I'm using 3 OS's. Linux, MAC and Windows. In Windows, my Host is Windows 8 and using Hyper V, I have a Windows XP, Vista and 7 Virtual Machines. I am doing this because if in case I miss 7, or Vista or XP, I always can go back to them and remenisce the good old days. lol
I paid to upgrade on the very last day of the offer. £25!! I don't mind the Win8 start screen in all honesty. If I had the time I'd probably get around to writing a few widget apps for it, purely for personal reasons and put them on the app store for free. As I find a lot of the current Apps are absolutely terrible. I'm talking about simple Apps as well like "Tasks". In saying that, I do like the live tiles. I wouldn't mind an App that displays my Google Calender events. If anyone knows of one.... Perhaps I will have to get writing one myself... One thing I don't like, is that I used to have my title bars and taskbar set to black. Now, if you do that on Win8, the title text is black. Anyway to change that to white? I can't seem to find it, or I'm blind. For £25 it was reasonable, I got a nice new explorer with the UP icon back again (that was almost worth the £25 on its own!!), far better file copying abilities (as in a heck of a lot more intelligent and faster, I have a habit of copying stuff from drive to drive, and now I can just keep selecting files and copy, whereas before Windows 7 would start MULTIPLE file copy commands, windows 8 just lumps them in with the one running....) I've got Start8 installed because I have found that I did use to use the Start button as a secondary Task Bar, for applications that I seldom used, but still used enough to warrant their own list. That is one omission I think Microsoft overlooked by removing the Start Button, and you'll be surprised how many people do use the Start Button as a secondary list. I don't think they have achieved in this OS the vision of a tablet/desktop OS. Far better if they would have made a Tablet OS. However, I feel Microsoft had their arms tied behind their back by the Office Team, who seem desperately not to want to make their Application Touch Friendly. As for the comments regarding Win8 being faster than Win7. I'll let you know a little secret. On Windows 7, if you disable all the window animation, your machine will feel super responsive. Same with Windows 8. It's that slight delay between pressing a button, the animation running and the event happening that when you remove it, it's almost imperceptible, but you do notice it. I do believe animated windows makes machines seem slow. I'm not interested in a box fading out when I click. I want the box to go. Poof. Just like that! Would I recommend Windows 8 to my family. Probably not. They call me enough with their problems already....
If it's the same situation between Win8 and Win7 GUI animation - which it is - than how would people be talking about Win8 being faster than Win7 that way? Otherwise I appreciate your refreshing and balanced perspective on the Win8 experience, and I agree with your comments about file copying as I noticed that too.
If I'm not totally wrong that are KMS Activation's?! As Activator are classified at MDL, they differs a lot from KMS!
You touched one sore point about Windows 8. You cannot write Apps on your own, you need a developer's license from Microsoft. You can get a free one, but then the apps you write will last only 30 days, and can only run on the development machine. If you go for a paid license, your apps will last a year, but you cannot deploy them on your other machines. You can resort to upload your private apps to the store, but then they become public, and you must comply with MS guidelines (no hacking, no gambling, no swearing, no soft-porn). If just one of your applications irritates Microsoft, they can revoke your license, and all your work goes down to the sink. As far as I can tell, 15 months after DP, no one has developed an in-house LOB application, there are only some Microsoft-sponsored projects. If you search on the web, there are no hints on how to develop in-house LOB applications for SMEs. Even worse, there are no third party compilers for modern-style (Metro) applications: MS has C#, but is a different dialect than the one used on desktop applications ...same applies to C++ Visual basic, once the favorite MS language, with lots of developers around the world, is left out of the door the preferred development environment is that sh#tty Javascript, which is the reason why you are getting only sh#tty applications on the store After 15 months of tries and retries, I decided that I will not change my main environment to W8.
we could said that for vista (maybe) too, hardware-wise if you stick into vista 16 GB RAM, quad core CPU, SSD drive... voila it flies I was merely talking about performance, to which most kids are ignorant of, why was aero-glass (blur to be exact) killed in win8 and why they reverted to solid colors instead for same reason classic shell was in XP and Vista and 7 win8 doesn't contain some magic file system in its core that magically speeds things up in fact I laff when people say "my win7 machine takes 1 minute to boot while win8 does that in 10 seconds" well doh... I defragment my HDD and it boots win7 in 15 secs to desktop, magic eh ? not to mention I still use old PATA drive
Boot time doesn't matter for me in any means! Were Windows 8 has the most advantage of any other Windows before, is while using huge Worksheets in MS Excel with an size of several hundred MB's! Special in filtering the save of time is a lot! Also the stability has improved with Windows 8 sdpecial for Office Apps. That applies for both Office Pro Plus 2010 and 2013. And we also using PATA drives only!!
Agreed. My customized Vista installs were quite snappy. The areo-glass in itself does not decrease or increase performance, and Aero still exists in Win8. Hence the point about speed does not apply. MS states the decision to cut glass was actually a design decision, not one of hardware limitations. From time of Vista on, there was a check in the OS to see if you could run Aero. Not glass -- but Aero. Since Win8 runs Aero, there could be no talk of performance there vs Win7. EDIT: unless people just see the non-transparent border in Win8 and attribute that to a Basic theme as they know it from Win7/Vista, and then ascribe the 'snappiness' of their Win8 OS (in reality due to fresh install) to the lack of "Aero", while in fact it runs Aero, just not Glass, which doesn't impact performance one way or the other. I think that comes closer to what is going on.
glass isn't problem, it's just transparent PNG I talk about blur, that does impact on performance, especially on tablets it simply drained the battery faster and slowed down the performance as it requires GPU to constantly work for it remove that and you have low consumption window draw (if it can be even called that)