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Old 8th December 2012, 02:16 AM   #81
Jomante
Thinker
 
Join Date: Nov 2011
Posts: 221
I installed windows 8 on a home PC a few months ago. I've had very mixed emotions about it.

There are some things I absolutely love, and some things I hate.

First experience: This was installed on an older system with a pre-vista video card. It was a really good card, but it didn't have the extensions that were added to support Aero. My system was dreadfully slow, and I finally traced it back to the fact that I needed to upgrade the video card despite the fact that Windows 8 does not take advantage of those features. That ticked me off, but I accepted it because it was an older computer so I can't expect miracles. But once I installed the new graphics card, whoa nellie! It was fast! My machine boots in about 10 seconds, and shutdown is similar.

I love the parental controls. One thing at my house is that the kids fight over the computer. I told them to restrict their time on it, but they never did, always complained that others were using up more time and so on. Windows 8 has a built in parental controls that allows me to control how much time can be spent on each account. Very cool. And when the kid runs out of time I can extend it if he/she is doing homework for instance. I also like getting the report of where they spend most of their time (websites).

I dislike the amount of hiding of everything. To this day I still have to do something two or three times before I get the hidden icons on the right (I always end up right clicking, left clicking, and ending up with the "all apps" instead, I just haven't gotten used to that). I particularly dislike IE hiding the URL, but I understand the purpose (to maximize screen). I don't like that some websites don't work in IE on metro, but works fine on IE on the desktop. Eventually I installed chrome and I don't worry about it anymore.

I discovered that I could get to some of the start menu items that have been hidden by RIGHT clicking in the lower left corner. That was very non-obvious and took a while. Adding a printer, I gave up looking where to go and went to the search bar and just typed in "add printer". I hated the way the search works, but now that I understand it, I actually quite like it. I was looking for something in the microsoft store and didn't realize that I could use the same right bar search to find it (I thought they had left the search feature out and was sorely disappointed).

Shutdown was awful. I don't know about the settings option previously mentioned, what I always did was logged out, clicked on the screen so I could log back in, then selected the shutdown button. That's only when I forget that I can just push the power off button and the computer will do a proper shutdown by itself. Seems a nuisance though to do it via the mouse.

I don't like scrolling to get to the items that used to be one click on the start button, but there are typically only a handful I actually use so for the most part now I only have to click on the icon and away it goes.

Video playing on my machine was really bad. It wouldn't handle my h264 movies from the DLNA server that my machine in windows XP handled without a glitch.

I don't like that desktop apps tab differently between windows than the metro apps. They should be more integrated.

It seems to me that Microsoft is seeing the end of the PC for consumers (will still be around for producers) as it gets replaced by the tablet, so Windows 8 seems like a bad move, but ultimately will help them move people in the direction that the tablets are going. Specifically to a more internet connected and devices where it doesn't matter what chipset is on it. It's a gamble for them, but we'll have to see how it pays off.
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