I'm really discouraged with new laptops.

[tedmich]

no issues at all with W8. It's fast and works great with everything.
(snip)
DIG IN!

Conforming to whatever MS's ill conceived new OS might be is undoubtedly what they want people to do, but you must admit that the expectation that everyone should instantly adopt a "huge cell phone" touch screen OS was slightly myopic on MS's part. It can work but it most definitely was not designed with its typical end user in mind. Its like the Win phone OS Design Controls just got cut and pasted into the computer OS design cycle, and market share means they can just muddle through, and force the public too as well.

Its like the old ATT monopoly joke: We don't care, we don't have to. If you are stuck in a bad relationship, some complain and stay, some leave and some try real hard to make it work.

[big_teee]

MicroSuc had to quit supporting XP, to force people on to something else.
I thought our Culture didn't allow Monopolies any longer?
For what I do, I'm sticking with Tux the Penguin!
T

[Tom Phillips]

MicroSuc had to quit supporting XP, to force people on to something else...

They didn't get me yet. I'm still running a desktop and a laptop with XP.
Everything I need to work is functioning fine and the predicted meltdown due to virus attacks has not materialized. Maybe the end of support from Microsoft was a good thing.

[Steve A.]

Worst.OS.ever

Window Update: After about an hour WU had dl'd 95% of the 75 recommended updates but I wanted to turn off the HP laptop figuring that I'd get the rest in the morning as I've always been able to do with previous versions of Windows. Nope. When I turned the laptop on this morning they were all gone so I had to start over from scratch. Geez!

Start8: I figured I better try out Start8 so I went to site with IE (yuck!) and downloaded tbe installation program. Great- now I just need to run it and I'm good to go. With FF I can click on Tools|Downloads to run it but I don't see that option (or *any* options!) with IE so I figure I'll check the Downloads folder. Nope. So I try Search on the Charms menu. Nope. So I go back to Desktop and search the C drive for "Start8" and it is even slower than the W7/Vista search engine and doesn't display any results until the search is completed after several minutes. I had to study the list a bit to figure out which item to click on since for all I know if I click on the wrong one I will have to start over from scratch...

to be continued

[Steve A.]

They didn't get me yet. I'm still running a desktop and a laptop with XP.
Everything I need to work is functioning fine and the predicted meltdown due to virus attacks has not materialized. Maybe the end of support from Microsoft was a good thing.

Kaiser still uses Win XP 64 bit in all of their doctor offices and the last time I checked Wells Fargo was using it on their customer agent desks.

I was disappointed to learn that the chipsets in the 8.1 laptops I was looking at do not support XP or anything earlier.

I think that as long as you run a good AV program with XP you are safe from viruses. (Note to self: Do *not* use the free trial of an AV program in late night infomercials!)

Steve

[big_teee]

Worst.OS.ever

Window Update: After about an hour WU had dl'd 95% of the 75 recommended updates but I wanted to turn off the HP laptop figuring that I'd get the rest in the morning as I've always been able to do with previous versions of Windows. Nope. When I turned the laptop on this morning they were all gone so I had to start over from scratch. Geez!

Start8: I figured I better try out Start8 so I went to site with IE (yuck!) and downloaded tbe installation program. Great- now I just need to run it and I'm good to go. With FF I can click on Tools|Downloads to run it but I don't see that option (or *any* options!) with IE so I figure I'll check the Downloads folder. Nope. So I try Search on the Charms menu. Nope. So I go back to Desktop and search the C drive for "Start8" and it is even slower than the W7/Vista search engine and doesn't display any results until the search is completed after several minutes. I had to study the list a bit to figure out which item to click on since for all I know if I click on the wrong one I will have to start over from scratch...

to be continued

Geez!
Are You Having Fun Yet?
The issue I had with win 8.1 was powering it off.
With Linux you can give a hard power off at anytime.
I kept hitting the power off button with win 8.1 when I was trying to figure how to get into bios?
There once I had it so confused, it said it had to do all these intensive scans and would take 2 hours before boot up.
With linux when you power off, it just reboots normal, no problems.

[bsco]

They didn't get me yet. I'm still running a desktop and a laptop with XP.
Everything I need to work is functioning fine and the predicted meltdown due to virus attacks has not materialized. Maybe the end of support from Microsoft was a good thing.

I also have a laptop and a desktop running XP....It works fine for me..I also have a copy of XP Professional which is on a group license...I do have another desktop downstairs that needs to be repaired and I was planning to put that OS on that computer...I have about 15 spare hard drives here and a bunch of floppy's as well....and spare ram.....so my plan is to try and keep these running..actually, during the summer months one can drive around and pick up all kinds of desktops that are not working and people are throwing out..upgrading to newer stuff....I am going to grab a bunch of them even just for the motherboards..gotta have spare parts.....just have to get them before it rains.....
Cheers.....
P.S. I still have a desktop running 98SE.......

[Steve A.]

Geez!
Are You Having Fun Yet?
The issue I had with win 8.1 was powering it off.

I'm getting the Win 8.1 install up to date before I replace the hard drive and install Linux. I must say that the Start8 program is pretty damn slick...

Steve

[Steve A.]

I also have a laptop and a desktop running XP....It works fine for me.

The 64 bit corporate version of Win XP is really great!

[guitardad]

Conforming to whatever MS's ill conceived new OS might be is undoubtedly what they want people to do, but you must admit that the expectation that everyone should instantly adopt a "huge cell phone" touch screen OS was slightly myopic on MS's part. It can work but it most definitely was not designed with its typical end user in mind. Its like the Win phone OS Design Controls just got cut and pasted into the computer OS design cycle, and market share means they can just muddle through, and force the public too as well.

