I find 8.1 to be very stable and fast and it installed all my drivers without having to go searching. I'm hoping you might be able to help me with this issue. I have about 16 icons on my desktop. 8.1 starts up really fast and all the task bar icons appear instantly as soon as the login screen slips away. About six of the desktop icons also appear instantly, always the same ones. The rest appear as blank white folders and take anywhere from 15 to 35 seconds to be properly rendered. They are unusable during this time. It would be great if they all showed up instantly. Why do some but not all? The only things that start up with Windows is a small diary called Remind Me and of course murphy78's Auto KMS. I have disabled them and also set the screen res to native but this doesn't seem to make any difference. It's not really a problem. I'm not that time poor that I can't afford an extra 25 seconds or so, but any ideas as to what might be "wrong" at my end would be appreciated. (i5 processor, Nvidia 1 GB graphics card, SSD 250GB, 4GB ram and 8.1 x64.)
To answer my own question. I hunted around on the cloud and some people suggested deleting iconcache.db. I did that and also deleted the desktop icons and recreated them,along with moving some more to the task bar. Anyway, all good now. All icons appear instantly as soon as the login screen is gone. 8.1 starts up very quickly indeed now. I'm glad I made the move from Windows 7.
I use CCleaner quite regularly, it does find those files often. I've never had the issues you face, but I didn't know these were related. Thanks for the update! (At least now I know what to do when one of my clients faces the same problem )
Windows 8.1 and Windows 8 didn't make any improvements in the traditional Desktop.. which is quite disappointing to non-touch users.. Only thing they did was added Modern UI and 8.1 improved Modern UI experience (I Hope ) and added a few apps like Calculator etc..Of course the photo and video app looks quite primitive..I think they are back to square one going back to Windows 3.1 days.. So the whole point is if Windows 8 is buggy then it is Modern UI apps which is buggy..As the core desktop experience remain the same as Windows 7..and there were no changes in desktop mode (except for ribbon experience in Explorer and a revamped Task Manager)
After giving Windows 8.1 x64 a month, I am returning to Win7 x64. I had previously run Win8.0 for a little while, before returning to Win7 then. My verdict? Windows 8.1 is worse than Windows 8.0. I actually enjoyed Win 8.0 a bit. My list of Win 8.1 (and 8.0) complaints is as follows: - Start screen now has tiles that take on colors inside program icons, with horrendous results. Start screen looks like a nasty carnival ride. This cannot be changed. Worse than that, it makes it HARDER to differentiate which tile/icon is which. - When I right-click on items, the context menu disappears often. Once I wanted to 7-zip something and my context menu disappeared 3 times before I could do it. - Windows 8.1 still has an ugly interface (even worse now than 8.0, due to Start tiles). Letting window borders change along with wallpapers would seem like a good idea but produce the most awful border colors so might as well not have that feature if you like to look at more than one wallpaper. Square opaque ugliness. - When I drag and drop a folder into a directory containing many folders, instead of self-sorting to the (alphabetical) area the folder should end up, the view of that window points downwards to the bottom of that directory, and I have to navigate to all the way back up to see that folder. Not so in Win7. - Weird graphics drivers issues with even the newest beta drivers. Try loading Photoshop and see it flicker a hundred times while it loads. Not ready. - Doing VM work in VirtualBox slows down the whole system. That's pretty bad if you run at 4.5ghz and have 2 SSD's and 16gb of 2133 ram. Not so in Win7. Could be VB but I've had lag issues with other tasks and programs too though not as bad as with VB. - Enjoyment of using this OS is pretty much nil for me. It works, sort of, but it definitely a step back for any desktop or laptop PC.
I personally could not agree more. While windows 8 start screen colour scheme looked more elegant and soothing to me, windows 8.1 start screen looks uglier when the same program icons are pinned to start. The start button is useless (I still create shortcuts for restart/shutdown). Perhaps I should change the mouse clicks (left to right). That will give me the traditional start button click.
Having exactly the same issues as you described. The three issues quoted are the most annoying for me. Not something to ditch the whole OS, but definitely something that has to be fixed. Actually pretty sloppy from MS, would expect something better. Cheers.