Thread: 2.0 in Windows 8

Originally Posted by Shougun

If you have 7 and you dont smoke your money then I wouldnt upgrade - but mine was a free upgrade promotional so.. why not lol

Its faster then 7 and has some neat features (discounting the main screen which is useless to me and I scrapped right away lol)

The thing is, doing so requires third party software (unless microsoft released a patch restoring the old start menu as an option that I don't know about). Why should I have to buy/find some third party software to fix something that should never have been broken in the first place.

The start screen is fine if you're using a touch screen/tablet I guess, but I've never really understood this because most tablets run android or IOS, rather than a desktop operating system.

Windows 8 is terrible, not amazing. Behind the scenes there are some technical improvements, yes. the only reason it really perfoms any faster than 7 though is because they replaced Aero with a barfy flat boxy solid color window theme that looks worse than the windows did in Windows 3.11.

I cant imagine where anyone at microsoft got the idea that this fugly OS theme is anywhere near asthetically presentable.

Function: Fails unless using touch input. Performance for some applications is slightly better. No option for previous windows navigation for users more comfortable with that.

Form: Fails in all areas. Start screen and new UI theme are both hideous.

What's worse is MS seems to be paying a lot of PC manufacturers to not offer win7 on their systems.

Also, Windows 8 has faster boot times, faster shut down times,

I have a wonderful Samsung 840 Pro SSD and windows 7 boots up in about 7 seconds (starting from when POST ends)- Windows 8 won't change this much if at all, as my storage device is no longer a bottleneck. Most people I know don't even reboot or shut down if they don't have to, only using Sleep mode to reduce power use when not actively using it, so this isn't much of a perk.

There's not even any reason to navigate the classic Start Menu with a mouse in Windows 7. Just type the name of the application you want to open and it'll appear. (Windows 8 functions better than Windows 7 in this regard.)

In Win7, nearly every application I ever use is either pinned to my taskbar, or in the start menu's frequently used apps list. Its a LOT faster to click these with the mouse than to type in the name of an application (especially if it's not an easy to type name)- I only use the typing feature for "hidden" things like taskmgr, cmd, msconfig, dxdiag, etc.

also all of these methods are a LOT faster than visually scanning my eyeballs across my entire screen to find the right "Tile" in the Win8 Start screen.

Originally Posted by Alhanelem

In Win7, nearly every application I ever use is either pinned to my taskbar, or in the start menu's frequently used apps list. Its a LOT faster to click these with the mouse than to type in the name of an application (especially if it's not an easy to type name)- I only use the typing feature for "hidden" things like taskmgr, cmd, msconfig, dxdiag, etc.

also all of these methods are a LOT faster than visually scanning my eyeballs across my entire screen to find the right "Tile" in the Win8 Start screen.

You can pin things to the task bar in Windows 8, too. For the frequently-used programs that you don't want to pin, just place in them in the first tile positions of the Start Screen. Push the Windows key, and then click what's right there in front of your face. That's no different from Windows 7, really.

Also, do you really use the taskmgr command to open the task manager? CTRL+SHIFT+ESC, my friend.

As for your point about boot times, I know people with SSDs are only going to see a negligible difference between Windows 7 and Windows 8. That said, 7 staggers the startup operation, so some processes and drivers load more slowly than others on a cold boot. I haven't noticed that issue with 8.

Like I said, I'm sticking with 7 on my desktop. I think I'm just such a vocal advocate for 8, not because I find it vastly superior to 7, but because people are calling it disastrous when it's really not. As with any OS, shortcuts go a long way in improving usability and efficiency. Windows 8 doesn't slow me down at all.