCBs about 5x faster.
My main reason for getting Win8 is so I can run gadgeteer boards under .net micro. That task is not proved successful though and the install process for the .net micro framework is beyond me at the moment. So I'm reverse engineering the concept for the Propeller chip which I think will be easier than installing the .net micro framework *grin*.
Oh - another nice thing that has never worked before in any version of windows going back to 98 - this new machine was able to copy files from another machine running a different version of windows without doing anything special. That makes porting all the data over to the new machine a breeze.
The screen did confuse my kids. They saw the big friendly buttons and the way they swipe from side to side when the mouse is at the edge of the screen, and without thinking, tried to swipe on the screen. Left a big greasy fingermark on my venerable 20yo CRT monitor LOL.
Overall and leaving aside minor problems getting to know the "new" way of doing things, yes I'm very happy with Win8.
It is a Dell and it has Vista stickers on it but the store have installed Win 8. Not sure of the specs. I'm fairly certain it is ex government - these computers get sold in bulk at auctions and then onsold on ebay, and they are very good value and sometimes only a year or two old. They have to have a new operating system anyway to ensure all the hard drive is overwritten (can't have secret government data out there!). The catch I guess is that it is a smaller box so not what you want for a gaming machine.
Ah - found the specs Dell Optiplex 760 Core 2 Duo 2x 2.8GHz+160GB+DVDRW+8, 2G Ram, Win 8 Pro, Key, Mouse, and free shipping.
Ok, maybe not the fastest machine around or the biggest hard drive, but it still does a cold boot to Win 8 in under 10 seconds which is the fastest windows boot I have ever seen since windows started, and is almost as fast as my first Z80 computer in 1984!
It is interesting it is doing a pcb autoroute about 5x faster than my previous machine which was a single core 2.4Ghz. So the specs don't really tell you much, especially the CPU speed. Maybe ram access speed is a better measure?
Or maybe because the competition (Samsung, Apple etc) have instant boot because people using phones can't wait to boot an operating system to answer the phone, and now that Win8 is being promoted as a tablet operating system they have had to rewrite it so it boots faster?
Using it is quite snappy. Opening an openoffice text document takes a few seconds the first time but if you close and reopen it is maybe 1/10th of a second to open. I guess the vibe is that it feels faster than XP. And it is way way faster than my 1 year old android tablet.
I wonder if Win8 would install on a really old computer?
Thanks for the info. It's good to know that even a Core 2 Duo will run Windows 8 reasonably well. I played around with a Windows 8 machine at Staples today and didn't really notice much difference between 8 and 7 once I selected the "Desktop" tile. Have you noticed any other differences?
I see M$ has now decided to once again follow Apple's lead (like they did with Windows) and get into the branded phone business directly.
So if Apple has the Iphone, will M$ have the 'phonE' (to be either pronounced 'phone' or 'phoney').
The truth is that technology has two objectives - the search for excellent technology (such as the Parallax Propeller) and the search for excellent stock market performance (which often gets off into hubris).
I suspect that rather than Windows 8 being the next block-buster OS for a desktop computer, Apple might just produce a version of its OS at a discount for the masses and blow away M$. Now that would be both an advance in technology and an advance in stock price performance.
In other words, it is always tough to beat excellence with mediocrity and hype.
I was searching for Win8/Office 2003 compatibility and came across this thread and an incredibly helpful reply from a moderator:
http://www.forumswindows8.com/microsoft-office/does-microsoft-office-2003-work-correctly-windows-8-a-6942.htm
Q: Hi all, Does Microsoft Office 2003 work correctly with Windows 8? And will it work correctly with the RTM version of Windows 8? I am planning to install Windows 8 but used to Office 2003. Thank you for any hints or suggestions.
A: Just try to install Office 2003 in your Windows 8, keep it there if it goes well. Replace it with Office 2007 or 2010 if not.
Mike Green, he ain't. Sounds more like an erco reply!
Though I can understand that anyone who has been using Microsoft's Office for almost 10 years would be reluctant to change.
Why are people who use software that does not work have a reluctance to change to something, anything, else?
Case 1) Back in the late 1990's I was working for Nokia. They had a ton of documents created in some old version of Word that they could not open in whatever was the new version at the time. Turned out that StarOffice, the precurser of OpenOffice, LibreOffice, etc, could not only open the old MS format but save to the new format. That saved the day.
Case 2) Some years back I was trying to save or export some simple Word documents as HTML. Turned out that random lines of text would go missing.
From time to time I try to use MicroSoft products but this is what I come up against. Lucky for me I can do my work without.
Just because I was in Taiwan, I had to pay a hefty premium over what it cost in the USA.
Later I upgraded my XP computer that was very bogged down with 512mB of DRAM to a Intel 64K Quad in Vista - but the Vista came in Chinese for free. When I looked at what it would cost to upgrade to also have English and to install a new version of MS Office, the $700USD computer required about $1500USD of MS products.... and the annual fees for anti-virus and whatever the darned registry needed to keep clean.
I was deeply disappointed, but friends suggested Ubuntu Linux in a dual boot. At first I didn't like the idea, but the EEEpc came out with Xandros Linux for $300 and I got that. From there I loaded Ubuntu on a dual boot to the old XP computer and it suddenly behaved like a normal computer without any changes in hardware or upgrade of DRAM. I also began to use Open Office (now Libre).
And so, after a successful dual boot of Ubuntu on the XP computer, I shifted the EEEpc to Ubuntu. And then, I installed Ubuntu Linux in dual boot to the Vista machine and have felt very comfortable with Linux for everything. Though I did keep Vista loaded with all the Parallax software as I am very loyal to Parallax.
The EEEpc died and I bought another notebook computer - a Toshiba NB250 with Windows7 Starter included. I partitioned and use it as a dual boot. While the Windows7 was more enlightened in that it provided an English option - it still gave a big sales pitch for MS Office at more cost than the computer. And of course, there as the need to get yet another upgrade from MS to have Windows7 do all the things that I had learned to use in XP.
Who is going to buy a $300 computer and then spend $700 for software on it plus $100 per year for protection when they can just use Linux for free?
I don't know what Windows 8 thinks it can provide that will revive sales for MS. But I just cannot afford the kind of money that MS expect an English user to pay for software licenses when they reside in Asia. I know that if I lived in the USA, there would be all sorts of avenues for discounted software - but none of it is available in Asia as MS is still trying to recapture losses due to 98% of all the XP in Asia being installed from illegal copies.
Besides all this, I learn a lot more about computing in a clear and simple manner with Linux. While corporate America may be committed to MS software for reasons that I am not aware of, I cannot afford it. And with Ubuntu Linux, not only do I get English, I get Chinese as well. To have two languages in Windows, I'd have to buy a rather expensive Ultimate license.
I just don't see how MicroSoft's business model is going to work outside the USA. It is rather like the US auto industry hanging on to imperial screws while the rest of the world goes to metric. I suppose if there is a war, the enemy won't be able to fix your war material. But that is about all such standards are good for. Even the U.K. is metric, just the USA holds on to pounds, miles, feet, inches, and MicroSoft.
And of course, there is the additonal problem that all the licenses that I've had for MS Windows have been tied to a machine. When I buy a new machine, I have to get a new copy. The OS is free, but MS Office is a huge investment to have to remake everytime I change machines.