Why Haven't You Bought Windows 8

I upgraded from Vista to Windows 7 because it was supposed to make my PC run faster, which it did.

I haven't read any information about Windows 8 that would suggest the same, so I have no need to upgrade.

IIRC they greatly streamlined the kernel.
 
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me, i find that when things are working - i leave them the hell alone. All my machines are working just fine on 7.

I dont patch, update, upgrade, anything unless I must. Often it ends up mucking everything up. I'm still hating the childish "upgrade" trend of a lot of new products to the big colorful ribbon and buttons. All the office applications to even design software like Autocad - forget smart menus and lots of screen real estate, no we need to treat users like children and give them all big bright buttons. We need to fill half the screen with a big panel, like an internet browser with too many toolbars installed. And in all the myriad of buttons, lets bury or leave stuff out that power users have always relied on.

No thanks. I'll upgrade when i'm forced to (it comes on a new machine that i buy). Not a minute before.
 
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We had, and still have, a problem with getting people to upgrade to Win7 from XP. Too many people are convinced that XP is just fine fine for what they do but not only is it out of date, such as requiring a floppy driver for 3rd party drivers at installation (hint: RAID) its full of security holes that have been taken care of.

Anyone here still on XP?
 
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We had, and still have, a problem with getting people to upgrade to Win7 from XP. Too many people are convinced that XP is just fine fine for what they do but not only is it out of date, such as requiring a floppy driver for 3rd party drivers at installation (hint: RAID) its full of security holes that have been taken care of.

Businesses using industry-based applications are particularly slow to change. Incompatabilities are a near gaurantee when changing from one O/S to another, even in the same O/S family. I've been through it myself many times. Oh your MRP system was designed for Windows 98 it will work just fine with Windows 98 SE. Bzzzzt no.

Anyone here still on XP?

As a consumer, I'd find it a little odd to be sticking with WinXp at this point given that Win7 really is a superior O/S. Lately however, I've been tossing around the idea of creating a WinXp partition so that I can get DS to work so I can play the ultima mod remakes. I've just never been able to get DS1 to work on Win7 64Bit despite putting in a lot of time and effort - I've tried every remedy on the net to no avail. So an XP partition might be the ticket...
 
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I'm on my XP system right now, my old Dell XPS laptop i bought for WoW, back in the old days. It's the only thing I can use to play games like Sacrifice or Star Trek Armada, and I'm going to use it for my station later tonight when we get together for Artemis. That's if I dont get Captain (we are going to roll randomly for who gets to be Capt)

Do I do my everyday computing on it? No, but XP definitely is good to keep around, and essential for some old games
 
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I've just never been able to get DS1 to work on Win7 64Bit despite putting in a lot of time and effort - I've tried every remedy on the net to no avail. So an XP partition might be the ticket…

You're one of THOSE guys. Dungeon Siege 1 works just fine in Windows 7. It's user error.
 
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Not sure if it was mentioned yet but now is a good time to make a decision on upgrading, since the upgrade price for Win 8 Pro will jump from $40 to $199 on Feb 1st.

I recently bought a tablet / convertible laptop PC which shipped with Windows 7. I did the $15 Win 8 upgrade and can say it definitely is worthwhile on a touchscreen PC - a much better touch experience than Windows 7. I'm uncertain if there is much benefit to non-touchscreen PCs though. The OS does feel a bit snappier maybe.

But basically, Windows 8 seems to be Windows 7 with an added layer of touch-optimized interface (which you can ignore with tweaks). So if you're still on XP it might be worth the upgrade, for the added benefits Windows 7 brought.

I'm still debating on upgrading my desktop Windows 7 machine - it doesn't have a touchscreen but I do use a Wacom tablet with it - which might work well with the metro interface.
 
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Myrkel, I would really suggest getting a pre-release copy or something to try it out before upgrading. Its very, very different.

