Initial User Experiences on Windows 8.

I think it's probably better just to learn to use the Start Screen, but if any of you really want your Start Menu back...

kuwisdelu said:

Ah, that does indeed suck. Trying to use modern software without a reliable and speedy Internet connection is a pain in the ass.

ETA: Now that I think about it, I'm kind of surprised it has that much of an impact. They're the same kind of live tiles used on Windows Phone, and basically the equivalent of notifications on Android and iOS. Shouldn't use up more than a few MB per month. ...or is your data cap measured in MB per month rather than GB per month? If so, wow...

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Our allowance is GB rather than MB, but not many GB and it's amazing how quickly we went over-budget with those live tiles constantly updating.

It couldn't have been down the usual huge initial updating that new laptops require, as I went to Starbucks to do that. Thank goodness for their free WiFi: we use it whenever we have anything large to download.

I didn't keep my notes so I can't tell you the amounts involved, but we watched our allowance diminish live on-screen, and the numbers clocked up very quickly (for us, at least!).

Don't all of those have tiles on the Start Screen, too?

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They might have, but as I knew Dragon wouldn't work on the Start Screen...

I'm not so sure. There are certainly professionals like yourself and me who require a full-fledged OS than an iPad offers (but I do everything on a laptop).

But even in the office, it seems like 80% of people's desktop use is just MS Office. I doubt 99% of people in an office environment actually need the processing power of a desktop.

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Much depends on the business you're in.

My husband is a Chartered Surveyor and in his office (he has his own business, so his office is just him and sometimes me) he uses far more than MS Office. He has to look at large plans, both land-based and geological maps, historical plans, and so on, and complex planning applications which include maps, spreadsheets, and so on.

He couldn't work on an iPad; and people of all levels of employment at the bigger practices he goes into (he works in minerals, which is a specialist side of surveying, and provides consultancy work to larger companies) can't either.

I know ours is just one example: but there are all sorts of businesses which require more than just MS Office to do their work. Screen size is another big factor in my husband's work: a small screen just won't work for most of the plans he has to work with.

I don't deny that a lot of computer-work could probably be carried out on iPads and similar devices, but there's a lot of stuff which couldn't be.

I think most people would probably be fine with nothing more than their smartphones.

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I struggle to read stuff on my son's smartphone screen. But then, I struggle to read the screen on my computer unless the lighting conditions are right: I'm 50, and have incipient cataracts. Several of my friends do too; and the population is aging. I am not an uncommon case.

I think Windows 8 probably is more future-proof than any Windows release before it. It's just much less past-proof.

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Ooops! That's sort of what I meant. I said the wrong thing. Apologies.

I know Apple won't let any apps into the Mac App Store that aren't sandboxed, and I think Microsoft is doing the same with Modern UI apps. I wonder if that makes it an issue for allowing Dragon to interact with them?

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At the point that I stopped reading up on this, Dragon wasn't working with anything on the Start screen. Whether that extends to working with an app once it's been opened I'm not sure: much depends, I'd guess, on how each app works. If there's a button one can tell Dragon to "click BUTTON"; it's harder getting Dragon to "click on that part of the picture", and so on.

Because I don't want to break out my 15" MacBook Pro whenever I just want to browse the web or post on AW. Nor do I need my whole laptop if all I'm doing is writing fiction. My laptop doesn't have 3G+LTE. Also, a laptop makes a really poor e-reader. ETA: And a tablet can also double as a secondary monitor for a laptop when doing work on-the-go.

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Why do you need 3G to write fiction? I'm confused. Or is 3G+LTE more than 3G?

How much does the laptop use? I pretty much never shut down my notebooks, and when I leave them unplugged, they only use maybe 1% of battery per day. Though I'm sure the one I left asleep and unplugged back in Indy will be dead by the time I go back in a few months...

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I've got other things plugged in right now so can't tell you exactly, as our monitor won't separate things out. I bet, though, that our ideas of what counts as a significant use of power are wildly apart. We don't have an electric kettle or toaster, for example, as our power system would collapse under their use, but most of our friends and neighbours think nothing of putting the kettle on to make a cup of tea. We don't leave our TVs on on standby when we're not watching them: we switch them off at the wall. We have to be really miserly with our power consumption. But even when we move from here we'll still do it because we've seen at first-hand how much power it saves, and that means we're saving money too.