Its like the old ATT monopoly joke: We don't care, we don't have to. If you are stuck in a bad relationship, some complain and stay, some leave and some try real hard to make it work.

Too an extent yes. I just didn't think they could have estimated the numbers of people who do not like change.

FWI when you use 8, it's fast. Faster than 7, and as I mentioned previously, among many hardware devices from cameras, audio interfaces, snths, guitar processors, etc and their editors, W8 operates just fine. That was my biggest fear. I can't say the same about my iMac. Switched to Mavericks and had nothing but issues with hardware. Most of my other hardware from MOTU, EMU, Roland have not worked beyond Tiger.

W8 I also use with a TS DAW. Workflow is so much easier. Running Adobe CS6 is also easy.

When I first used W8 I was initially thinking ohh crap.. but as I did with any piece of software or hardware or even my first smart phone, I had to dig in for a couple hours and figure things out.

Our workplace went all W8 and people freaked out. I showed them how easy it is to use, now they won't go back to 7. They even use tiling in their workflow. Most appreciated are the shortcuts.

Learn those and anyone can navigate through W8, W7 10x faster than the normal mouse click drag, opening closing windows and dealing with wrists bugging them.

[guitardad]

FWIW XP is what 15 years old? It's also not suitable for newer hardware specs. How many are still driving 15 year old cares or using 15 year old computers? Still have flip phones? not too many..........

I see a lot of businesses and especially medical offices on XP. Mostly because they don't want the cost of changeover, otherwise they would have 7.

[Steve A.]

I see a lot of businesses and especially medical offices on XP. Mostly because they don't want the cost of changeover, otherwise they would have 7.

I know that some hospitals like Kaiser run Epic software which runs on Windows Server 2008 64 bit which is like the industrial version of Win XP 64 bit. The software works for them so why have a new custom application written for W7?

One of my big gripes with Vista & 7 is how they conduct searches. I like to do quick filename searches but I have not figured out how to do that without 3rd party software. Supposedly if you turn off indexing on a drive Win 7 will run a filename search. I really liked the search engine in Win2000 and XP with options for setting date and size filters. I just ran a search for "sero" on the E drive and it took over two minutes for it to find 66 files. I then ran the same search in FileSearchEX (a 3rd party add-on) and it took about 10 seconds to find 72 files (including 6 hidden files.) I ran a search on all drives in Everything and it had found all 66 hits by the time I hit ENTER (it maintains a filename index using idle time on the computer.)

Perhaps it was because I've just used W7 Home Premium but Windows Explorer seemed to be braindead. I would create or move a file using the built-in Windows functions and accessories yet it would not be shown in an Explorer window until I hit "refresh". When I think of an Operating System I think that Job #1 is handling disk operating system functions and once that is taken care of it can branch out into other areas. With Home Premium I would create a text file in the default folder but when I went to open it later I was informed that it was in a protected folder that I could not access. (I learned that I had to "take ownership" of folders to be able to access all of them and I added a button called "Take Ownership" to the right click menu of a folder.)

Windows 7 might work great for other people but it doesn't work very well for me. Another gripe. With XP I would move My Documents to a separate hard drive and for the most part it worked great (a few programs insisted on writing to a My Documents folder on C: but I could deal with that.) With Vista and W7 we have "libraries" and a separate essentially virtual drive called "Steve" so My Documents are scattered in at least 3 folders on two drives. For the files in the Steve library the full filenames are incredibly long and some programs can't deal with that because there are two many characters.

The big problem is that W7 didn't give me the option to set up and run things the way I wanted to. Why not include a traditional file search feature? I think that MS wanted to show how it could be like a desktop version of Google. (I must admit that they got that search engine working better in W8.1 as you can have it search the internet or Settings, too- but I still want the traditional filename search engine!)

Steve Ahola

[tedmich]

I had Win8 at work and then it made a mandatory upgrade to Win8.1 after asking me for months if I wanted to do it; one day a dialog came up saying "Update now or in 4 minutes?", no "HECK NO" choice was allowed...Win 8.1 was a better interface than 8.0 without classic shell, but I had it for only a month until we downgraded to Win7.

The search feature with full indexing was useful in Win8, I could get all the docs with a given PN or all docs with related content BUT once you got the list you could do nothing with it; no sorting by date, no "Details" display with mod dates etc, no printing, no saving searches, just a big blank cell phone screen with icons of the docs. You had to drop back to a real desktop before you could do anything with it. Once Win7 is fully indexed its about as useful, and our IT guy believes Win8 is a real security risk compared to Win7.

[überfuzz]

Seems the thread has turned into a string of anti win posts. My main OS is a Linux dist of my liking. However, I have win7 on one machine, double boot. I think it's fairly good, specially for gaming and recording/editing music.

On topic, I hear that there is a new generation of processors on the drawing table, or under development. I've seen benchmarks where a 3% over all performance improvident is stated. This fact discourage me a bit. The heat/size ratio of laptops is currently limiting the possibilities regarding performance improvements.

[big_teee]

Windows 7 was OK.
I ran it for a couple of years.
It was more prone to viruses, and it was not a good late night browsing machine.
I had to roll it back to a previous date a couple of times when it got confused.
These kind of things I've never had to do with the Penguin.
With all Windoz, You have to mess with AV and Anti malware all the time.
I don't miss any of that.
On the other hand with Win 8.1, I couldn't get it off the Hard drive fast enough!
I told it AMF, and reformatted the hard drive.
T