One of the first things I did was, as another user did, create two shortcuts to shutdown and reboot. The new method is absurd.

Also, you can't just hit F8 to go into safe mode anymore. The new method, Shift-F8, only works if there's an actual problem that Windows detected is what I'm reading. I've never had Shift-F8 work.
 
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You're one of THOSE guys. Dungeon Siege 1 works just fine in Windows 7. It's user error.

Well I've tried to get it to work on two very different Win7 64 bit machines (different mobos, different make/model of vid cards etc.) and end up with the same exact error.

Had a buddy of mine come over who got it to work just fine on his machine and was stumped as to why neither of my machines will run it and both machines give the same exact error despite being quite different from one another. But I'll go ahead and be one of THOSE guys so you can continue being superior.
 
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Well, every second OS from MS tends to be good…. 98 -> ME, ME->XP XP->Vista, Vista -> Windows 7 -> windows 8…. it's really a trend…. so windows 9 here I come.
 
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All the real growth is in tablets.

Too many people seem to be putting all their eggs in the tablet basket. A few bigwigs have gone on record saying soon all businesses will be totally tablet-based, which shows how utterly ignorant they are of how people actually work. We just have to keep our fingers crossed that too many paths aren't closed off by the time the tablet bubble bursts.

As an IT person it's incredibly worrying how the dumbening of computers is creating havoc for people when they have to actually use real software. I have one user who can't figure out how to do anything unless there's a huge, colorful button for it staring her in the face, and I imagne that's going to become more common as the computer-as-appliance trend continues.

And slightly more on topic, I see no need to upgrade, so I probably won't leave Win7 until I'm forced to.
 
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People just think differently. For some, a PC is a mere tool. Nothing else.
 
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Clearly, touchscreens are the future of computing - Star Trek says so. :)

But seriously, I can see tablets one day replacing laptops and desktops for a lot of "consumers". Power users, developers, IT and business professionals will still need traditional interfaces for a while, until the new touch interfaces are more refined and flexible. Windows 8's metro interface is not there yet - but it's decent enough for casual computer use. And for gamers - it hardly makes a difference as games are mostly played full screen anyway.

I think Windows 8 hasn't gained traction because relatively few people own tablet PCs or touchscreens (aside from iPads and Android devices).
 
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I was perfectly content with XP, but I got a new PC with Win 8 on it and so far its been ok. The whole dashboard look is really just a replacement of the Start button. In that Start screen one of the boxes is for Desktop. Press that, and bingo, you are right back to your normal looking desktop, with icons and shortcuts. I very very rarely even look at that Start screen.
 
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So I suspect I have some minor OCD issues as after posting in this thread I started thinking about installing win8 at home ... and the idea became a broken record in my head and the only way to appease it was to try it out :p

So friday did a CLEAN install since upgrade seemed foolish. I will outline the results below. However I ended up putting win7 back on because I could not get Skyrim to run ... and it is the only game I playing now so was kinda pointless having a great gaming rig where I couldn't even play my current game. Will explain after my summary.

PROS:
- Smoothest install for an OS I ever have done. Not only did everything run out of the box (except skyrim) but it properly found all the drivers for all my hardware - something windows 7 couldn't do and I had to have drivers on disk for. It also found updates for my video and sound drivers that matched. I popped in the DVD, ran set up, selected some options and I was ready to go in about 45 minutes (not counting patches afterwards).
- Fast. Boot up times was incredibly fast compared to windows 7. Most programs also started much faster. Photoshop, Adobe Pro, Dreamweaver CS6, full Office - all ran quickly and smoothly.
- Customizable once you find your way around. There is an app to make a "start" menu if you really want it. I just created my own toolbar instead. Ignoring metro I just worked on the desktop.

CONS:
- metro aspects a waste on a PC
- couldn't run Skyrim

Skyrim:
So not sure what the issue is but I suspect it had to do with skyrim being more Dx9 focused then Dx11. Win7 has better Dx9 support then Win8 is my guess based on some web browsing. When I first loaded up skyrim I got an error about a missing DLL file. Searching on it I found it was a Dx one and so I installed the DirectX drivers from MS.

