The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition

Interesting discussion of various OS's. (Sam, you didn't answer why you liked the "looks" of 8 better than 7, especially since you mentioned you don't like the IFKam and after looking that up I see it means you don't like Metro.)

With a little more reading about 8, yes I see there are third party apps that will make it look like 7.

And several have said that 8 is MS's initial foray into touch screen computing. If that is where computing is headed - same OS on all your various devices - kind of moving away from "the desktop computer is king" type of thinking, then maybe IFKaM kind of makes sense.

There are Mac people in my extended family. I see that the ipad looks pretty much like the iphone - all the apps right there on the screen - touch and you're in. If we all, eventually, will be taking our "desktop" with us, in a tablet, or on our ever-smarter phone, everything touch oriented - I now can kind of see where MS is going with this new move.

What does everybody think? Will all of our computers eventually be like ipads - some bigger than others, some smaller which also make phone calls and take pictures? Does it make sense to have a common interface for all those devices, since all, within reason, will be running the same apps? Makes you wonder.

Rich

 

We have a client that uses this at work, and they haven't had any problems with it on Win7 that I know of. That said, it has been a thorough pain for us, as Dragon refuse to support terminal servers (They used to, but dropped it because of the volume of support requests, after telling us to pay for it!)

Rich: I've always preferred flat/square/uniform interfaces (as long as they are functional) over round bubbly ones, and ditching Aero in favour of the new flat style I think is a step forward. I miss having a translucent bar at the top of chrome, but that's about all I miss from 7. I don't know, personally I just find the interface a lot nicer to work with, and it's certainly more professional-looking. In addition, the ribbon UI for windows explorer which I was dreading actually works really well.

IFKAM wasn't really intended for desktop use with a mouse and keyboard at all, it was designed for a touchscreen environment - i.e. Microsoft Surface. That's where the interface that we all dislike was heading. It works well for a tablet computer, but not so much a desktop.

Using a tablet PC, whether it an iPad or Android, you can access any windows PC through remote desktop, which I've used extensively.

 

windows 8 has a very clean look without a necessary gimmick to get that look, i would trade aero for that new metro look without the gay ass start screen in a heartbeat. hopefully windows 9 doesn't come with tablet stuff crammed down your throat.

 

wow, feel like i am the only that liked vista.

It was stable, bar the odd nvidia driver, but agian that was nvidias fault. It ran perfectly fine on my PC. Loved the new layouts and folder options, the audio was handled MUCH better than that of XP, as was networking, i found.

Win7, i love even more, features like the jumplists i cannot live without now, and the snapping of windows. But to me, Vista felt like a whole new OS vs XP, where as win7 felt like an itteration of vista.

I am yet to try windows 8, and i never go by the popular opinions of people who generally seem to hate change, and i will try it myself very soon. I have even heard IE10 is very good.

 

Personally am a fan of the Vista UI but not of the performance. Though I heard it's much closer to 7 as of now. It's been polished and tweaked a bit. Also, Dx11 support.

As far as Windows 8 is concerned, am still a bit skeptical. Haven't had a chance to get it yet and don't really have an urge to. Sure I will at some point

The boot times are what impressed me. The Metro UI can basically die because I refuse to use it. Hear good things about performance though and I hear it's actually great on touch devices, which would be a good thing, to not only create competition, but to make potentially the best touch screen OS ever. It's just polished up Windows 7 with a UI hacked on, which means useful.

For the meantime, I don't have much to complain about on Windows 7.

 

Sam,

You said something the other day about upgrading to Win 8 costs you your win 7 license? Could you clarify that please. If it wasn't you, I apologize.

Best Regards,
Russ

 

Wasn't me - I may well have said I'm not sure what happens to it, but so far I'm still happily using the Win7 machine I used to qualify for my Win8 license. However, this is a copy of W7 that's had the activation stripped off, so I wouldn't see an error message anyway. Either or, that proves that you don't actually need a proper bona fide install of Win7 to qualify.

Installing Win8 to a machine does, however strip the Win7 bootloader off in favour of the W8 one. This can still be used to boot Win7 though, even from the same drive, as long as you chose to keep the old OS intact.

 

Maybe you use to be progressive but that doesn't mean you are now. Like Sam said most of your Win7 problems aren't problems. The only one I see with legitimacy is your mouse and that certainly isn't the end of the world. All you've done is complained about not being able to find things in 7 and even think things are missing, they aren't, and once you learn where they have moved to it is no big deal. I don't like some of the things they have buried as it takes longer to get to them but over all 7 is and will be as good as XP over it's decade plus of use. The way I see it you can't deal with the changes, as all of the functionality is still there plus some.

Also why would you make it look like XP, what a waste of good technology and with that said it just shows another example to support my argument of change.

What does this have to do with anything or the whole paragraph following it?

You're just patting yourself on the back for being so great because you knew what you wanted, why? Don't get me wrong it is great to know what you want and to be fortunate enough to live a good life but again what does this have to do with Windows or PC building?

Stevo

 

Buried what? The search/run bar is excellent!!! You don't even need to navigate to certain functions. Just type it in the run bar

 

That is true you can access some things easier, much easier!

 

I've only read about 10% of the discussion going on at the moment, but I'm glad someone mentioned ME was a POS. I never used Vista either, skipped to Windows 7.

In fairness to Russ, the first thing I do when I install Windows 7 is make it look essentially like XP did..

http://i.imgur.com/AbfXV.png

I probably won't be using Windows 8 for the foreseeable; I have no need to and I'm beyond the point of caring enough to install it just to have a look around.

 

I skipped Vista myself. Though I heard, that systems with 8Gb of Ram ran just fine :S

 

It's not just RAM the hard drive bloats with time exactly like ME did.

 

It was merely a statement I read somewhere. Can't really confirm it, nor do I wish to try

 

I think this is the theme Russ is talking about. I know several people that use it. They simply prefer a plain grey interface, and I can understand that. Shame that the plain grey interface still isn't as clear as it used to be though.

 

People are actually turned on by the simplistic windows look? Screw that! LOL! Turning off aero, and simplifying windows would be a marginal improvement in my opinion. So I'll just be satisfied with the new sexy windows look It'd probably shave a couple minutes off a 5hr Blu-Ray encode...

 

It's not done for performance reasons

 

Who would deny that windows 7 looks sexy? Apparently Russ

Frankly, what I've seen of '8' looks enticing!

 

Finally having a truly customisable lockscreen wallpaper is nice. The taskbar and windows also look nicer in my opinion.

 

http://i.imgur.com/8BVRB.jpg

Will have to get a camera out for the lockscreen as you can't PrintScrn it.