Windows 8, anyone use and like it

I quite like it. The effectiveness of the touch gubbins does seem to vary based on the hardware. I work in IT and got a few devices on loan for a week or two from Microsoft and other suppliers. I hated it on a last generation Acer slate but I thought it was great on a Microsoft Surface.

I think it works fairly well with a mouse too. The 'desktop as an app' business is a bit clunky but it would be a non-starter for most businesses if it couldn't run legacy apps.
 
Absolutely, we were in the same boat and had lots of Microsoft gear on loan. If they changed everything to apps there would be hell-up, if they didn't embrace apps there would also be hell-up, its a nice balance and entirely up to the user as to which way they want to use it.

Just a shame that they didn't polish media center whilst they were at it :(
 
In desktop mode it's not half bad, even in a min spec vm. I did half consider putting it on my work laptop after I semi borked it yesterday but didn't have time and I haven't tested all of the software packages we use.

I still don't get why they haven't included a straight to desktop mode for the enterprise edition though.
 
Annoying I know. You can just install Start8 though. I know you know this Neil, but others in here may not.

Mine now boots straight to the desktop and has my old start menu back. If I want metro, it's now in the start menu as Windows 8 Menu.

http://i.imgur.com/M7oQ3PB.jpg
 
We're still using XP at work, but in May/June this year we're all upgrading to Windows 7! Seems crazy to be behind the times when its a very big multinational company with some sort of big licence deal with Microsoft.
 
TopBanana said:
We're still using XP at work, but in May/June this year we're all upgrading to Windows 7! Seems crazy to be behind the times when its a very big multinational company with some sort of big licence deal with Microsoft.
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sounds about right, we're still installing W7 on rebuilds/new machines.

W8 is a non-starter for us.
 
I only moved from XP to Win 7 when I had a new laptop. My boss' boss still has XP on his machine.....
 
Pookeyhead said:
Annoying I know. You can just install Start8 though. I know you know this Neil, but others in here may not.

Mine now boots straight to the desktop and has my old start menu back. If I want metro, it's now in the start menu as Windows 8 Menu.
Click to expand...

Just spotted this which might completely change things thanks ! Bugs the life out of me starting in tablet style all the time. I did consider downgrading to win7 because it annoys me so much. Any other tips to make it more friendly ?

Cheers
 
Coley. said:
Just spotted this which might completely change things thanks ! Bugs the life out of me starting in tablet style all the time. I did consider downgrading to win7 because it annoys me so much. Any other tips to make it more friendly ?

Cheers
Click to expand...
I use win 8 with start8, costs $5 but money well spent, ill post up a screenshot today
 
As a laptop user I usually sleep/resume so when I wake the machine up I am returned straight back to the desktop environment I left. Nothing stopping PC users using sleep/hibernate too, as I do with my media centre PC. If I do perform a shutdown/restart, which does boot to the tiles, then it requires one mouse click or pressing Windows-D to get me back to the desktop environment.
 
Hibernate isn't recommended on ssd though. Sleep should be okay though.

I was reading the other day that W8 doesn't really shutdown persay anymore, it uses part of the hibernate process. I wonder if that will have an impact on ssd users.
 
That's true, and I do have SSD boot drives in my laptops, but I just let Windows default power settings take care of what happens when I close the lid or hit the power button. I do not hibernate my laptops. My PC, with HDDs only, I do.

With all these ultrabooks out there this must be pretty bread and butter activity, so if the defaults are going to screw SSDs the whole industry needs to get its act together and make sure the solution implemented does not destroy SSDs in short order.
 
TopBanana said:
What's the difference and why is it bad for SSDs?
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sleep puts the hardware into a low power mode with the DRAM in self refresh mode. This means when you open the lid/press the power button the power is applied and you just resume from where you were.

Hibernate takes the contents of the DRAM/system state and writes it to HDD. Because the DRAM of many PCs is 8/16G, doing that can write a lot of data to the SSD. As SSDs are flash devices, they have a limited lifetime and the controllers employ wear levelling to try and use the whole of the memory at an equal speed. My personal opinion is that the number of times I hibernate my PC isn't going to have a meaningful degradation to the lifetime of the SSD, so I tend not to worry about it....
 
arad85 said:
sleep puts the hardware into a low power mode with the DRAM in self refresh mode. This means when you open the lid/press the power button the power is applied and you just resume from where you were.

Hibernate takes the contents of the DRAM/system state and writes it to HDD. Because the DRAM of many PCs is 8/16G, doing that can write a lot of data to the SSD. As SSDs are flash devices, they have a limited lifetime and the controllers employ wear levelling to try and use the whole of the memory at an equal speed. My personal opinion is that the number of times I hibernate my PC isn't going to have a meaningful degradation to the lifetime of the SSD, so I tend not to worry about it....
Click to expand...

Thanks for that, that's what I thought the difference was, so I assumed that leaving the hardware in low power mode would be worse than having it off - I wasn't aware that the lifetime of SSDs was so short that it would be a problem.
 
TopBanana said:
I wasn't aware that the lifetime of SSDs was so short that it would be a problem.
Click to expand...
Unless you're hibernating 10s of times a day (most PCs go into sleep mode when you close the lid simply because resume time is much quicker) I don't consider it to be a major issue....
 
Just downloaded smart8 and its amazing !!! thanks. If I could just find where they've hidden windows update........
 
Press Windows-X to call up the toys for the grown ups, including Control Panel, and then pick Windows Update from there.
 
Coley. said:
Just spotted this which might completely change things thanks ! Bugs the life out of me starting in tablet style all the time. I did consider downgrading to win7 because it annoys me so much. Any other tips to make it more friendly ?

Cheers
Click to expand...

Not really... once you get rid of the silly tablet front end, everything is pretty cool. I added a little patch to enable me to run Win7 sidebar gadgets for my little radio player and drive thingy, and I also use Stardock's Object Dock to give me a Apple OS style dock.
 
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