Maximum PC

I remember seeing a preview of win 8, shortly after it was announced, in an ad before any usable preview version was released.
It was a picture of --what I assumed at the time was-- the start menu...cluttering up a whole screen with an array of tiles.
I believe the ad said something along the lines of "windows 8 let's your apps show off their personality".

Now, I've had apps with "personality" before. Like the stationary program that, every time I clicked "close" would bring up an exception saying that it had "encountered an error" and needed to (guess what) ...CLOSE...

So no, MS, I don't want my apps showing off "personality"... I'd much rather have them function correctly, and be available in a simple, easy list format...even if said list doesn't exhibit a "personality".
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Then MS released the preview version of win 8. It was even worse than it seemed in the ad...now the start menu was gone entirely, and the new "metro" UI was ostensibly designed for touchscreens, with little or no concern for it's usability without them.

Fortunately, there were options to disable "metro", but reluctance over the upcoming OS persisted among the internet community.
"Windows 8 is the new Vista" was a common view.
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Finally, Win 8 was officially released, now with the user friendly options removed...
No disabling the metro UI... And why? Because more users had hated metro & turned it off than had been using it!
Rather than saying "ok people hate metro, maybe we should learn from that & get rid of it"
Microsoft said "ok people hate metro, let's take away that 'disable' option & force them to accept it"

i.e. "We are Microsoft. Your computer will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated".
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Now people are somewhat split as to how windows 8 is doing. MS insists they're doing well, "just look how many licences we've sold"
Sure there are a lot of licenses sold, but most of those are on retail machines. Even if win 8 machines sell well, how many of those buyers are planning to "downgrade" to win 7, or install linux?

Some say it's not doing well, because software developers aren't making many apps for win 8. Obviously new programs have to "follow the money", so to speak; there's no use making apps for an OS few people are using & ignoring an OS many are using.
And an OS with no software isn't going to very popular.


But, in my opinion the numbers & financial statistics don't really make a difference.

To put it simply:
If your OS needs third party software to add an essential, & previously standard, feature (start menu) or just to make the UI generally usable; if the acceptance of your OS by users hinges on said programs....well then.....it's a fail....not a "Win".

...Just sayin'

I dislike Win8; but when I think about it, it's only because it doesn't work well with a keyboard and mouse. It does work well on their phones, pads/ultrabooks (surface), and all-in-one PC's with touchscreens though; so it can really be an awesome OS in that it covers all those up and coming platforms...just not us mouse and keyboard types where Win7 is still just fine.

Win7 isn't loosing support anytime soon, so if you still like that OS you can for sure keep it. But allow Win8 to mature a LOT more before it gets the brunt of the hate it's already received. Apple hasn't even unified devices in this fashion and have gone as far as just giving up with desktops all together and that's what they're going for IMO...their throats. Right now, Apple isn't in the PC market heavily and just this one release is driving the market and forcing them to react. If I were looking for a laptop, Asus got pretty darn close with a touchscreen Win8 ultrabook (needed both screens to be touch to be a winner), Step mother is loving her Win8 Nokia phone over the iPhone4 prior, the Surface is a really nice update to what the Transformer was, Acer has a nice touch All-in-one; and I'll just keep Win7 on the home PC's.

Gotta evolve or stay in a beige box you're use to. You have to admit there's a lot of Linux fans out there that just hate the same OS I pay for and really enjoy. Do I enjoy using Ubuntu? Not really, not on a daily basis. Do I toss them and all the other distros in the dogpound because I no longer remember how to use them correctly? No. I bet if you soft-pedal this a year or two, you may come out the other side seeing that Win8 is not the WinME it was touted as early on. And I know the feeling. I tried the Beta and was instantly lost. Wrong platform, wrong beta tester, wrong OS outlook. It's really driving the market and opening up channels.

I think the problem is that people are too used to the old way down to the letter that they don't see in practice, not a whole lot has changed. The Start Screen retains all of the features of the Start Menu: a hub for your programs and apps. The problem I have with Windows 8's UI is that Microsoft has done too much hiding away. But let's take for instance what you still can do:

• Search for a program on the start menu (it has to be there, and I still haven't figured out the jist of what Windows indexes)
• Pin things so that they're more or less two clicks away.

Here's what I find annoying (sometimes)

• "All Programs" is hidden. Either you right click in the initial Start Screen, or you do a search and empty it.
• Separate searches for Control Panel items. This one I find particularly annoying
• Control Panel and Shut Down (etc.) aren't one-click accessible now.

Otherwise, everything I can do in Windows 7, I can still do in Windows 8.

