Be Excellent To Each Other

So if it is easy to use on a tablet, but you think your in-laws would find it difficult on a pc. Where your finger is replaced by a mouse, to click on stuff?

Am I missing something...

I don't really believe that. 98->XP was easy and excellent. XP->Vista added some UI pretties and an optionally different Start Menu but was hardly revolutionary. Vista->Win7 was again some minor changes and was incredibly well received by any yardstick. Win7->Win8 has pissed a number of people off and created the kind of debate we're indulging in right here. The fact that you seem blind to the difference doesn't mean a difference doesn't exist.

I'm sure that going from 3.11 to 95 was a bigger jump for people but the Windows UI's been an evolution rather than revolution since then.



And I'm not alone in thinking it's an awful pointless design which actually decreases usability in non-touch screen devices. The fact that other people share your opinion doesn't make you right and everyone else wrong and it certainly doesn't constitute an actual argument.



I don't wish you to explain it at all; I wish you to debate and opine on the subject rather than just repeating the mantra 'I like it therefore it's totally fine for everyone' which is pretty much all you're doing at this point.

I don't believe for a second you mean to do it, but you're being patronising and reductive and the quote above where you think I'm somehow struggling with your 'explanation' rather than just not thinking you're right is as good an example as any of that attitude.

Will people eventually adjust? Yes, of course they will (even if partly because they won't have a choice). Does that mean it's a great (or even good) interface that won't cause anyone any problems? Of course not, which is pretty much all anyone's saying here.

There is no need to get insulting, how am I patronizing?

I genuinely can't see what the issue is or why it will be so hard to use.

whether you believe it or not it was true.

The change from 3.11 was a huge GUI change. Folks knew and liked 3.11, and the whole every thing has gone, not folders for apps to speak off.

I agree since 95/98 onward it has been evolution, with two spot on OSs XP and 7.

To got to Windows 8 is another huge GUI interface change.

I will install it again this week, to see if I can form better discussion or debates. You and AE have not said why it is disastrous an a desktop yet.

The metro interface is terrible and clunky as hell with a keyboard and mouse and no touchscreen.

It's also impossible to stay just in the metro interface, so even if some users find it easier, they have to revert back to the old desktop for things like Microsoft Office and Control Panel.

The idea of switching between one interface that is designed for the hardware you are on, and one that is designed for hardware you are not on is bullshit.

Although one of my biggest complaints is them locking Windows down to more closely resemble a closed system than an open one. A Windows App store is a great idea, not letting developers distribute metro apps anywhere else is bullshit, and will be detrimental to the platform in the long run.

I'm sure you can get one off the record.

Well today my new laptop arrived, with Win 8. Only took me a min to work out wtf was going on with the start menu (I've not looked in this thread before.

It just looks like the 360 dash to me. I've not really used it, but have been very impressed with Chrome keeping all of my settings!

So far I've used a Surface, a tablet with Windows 8 on it and a laptop with Windows 8 on it.

Of all of them I like it on a none touch device the best.

Windows 8 still needs a lot of right click to get you around it and thats either a pain in the arse or not there with touch devices.

I like it more that I did but it won't be going on my Alienware machine.

Fuck this fucking goddamned bullshit fucking piece of shit OS. I've just fired up the laptop I bought my mum for Christmas to have a poke at it and within minutes I wanted to hurl it out of the windows.

First up, you need a fucking Windows online account thing to even login in to the piece of shit and that required not only an email address but also a fucking phone number. I gave it my mobile number in case it sent some kind of SMS to the phone as it's supposed to be a surprise present, but I couldn't really not give it my mum's email address so there's a chance I'll get a phone call from her asking why Microsoft are welcoming her to Windows 8 or whatever and I'll need to come up with some excuse that won't tip her off. Thanks Microsoft! And that's aside from the fact that I shouldn't even need an online account to get onto the fucking thing in the first place. I'm never ever going to buy anything from your stupid store so make the damn thing optional!

None of this is helped by the fact that after going through all this shit the setup failed with a non-specific error and booted me back to the start of the process again. At the end of the second go through it gave me some weird message about someone else already signing in with the details I'd supplied which left me think I was actually locked out of the entire machine. It turns out that you just ignore that message completely and set up a local login account anyway and it shuts up. Intuitive! You fuck-damned cunts. I work in IT and have been elbow deep in Windows for years and it's taken me twenty confusing and infuriating minutes to even get into the thing; if I'd just handed this to my mum and let her at it she'd have been weeping for mercy in minutes. It's stupid, useless, unnecessary, certainly isn't helping out the user in the slightest and is probably one of the worst software experiences I've ever had.