That semi-solved the issue. I was, an hour later, able to run Skyrim VANILLA and ONLY in window mode - which is not very immersive (like watching a movie in a window on your PC versus full screen).

Most mods were okay. However the second I enabled either SKSE or ENB I would get a CTD as soon as I got to the main menu in Skyrim ... which is when they load. Disable them and things would run. I suspect it has to do with the fact that they use DLL files.

Some quick searching gave mixed results - some folks said they had problems with SKSE on win8 and other said it worked fine.

Regardless being in IT for most of my life I knew two things 1) Given enough time, research and fiddling I could probably solve all the problems. 2) The time it would take to do so could be anywhere from a lucky web search and a quick fix to weeks of frustration trying tons of solutions.

I spent 90 minutes (was close to midnight at this point and I had been up for 20 hours) searching and all I found was mixed information. So I said screw it, put win7 in, started setup and went to bed.

So staying on Win7 until I am sick of Skyrim :p Maybe try again this spring, especially if I can find out how to get SKyrim with all its mods, ENB and SKSE aspects working smoothly, and in full screen mode.
 
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Just to say a few words totally unnecessary, but I feel like it. :)
PROS:
- Smoothest install for an OS I ever have done. Not only did everything run out of the box (except skyrim) but it properly found all the drivers for all my hardware - something windows 7 couldn't do and I had to have drivers on disk for. It also found updates for my video and sound drivers that matched. I popped in the DVD, ran set up, selected some options and I was ready to go in about 45 minutes (not counting patches afterwards).
- Fast. Boot up times was incredibly fast compared to windows 7. Most programs also started much faster. Photoshop, Adobe Pro, Dreamweaver CS6, full Office - all ran quickly and smoothly.
- Customizable once you find your way around. There is an app to make a "start" menu if you really want it. I just created my own toolbar instead. Ignoring metro I just worked on the desktop.
- I'm unsure what machine you're talking about, but in my case win7 detected and installed ALL drivers on ALL machines I've encountered so far except a fingerprint device "noone uses" driver for some ASUS motherboard. Solution is (was) simple, buy cheap software called Driver Genius and voila - not only it detects and installs the missing driver, it also installs latest drivers for all devices. Win8 is a new OS, in a few months I bet you'll need Driver Genius on it too as Microsoft's online driver base doesn't contain everything as it's not Microsoft who makes drivers.
- I've said in my previous post that Win8 boots faster than Win7. But I've also said that my next hardware to buy is SSD. Means what? Means I won't care for speed as on SSD even the slowest OS would run fast. It's true that SSD is not cheap currently, but it's still cheaper than upgrading to win8.
- There are thousands of "enable classic start scheme" apps out there. Why is that in PROS? It should be in CONS as instead of putting that as an integrated shell, a customer has to bother with it.

CONS:
- metro aspects a waste on a PC
- couldn't run Skyrim
- Not wasted on all machines, but on machines without touchpad/touchboard or whatever. And those are currently majority, who'd buy an expensive touchboard instead of a cheap keyboard you can smash when frustrated with… With… I know:
- Skyrim. You should find some other software to test OS with. Skyrim should have been named Bugrym and to be honest I've lost all hopes Bethesda will eventually patch it properly. Skyrim definetly does not belong to win8 CONS as Microsoft is not to be blamed for that bug-o-rama game.

Clearly, touchscreens are the future of computing - Star Trek says so. :)
As I've said, the problem is the price. Cheap keyboard you can throw into someone's head or expensive touchpad you need to be careful with, what would you buy?

Star Trek world economy can't be applied to RL yet as it's not like current ours one: "produce as much junk as you can, sell it cheaper than quality stuff and kill quality with quantity".
 
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