And an ARM tablet uses about a tenth or so of that. It costs about $1.36 per year to keep an iPad charged. If one's primary use of a desktop is browsing, email, and MS Office, switching to a Windows RT tablet would save tons in power costs.

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It probably costs us a lot more than that to keep our iPad charged: for a start, we live in the UK and I think you're in the US, where power is cheaper; and making our own electricity results in electricity which is considerably more expensive per unit.

And I bet it costs a lot more than $1.36 to cover the power wasted when your seventeen year old son leaves his charger plugged in even when his iPad isn't charging. Those chargers eat up power like you wouldn't believe, even when there's no device connected to them. Bloody children.

(Sorry for taking this thread off-topic: I'm finding it fascinating, and hope I'm not boring everyone else.)

Old Hack said:

And I bet it costs a lot more than $1.36 to cover the power wasted when your seventeen year old son leaves his charger plugged in even when his iPad isn't charging. Those chargers eat up power like you wouldn't believe, even when there's no device connected to them. Bloody children.

(Sorry for taking this thread off-topic: I'm finding it fascinating, and hope I'm not boring everyone else.)

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I hate this too. It's understandable when the outlets are in really inconvenient places (i.e. all the time, everywhere) but not worth the power drain. Open question to mfrs - why the hell do these things drain power when there's nothing connected?

Because they are transformers, and that's what transformers do. I don't think there's a way round that one.

"If we can put a man on the moon..."

Google has made a deal with a few software providers whereby Google Taskbar and/or Chrome is bundled with the provider's installer. The 'Ask Toolbar' is also deployed in the same fashion.

DivX, Adobe, Avast, and many more fell for that ploy in exchange for a few bucks and a befuddled user base.

You can always uninstall Chrome and/or the Taskbar(s) afterwards.

It's the sort of annoyance that's worth a couple flame mails.

-cb

Old Hack said:

Why do you need 3G to write fiction? I'm confused. Or is 3G+LTE more than 3G?

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Because I use my iPad for much more than writing fiction. When I want to use the internet on-the-go without having to go through setting up a hotspot for my laptop, I have my iPad. There are many situations where it's more convenient than a laptop. I do still need a laptop, though, so I carry both.

onesecondglance said:

I hate this too. It's understandable when the outlets are in really inconvenient places (i.e. all the time, everywhere) but not worth the power drain. Open question to mfrs - why the hell do these things drain power when there's nothing connected?

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Ya'll would probably have a heart attack at my electronics setup.

And a panic attack at my data use.

kuwisdelu said:

I think it's probably better just to learn to use the Start Screen, but if any of you really want your Start Menu back...

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Sweet dude, I'm not scared of installing Windows 8 anymore when the time comes.

Are you going to school for computers?

Paperback Writer said:

Sweet dude, I'm not scared of installing Windows 8 anymore when the time comes.

Are you going to school for computers?

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No, I'm going to school for the money.

I'm a PhD student in statistics.

But I do hope to get a job designing algorithms for the Microsofts and Googles of the world.

At first I was like

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/143553/Anime/lain_room1.jpg

but then I was like

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/143553/Anime/lain_room2.jpg

Sounds like you're pretty smart.

kuwisdelu said:

At first I was like

PICTURE 1

but then I was like

PICTURE 2

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Hmm I'll have to watch some Lain to catch the reference.

Phew, and I *finally* have internet in my new apartment.

Old Hack said:

Our allowance is GB rather than MB, but not many GB and it's amazing how quickly we went over-budget with those live tiles constantly updating.

It couldn't have been down the usual huge initial updating that new laptops require, as I went to Starbucks to do that. Thank goodness for their free WiFi: we use it whenever we have anything large to download.

I didn't keep my notes so I can't tell you the amounts involved, but we watched our allowance diminish live on-screen, and the numbers clocked up very quickly (for us, at least!).

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Hmm, if that really is just from the live tiles and not something else, that could be a problem, especially if they ever get 3G+LTE Surfaces out.

I know when Siri came out, people were worried about requests eating up data, but it turned out she compressed queries pretty well.

I bought my son a new computer for Christmas. It can with windows 8 and I set it up and put a virus detector on it so it would be ready for him when he opened it.