So, then I get into it and remember anew how fucking horrible the OS actually is. Even with the fact that I remembered from my last go round with it that Win+D gets you the desktop I still had to actually turn to Google to find out how to see the list of all apps. And it involves right-fucking-clicking to pop-up a massive and uselessly empty bar from the bottom of the screen and then selecting the single All Apps entry on this dirty great bar. Because of course it fucking does.

I also noticed another fun thing: if you launch IE from Metro or the desktop you actually get two totally different versions of the app! The Metro version has a completely different looking address bar at the bottom (briefly, after which it fades away into the ether and I actually gave up trying to find it again) and no real UI to speak of while the desktop version actually looks like what most people recognise as an internet browser. Two totally different versions of the same thing. Yay for consistency!

The piece de fucking resistance though is the shitting Charms bar. That stupid thing that skulks in from the side of the screen bringing it's asshole friend 'dirty great pointless date/time block you probably don't want in the way of your stuff'. This is particularly special because of the touchpad shortcuts that Win8 brings to the fucking party; one of which is to show the Charms bar and the date/time block every time you swipe in from the right hand side of the touchpad. A movement, it turns out, that I do quite a lot just in the course of navigating around so every thirty seconds or so the fucking Charms bar pops up to remind me that Windows 8 is a cunt. Thanks, really, that's just fucking brilliant Microsoft you shit-nuggets. I imagine this can be switched off (God I hope so) but that's just going to be another miserable round of fucking about in the options looking for a way to disable something I never wanted in the first place. Fun times.

Oh, and of course I again had to Google just to find out how to get access to the shut down action; something else that's going to have my mum just staring at the thing in utter confusion the first God knows how many times she uses it and finds herself in the apparently needless position of just wanting to switch the fucking thing off.

I know, I know; there are solutions out there to hide much of the Metro bullshit and I'll have to look into them of course, but that's kind of the problem: I have to now investigate some shit I don't want to just to make it usable. Why? Why should I even have to? Fuckers.

No doubt the ridiculous rage in this post and the fact that it's me moaning about it again will bring the usual replies of 'you just hit one button and you get the old desktop back' or 'it's fine once you get used to it, stop moaning' which I understand rationally, but none of that takes away from the fact that the half an hour spent fighting with the setup process and then the OS itself was miserable and infuriating and makes me dread going back to it (especially as I need to go through the whole mess again to set up the second machine for my niece) which is exactly the opposite of how a well designed bit of software is supposed to make you feel after you use it. That's the root of my complaint about Windows 8: using it is annoying and shit; and there's just no excuse for that no matter how you twist it.

With out being patronising. I had none of the problems you had it just worked.

Might be because used the enterprise version.

That sounds incredibly frustrating and shit.

That's because it is.

Avoid like the plague.

I can't remember being so utterly repulsed by a Microsoft OS since Windows ME, and that's really fucking saying something.

Still, XP has lasted eleven years so hopefully Win 7 will do the same

(I still have a Windows XP PC in active service as my dogsbody machine, it does downloads and archiving and unraring and disc burning and all that shit, it just keeps on trucking.)

It's not just the crap UI, it's the insidious nature of the whole approach, basically being a way to get people to buy all software exclusively via MS (ie adopting the Apple approach). And let's not forget the in-apps adverts.

Ballmer can go fuck himself.

Comparing it to Windows ME is a bit extreme that was broken. This is not, it's just too much of a leap for that particular reviewer.

Nobody forces you to use the Metro interface. Programs can still be installed an run in the same way they always have been.

I think some of these reviewers make snap decisions based on a small amount of usage which really gets on my tits.

I predict a U-turn within 6 months

Not likely as I'm not installing the fucking thing on any of my machines so the only time I'll need to use it is the inevitable tech support calls from my mum/niece when they can't work out how to do something simple (like see a list of all the programs they've got installed or, I dunno, shut the stupid thing down).

Also, am I 'a reviewer' now? When did that happen?

I have done a recent thing to bamba (bought a laptop for someone else) and it had windows 8 on it, I saw that you could log on with an email, but noticed you could do it locally too I really liked the look of it, but when I wanted to add a new user it took me some time to work out how to do that, also I too struggled to find the shutdown option initially.