You also have to look at use cases of the majority of the user base. Honestly, since Microsoft pinning lots of things to the Task Bar, the start menu was growing increasingly useless. I pin all of my mostly used applications to the task bar. I never really opened up "All Programs" anyway, I used the search bar. And if I don't find what I need, I know the structure of my partition well enough to go grab it. So I agree, the Start Menu for what it was supposed to do is getting increasingly vegistial and I don't miss it at all. Windows 8 could definitely use UI improvements, but the Start Screen is not in that pile.

Reminds me an old movie. Oh yeah, this one:


It just felt weird to me because Metro (which they hate us calling it that) is still a bunch of desktop icons IMO. I enjoy living in a well organized start menu fly-out with my most used tasks pinned and NOTHING on my desktop. I get a little pissy with myself when I have more than 6 and have the need to get them to their correct location. Here, it's all back to Win98 and everything is back to shortcuts on the desktop. Looking around at others' screenshots, they're still in Win98 mode anyway and flood the desktop with shortcuts anyway; so perhaps I'm the only one that embraced the idea that our wallpapers need not be covered with 128 shortcuts.

I'll accept the change, but I am very slow to embrace it. I see much more hope in Win8 than the WinME and Vista it's been compared to, but it's just not a world I'm ready to move into quite yet. Heck, I'm still trying to get my phone's auto-correct working and stop with all the French; I can't just move from Win7 and all it's glory and adjust to 8's odd behaviors too. Just asking too much of me currently. I'll see it in 2014 perhaps.

Bingo, Chumly. That's my main problem with the "start screen" layout. Except that it's less organized than having 128 shortcuts. >_>
I'm not as much a stickler for "desktop neatness" as you, but I don't like having it covered in shortcuts either. Too many and it takes twice the time to find the shortcut you want on the desktop than it does to go to the directory.

What really bothers me about Win 8 is the paradigm shift. If users aren't using the "options" that MS wants, they remove the options and force you to do it their way. Even if it doesn't fit how you work, or how your mind processes information, and makes your computing cumbersome & unpleasant.
Remember when Win 7 came out? All those "we listened to you" ads highlighting various features? I remember seeing one the first time & thinking "yeah, right...they 'listened' to the users complaints". It took a while before I actually tried win7, but once I was able to explore the options & try out the new things like "jump lists" I really did like them. They really were useful, & the only thing that annoyed me was the "aero peek" feature, which I then turned off. Even then, I could see how aero peek would be useful to other people, although I didn't it like personally.

But that is my point...even the "new useful" win 7 features have options to disable them if they aren't your cup of tea.
What happened to that "we listened" mindset in Win 8?
With Win 8 they're taking away the options. They seem to be burying some of the "power user" options too... they'll probably be completely removed in "Win 9". Imagine going to the "performance options" menu & the only setting is "let windows choose what's best" (aka. every option checked) That's the future version of windows...except they won't have the menu there at all to even see what's making your computer run slow. Then they'll get rid of that pesky "uninstall programs" option in "Win 10".

Even though Win 8's UI ( "Windows iSore" ) may work well on touch devices, it doesn't translate very well to keyboard & mouse use. And frankly I dislike touch devices, too. They're annoying as hell; they don't even work half the time & the other half the time is just spent misclicking everywhere while trying to move the cursor around...with a mouse it's easy...point the cursor where you want and it doesn't click 'til you press the mouse button.
When a friend asked me when i was going to get an iPad, I said "When they cost $100 & I can use a mouse & keyboard with it. And it uses windows, has a dvd tray & has better specs than my year-and-a-half-old laptop. And doesn't say 'Apple' anywhere & wasn't invented by Steve Jobs". In other words...never.

Unfair? Yes, but it's true. I'm not pending a dime on any Apple garbage if I can help it & I certainly don't want my PC looking or functioning like Apple garbage. (An Apple II would be nice though...it's the last thing they made that was worth a damn)

Wait what was this post about....?

Oh yeah...So the thing I hate about Win 8 is that MS took away all the options. I would be fine with the start screen & metro(sexual?) UI, etc. if I could turn off & disable them at will (without needing a program like classic shell) if they don't work for me. (they don't!)
That, and I hate the MS "app store" thingy.
"No, I don't want something trying to make me buy your sh*tty 'apps' every 5 minutes, ok? If I want a Microsoft program I'll go download it at microsoft.com."...blegh

I myself am perfectly fine with Windows 7. I played around with Win 8 on a display computer at my local Fry's and I hated it. I won't go into detail here since all of my reasons for hating Windows 8 are listed in posts before me. I just wanted to add that the same day I was at Fry's I was in the return line. There were two customers ahead of me both returning PC's. They both said they were returning them because they had Windows 8 installed on them. They said they bought PC's because that's what they wanted. A computer with a keyboard and mouse. And they hated the fact that Windows 8 was made for phones and tablets. They hated it on the PC.