Posted on 02/11/2014 1:11:44 PM PST by lbryce
One of Microsoft's strongest supporters took a good, hard look at the soon-to-be released next version of Windows 8, which could arrive in April, and threw his hands up in frustration.
The new version is called Windows 8 Update 1, and it includes a number of small changes, mostly minor tweaks.
These tweaks try to fix some of the complaints people still had about Windows 8. But blogger Paul Thurrott of the influential Windows blog “Supersite for Windows” says they really just make Windows 8 more difficult to use, especially on a tablet.
He took Microsoft to task, writing:
Windows 8 is a disaster in every sense of the word. This is not open to debate, is not part of some cute imaginary world where everyone's opinion is equally valid or whatever. Windows 8 is a disaster. Period.
There’s no reason to rehash the long list of complaints users have about Windows 8. We can summarize them: Windows 8 is not well designed. It's not easy to use.
While the idea behind it was good — a two-in-one device that melds a PC with a table — in practice, it's "a mess" Thurrott says, because it's really two operating systems, “mobile and desktop, fused together unnaturally like a Frankenstein's monster."
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
I hate the idea of a touchscreen laptop and I will never want tiles.
Or did people lose interest (about the time Friends was cancelled or so)?
My cousin was one of those computer geeks who got in early and landed himself a job as some kind of administrator of a company’s computer systems.
He had about a decade of denigrating the keyboard banging monkeys. Over time those keyboard banging monkeys learned to do his job and more. In an attempt to save his job he deliberately made a mess out of the system. The company got suspicious and called in a private investigator who specialized in computer crimes and caught him. He was inserting invisible firewalls between departments, routing things to dead end files that only he could find etc.
He got called into a meeting with the company heads, corporate attorneys, and prosecutor. They dumped a pile of evidence on the table in front of him and told him to think real hard about the choices in front of him. He went home that night but he did it without his severance package or any of the other perks he was supposed to get upon his termination. What really saved him was the fact that he wasn’t actually stealing anything but he did cost the company some considerable money.
Still using almost-glitch-free XP.
Probably with XP is you have no idea how many rootkits or other security holes going on by now. Starting with Vista they added UAC which really does help keep things safer.
Just installed clean 8.1 two weeks ago, coming from 7. Win8 is an UI abomination in many ways, but I think they could salvage this wreck, if they honestly listened to some of the criticism.
I’ve used classic start to restore win7 usefulness, and basically ignore all the metro nonsense. This does smell like Vista/7 experience, which gives me hope that they will come to their senses.
I was being sarcastic/ironic, attempting to imitate the hyperventilating that so often accompanies any discussion of the shortcomings of the various releases of Windows.
I skipped Vista, partly because of the awfulness-rumors attending its release, but mostly because I liked Windows XP and had purchased a new XP machine just a few weeks before MS announced that they absolutely, positively were not going to allow any more copies of XP to be sold.
That machine served me well until I had to get a 64-bit machine for my work; on that machine is installed Win 7, which I like very much. Another reason I had to leave XP behind was that it was becoming too vulnerable to viruses, and the anti-virus software I use was unable to deploy all it's capabilities under XP, even on 64-bit hardware.
I've used Win 8 on a touch-screen computer we got my daughter. My only real beef with Win 8 as it is installed on that machine is that I have not - after several hours of concerted effort - been able to get it to communicate with the Win 7 machine that is serving as our home printer server; this effectively prevents my daughter from printing anything out without e-mailing it to herself, etc.
Win 8 seems fine in other respects; I installed Classic Shell so it has the normal Start-button/taskbar design I'm used to, although she uses the "Metro" desktop.
Hey, that’ll kill off a ton of the software industry if they did that all over. Level 3 bugs are a cornerstone of the software industry. Make it so you have to run a few simple fixes that you know by heart but say it’s a 3 day thing. A *large* proportion of the IT keeps their jobs by intentional bugs.
Now that’s funny.
Yep. They should have learned from Apple. Instead of completely changing Windows 7, which everyone liked, they should come up with incremental changes that add a few key features with each iteration. Instead of Windows 8, have a Windows 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, etc., make each one a little better. Then, keep your Windows Phone OS, but make it compatible with Windows programs like Outlook, Word and Excel and scale it for tablets. Simple. But no, Win 8 had to work on PCs and tablets and be the same OS. How is that working for ya, MS?
Don't doubt that. But it's just easy to use and works. MS updates have been provided until now, but soon to be discontinued if not already.
Any smart people on here tell me why I can tether and mobile hot spot my Galaxy Note 2 to my Lubuntu netbook and my old Windows 7 computer but not my new Windows 8.1 laptop. (for what it’s worth, I pay T-mobile for the privilege.)
My wife had to go to England for 3 months and brought along a new Asus laptop with Windows 8 installed. While she was gone, in order to sync her pc with her laptop, I installed Windows 8.1 on her computer along with Windows Classic Shell. I don’t see any of the tablet-like apps and the desktop looks like my Windows XP machine. It’s very stable, boots up and shuts down quickly, networks fine and when I reinstalled all of the programs she had on her last pc they all work fine. I didn’t have any problems with it and when she returned she was very happy with the results also. When they stop supporting XP Windows 8.1 will be my next OS. I hated every flavor of Windows that came after XP but this is one I can work with. Again, I completely blocked anything that looked like a trendy tablet app and use it like touchscreens never existed. That works great for me.
I think that’s where I’m headed.
The windows 8.1 update is working alright for me.
Actually I like it.
Vista was a disaster
IIRC, Dell, Lenovo, HP and others have gone back to bundling Win 7 with their retail computers.
Reason: Their tech support centers could not handle the flood of Win 8 questions. MSFT changed too much all at once. Many people couldn't handle that.
Win8.1 is OK, and I am using it on this PC.
It’s definitely faster than Win7 but it is like a all versions of Windows. clunky and they moved things into places for the sake of doing it rather than some sort of improvement.
Overall, it is worth the $39 upgrade price I paid for it as an early adopter. It’s not worth any more than that and Ubuntu is looking more attractive every day.
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