So I share some of the initial frustration, but none of the vitriol, and it looked like I would be able to work out the stuff in the end (I worked out where the shutdown was by doing the usual of clicking randomly until it became obvious). I'm sure I could have worked out more, given the time, and there's always the user guide if you want some help.

I left feeling slightly jealous that someone would have a newer OS on their laptop than I have on mine.

Malc

My post was not directed at you Bamba, my post was a reply to AE, I did quote him before my reply. He linked to a review that I was referring to.

Also the U-turn comment was for him and relates to an old habit of his.

To be fair Bamba you hated it before you used it.

That's not 'fair', it's 'nonsense'. The progression of my opinion is available to see right here in the thread; I had no real opinion then I downloaded and installed the release candidate on my desktop machine and hated it. An opinion which I backed up in some depth. Now I've used it again on this laptop and had another bad experience which, again, I've gone into some depth about. This inability of yours to just concede that maybe, just maybe, I don't like something that you think is good is honestly just weird of you man. If you've got further constructive comments to make that's cool, but if you're just going to say odd stuff like accusing me of not liking something before I'd even used it then maybe you just shouldn't bother in future because it's aggravating and doesn't anything to the conversation.

Fair enough, apologies for misreading.

As I understand it there are some tasks that can only be performed in one 'half' of the OS or the other, so you can't avoid Metro completely. (That's what the Custom PC review said, anyway.)

I jumped straight from XP to 7, and I'll be doing the same with 8, leapfrogging it entirely. I never installed Vista on any of my own PCs, although Mrs AE did run it on her laptop for a while.

The :turnip: smiley is still on the list at Fruit Forums



Do you remember when Echo did his 'Turnip's Top Ten U-Turns' thread? He got to ten with absolute ease, and even had three or four extras that didn't make the list.

Off the top of my head, some of the best ones were:

I'll never need a hard drive bigger than 80GB.

I'm never getting broadband because it's just for thieves.

I'm never drinking again.

I just assumed as I liked it and you called me wrong (shocker), that you must hate it.

But saying that I did not have the frustration that you had. This was my 4th installation on 2 machines, so I knew what to expect.

What version of Win 8 was it. as I used enterprise on a dual boot, so every one can get used to it before I turn win 7 off..

I did a local loin first, then associated my outlook.com with it afterwards.

I have not had time to spend more than 1 hour to play with it, and need to install office, then every one can use it.

The bit I found useful is that you can search anywhere on metro you just start typing. The 4 corner thing will take a while to get used too.

top 10 things to do

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/window ... ation/6467

Press the power button, just like any other piece of electronics.

Interestingly, now you mention it, I didn't have the same problems when I did the install on my main machine of the RC version; it's only when I set up this new laptop for my mum (running some Home version I assume) that I was forced to set up the internet facing login before it would let me in. It's possible that there was an option to ignore that and only setup a local user and I missed it but I did hunt around for such a thing as it was bugging the hell out of me. As I say, I need to set up exactly the same laptop for my niece soon as well (I bought the same machine for both of them for Christmas) so I'll look harder the second time round for a 'cancel' option on the internet facing account and report back.




Personally I'd probably find that pretty useful so I'll need to have a play with that, but my mum's my current concern and she'll want to do everything by pointing and clicking so it's not a selling point for her I suspect.

It certainly is possible from a standard win8 install. I think it's labelled as local user, but I can't remember.

Well I had no problems setting it up, but then it was for me so I wouldn't have thought twice about linking it to my windows account anyway.

Getting proper fed up with it now though.

Ok, what am I missing because I've had my first proper attempt at using this today and it's a fucking abomination, so much so that I'd happily use ME as an alternative. Trying to install anything seems to lead to a random response of either just hanging the installation, hanging explorer, or if I'm really lucky popping up a UAC prompt (or, hilariously popping up about 5 of them 10 minutes later). Nothing seems to be where I'd expect it to be, and everything seems unbelievably unintuitive.

Seems to me that you're not missing anything - you've got it spot on in fact. It's an abomination.

Sounds like your installation is borked. Not had those or any other issues.

And as others have mentioned its actually easier to find things now.

This.

I was able to get a copy of Windows 8 Pro via my Technet acccount so installed that.

Windows 8 Media Center is pretty good now, plays MKV files without needing codecs and fixes

If you have Windows 8 Pro you can get the Media Center for free here (normaly £6.99)

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-GB/wind ... ture-packs

Won't replace my XBMC but its nice to have on a laptop

Thought I'd resurrect this thread to share some bizarre shit I've just encountered.