I hated it. Why does Microsoft feel that an upgrade needs to be so totally foreign from the last one? The screen made no sense to me. What was wrong with having a start menu to launch programs or icons on your desktop? What are these little windows thingies? I gave him the computer and I hope to hell I never have to look at that OS again.


Can I still buy a copy of Vista? I think I'll get a copy and as soon as I get a new computer, I'll wipe it completely and load Vista before I do anything.


I'd hate to think I've just reached that point where age and inability to understand new tech converge.

Shadow_Ferret said:

Can I still buy a copy of Vista? I think I'll get a copy and as soon as I get a new computer, I'll wipe it completely and load Vista before I do anything.

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Why Vista when you could have 7?

Old Hack said:

Because they are transformers, and that's what transformers do. I don't think there's a way round that one.

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The older, heavier, lower-power wall warts are 60Hz transformers, which ARE horribly efficient, as a transformer that puts out more power as heat than it does into the cable it powers is (or was when they were making them) cheaper both to make and to ship, making it a few pennies cheaper at retail. But they're obsolete now.

Modern wall warts are switching (or "switchmode" or "electronic transformer") power supplies (the primary voltage is chopped at several hundred kHz, and the transformer at that frequency can be much smaller to transfer the same amount of energy), and are much more efficient.

I recall the 5V 1A (that was a LOT of current for a wall wart back then!) wallwart for the Commodore 64 - it was big and heavy. Nowadays there are wallwarts with that rating with a mini-USB connector at the end (ISTR that's the newer, universal cellphone charging standard connector) - it's the same rating, but literally 1/4 to 1/10th the cost, and it doesn't get as warm as the older wall warts. Not only are switching supplies more efficient at full load, they pull much less power when there's nothing connected. And it weighs a couple of ounces instead of most of a pound.

Yes, you could at a switch ON THE WALL WART to switch it off completely, but that would add to the cost and most people won't buy it. All I can suggest is plug it into an outlet strip with a power switch and use that switch.

The problem with switching supplies is they often aren't well shielded or designed (especially the cheapest ones from China, they often have stickers saying they meet FCC and CE/EU standards, but they don't), and give out a lot of RF/radio interference (aka EMI). If you're running a computer it doesn't much matter, because the computer itself often gives off a lot as well. But the older, less efficient ones that DON'T give off interference have been outlawed in some areas, and you can ONLY buy the new ones. Compact fluorescent lamps and LED lamps use similar switching technology, and can also emit RF interference. This mainly interferes with the lower frequency bands used by AM and shortwave radios, and not with UHF signals such as WiFi, so few people notice. More and more people listen to radio through Internet streaming anyway.

If you want even more techy details on all this, here's the site for you:
http://sound.westhost.com/lamps/index.html

kuwisdelu said:

Why Vista when you could have 7?

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I know Vista. I don't know anything about 7 either. Is it closer to VIsta or 8?

It's like a polished version of Vista. I've been running Windows 7 and it works really well. Really stable, no crashes.

Shadow_Ferret said:

I know Vista. I don't know anything about 7 either. Is it closer to VIsta or 8?

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If you're familiar with Vista, I don't think you should have much of a problem with 7. Microsoft revamped lots of things under the hood, but it looks pretty similar, minus a few minor changes. The most immediate thing I can think of is the taskbar is a bit different, but better, IMO.

The one thing I really like about Win7 over XP is being able to drag a window to the top edge to maximize it and likewise drag it away to unmaximize. I'm often dragging a maximized window from one screen to the other, and it's really fast to do. Dunno if this was in Vista, as I was fortunate enough to skip over it.

benbradley said:

The one thing I really like about Win7 over XP is being able to drag a window to the top edge to maximize it and likewise drag it away to unmaximize. I'm often dragging a maximized window from one screen to the other, and it's really fast to do. Dunno if this was in Vista, as I was fortunate enough to skip over it.

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Being able to snap to half the screen is even better. Still not as nice as OS X window management, but definitely a major improvement over XP.

But seriously the best feature of Vista and 7 is finally getting Search in the Start Menu.

Sorry to hear that Cliff it seems like Windows 8 is giving you nothing but woes. A dvd rom or burner is not that pricey though. You may be able to get a used one from an older computer if you know someone.