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Windows 8: Yea or Nay?

5

5mn_Major

Registered User
I just got a laptop and am ready to transition (never fun). But I was watching a co worker yesterday launch his new laptop...and suffice it to say, he was not happy about the changes.

I am contemplating buying/loading windows 7 on my new windows 8 machine. Any thoughts on that?
 
Re: Windows 8: Yea or Nay?

I bought a Windows 8 laptop back in July. It's not a great OS at all, and I could go on listing its flaws in design for a non-touchscreen interface, but that's just a tiring thought - just try searching the Control Panel within the GUI and not using the Search function. It can't be done. You have to know it exists and you have to use the Search function in order to perform what I consider some pretty basic OS personalization.

Here's the thing, if I could go back to Win 7, I would, but there are components on my machine that would be disabled if I did that. The laptop has a blu-ray player installed, and Win 7 has no driver support for blu-ray tech and there are no plans to ever add it. Let alone the blu-ray drive, a PC is designed for optimal usage with a particular OS, and in this case it's designed for 8, so the performance would lag if I loaded 7 onto it. So I'm learning to adapt to it. I hear it's a great user experience if you have a touchscreen interface from a coworker, though.

Windows 8.1 was released recently, and it's a free upgrade offered by MS for Windows 8 users, which is supposed to help make the UI more friendly for people like me, but the hitch is that they're pushing it through that ****ing app store interface and not through the Windows Update, and even when following all of the instructions on MS's Windows site I can't seem to get the upgrade to push to my system. It's frustrating, to say the least.
 
Re: Windows 8: Yea or Nay?

For all the gripes about the user interface in 8 (and it is silly), you can still get the usual desktop environment. In fact, it became a little easier to use the desktop environment in the first service pack for 8.

One of the biggest benefits of Windows 8 is that it uses less memory (both in storage and in RAM as it runs), so you ought to be able to boot and log in faster as well as have more RAM available to use for other stuff while you're running.

If you feel like you can work around the UI changes (and I'm with St. Clown, they are pretty stupid), it's probably worth it for performance reasons.

Edited to add: I can't really argue with St. Clown about how they changed the way you do a lot of your critical updates. I hate being the guy who just hates it when things are different, but I do think MS tried to fix some things in 8 that weren't broken in 7. I suppose I should amend my statement to say that if it weren't for the RAM issue, I'd have no problem telling people to stick with 7.
 
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Re: Windows 8: Yea or Nay?

Stick with 7 unless you have a touchscreen interface or some other reason to switch.
 
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