I got my mum a wee Win8 laptop for her Christmas to replace the ancient Atom netbook hand-me-down she'd been running. Recently she'd been having hassles with Firefox (it would randomly crash out utterly every few minutes) so rather than fucking about with it I just pulled it off the machine and stuck Chome on instead. Sorted! Until yesterday. I got the usual garbled description of events that I always get when she reports a tech problem but the gist was clear and she was insistent on this: Chrome had been removed entirely to be replaced with Firefox, which was still crashing the way it always had. Obviously I scoffed at this idea but said I'd take a look and my sister dropped it off today. I booted the thing up and, to my utter amazement, she was correct: Chrome was gone and Firefox was back! Right down to the shortcuts being swapped back out again on the Start bar.

There's no way she's done this herself, not even accidentally, and she wouldn't have had anyone else fiddle with it (and she'd definitely have mentioned it if that was the case) so what the shitting fuck? Chrome wasn't completely gone as the Program Files folder was still there (albeit with not much in it) but still. Also, the Firefox install is fucked and won't uninstall but I can't be arsed playing with it and have just hidden it away.

The only thing I can think of is that System Restore has kicked in, but would it undo an uninstall like that? And would it remove Chrome at the same time? And why would it even have kicked in in the first place? I'm confused and slightly worried that it'll happen again now.

Yes.
Yes.
Christ knows.

Something along the lines of:



?
Malc

Ah, that could well be the one.

Hmm, that implies some kind of serious crash which doesn't bode well either. I did have a quick scan through the event logs but didn't see anything referencing a system restore or a serious crash. I suppose I'll just need to wait and see. I'll question her when I hand it back whether something like that happened but no doubt I'll get a blank look followed by lots of rage-inducing rambling so I'm not expecting anything constructive.

Not necessarily. It kicks in if you power down before fully starting up, which you can do quite frequently by accident with a laptop.

I thought you got a different and slightly less worrying screen for that kind of thing (also for stuff like letting the battery run all the way down) and 'last known good' was the next level for serious crashes; but a Google proves you correct indeed! Fair enough, I'll quiz her to see if something like that happened and try to guide her towards the 'Start Windows normally' if it does happen again. Fucking Windows. Thanks chaps.

TECHNICAL HALP QUESTION:

Ok, I've got Windows 8.1. I've created a very super mega important document or two in, what I thought, was adobe. It turns out that Windows 8 has ultra spaggy "PDF Reader" which I now know is not Adobe.

Here's the problem:

I had to fill out a rather large 50-odd page form for something mega important.
It took me sodding ages.
The authority that I need to send said form only accept the form filled out and emailed to them as a PDF.
They do not have PDF Reader. They have Adobe.
They won't even accept a paper copy. I hate this particular authority. Grrr.
When they open the form - that I created using PDF Reader - in Adobe all the boxes that I had filled out are now all over the place and totally fucked up, words in boxes where they shouldn't be and numbers randomly spewing out.

I've checked it out online and it turns out that, yes, I did create them in PDF Reader. I downloaded Adobe from the App Store and, low and behold, the authority is right.

Here's what I can do:
I can painstakingly fill out the form again tomorrow at work. It will take hours.

What I'm hoping happens!

Hive mind come up with some way of making Adobe open the PDF Reader file perfectly. I save the file as an Adobe file saving me a lot of stress and some hair.

Question: Is this at all possible? It'd be rather lovely if someone said yes, but also lovelier if someone then just told me how or pointed me in the right direction. My Google-Fu is weak and it took me long enough to find out that I was using PDF Reader and not Adobe. Yes, I'm that guy.

I'd guess that this pdf reader can output in different versions of pdfs. Try save as

I tried that. It's got this button here that says PDF and an arrow but clicking it does nothing. It doesn't appear to save as anything but PDF?

I'm hovering over buying Windows 8.1 for just £49.99... I think it's the price that's enticing me.

The next update will allegedly restore the Start menu so if you can wait until then it might become a totally decent OS.

Note to Kovacs: we know. Just don't. For the love of God.

Knowing me, it would take me that long to install it anyway so I may go ahead with it. It's something shiny and new to play with.

Don't forget it has IE bookmark and tab syncing with WP (and other apps in 8.1). A feature the absence of which I bemoaned, and of course now I have it, never use.

Nice tip.... But like you, I probably won't use it as I use Chrome primarily.

Anyway... I have Windows 8 downloaded and ready to go. Are you excited? Anyone? No? Oh well.. I'll have a full report when it's installed I'm sure.