I went to help an elderly partially sighted lady with her new computer.My first real experience of Windows 8.
I thought I was good with computers but I felt like I'd never used one before and left wanting to firebomb the nearest Microsoft office!
It's like someone taking a car and swapping the pedals round, putting the ignition key in the rear wing and the steering wheel in the glove box. Is Windows 8 an improvement for some? I'd like to know who they are!!
Partially sighted? You need to the opposite configuration to most folks then.
Make sure she never gets to the desktop.... Do everything via metro apps.
(tablet may have been a better choice)
People whose first experience with a computer was a tablet.
I'm just getting to grips with an Android machine. I'm not* enjoying the experience
Similar to the feeling I get when trying to install MS Office 2013...
brings back some semblance of sanity
Hmmm. I hate it, but feel it works OK for users without complex needs: the Start screen kind of works. hate trying to set it up though, nearly threw it across the room.
I started with that shell, but then went back. We now have three laptops on 8.1, plus two windows phones (7.1 and 8). I have android tablets (Samsung and Nexus). On the laptops, I use the desktop for "normal" work but use the "apps" by touch quite a lot.
I agree that the learning curve is a bit steep, but I can now see where MS is coming from. I *almost* got a non-touch laptop as my new "work" machine, but now I am very glad I went for touch. It's surprising how useful it is, especially when mobile, once you get used to it.
I'm still getting frustrated with the new-look of office 2010 though as I am using both that and 2003.
8.1 is, in my view, considerably more acceptable.
I still find it incredibly annoying that you end up with, for example, two versions of Internet Explorer. That simply causes confusion.
I am quite impressed that the whole installation process is pretty slick. Shame that the updates (e.g. from 8 to 8.1) involve such huge downloads - 3.6 or 3.8 GB, from memory. Fine if you have a very fast internet connection, impossible if yours is slow.
I bought a Win8 laptop last summer, but somehow hadn't turned it on for months... A couple of days ago I did, applied all the pending windows updates, then installed W8.1, which appears to have arrived with the subsequent 'update 1' included. My first few uses were really exasperating, but once I got some useful shortcuts onto the desktop, and now with the very basic 'start menu' (if you right-click the desktop's start button) I'm much less put-off by it.
For me, coming from XP, I'm more worried about getting to grips with UAC which I certainly do not intend to turn off, and getting the scripts etc which run on my other machines (all XP Pro or Home) adapted to work on the the new machine.
I chose to get W8, even with all the negative publicity, because I'm willing to believe that the user interface issues can be worked around, but I want the underlying OS changes, going from XP -> W8, eg changes in the way that memory is managed to make process/memory isolation better... (I've a degree in computing & spent much of my working life maintaining a mainframe OS, so OS (rather than GUI) stuff matters to me.)
I can't stand "File Explorer" though and am thinking seriously about installing one of the various Explorer replacement tools, probably "xplorer2". As it is countless scripts I run issue commands to Windows Explorer and if they can be changed to issue commands to a more versatile equivalent, so much the better. It seems to me that if I have to learn a new way of operating a machine, I may as well learn xplorer2 rather than FE.
I get what they are trying to do, I just can't see why they are trying to do it with windows[1]. Touch is of no benefit whatsoever on my 3520 x
1200 desktop, and if someone touches my screens and gets finger prints on them I will break the fingers!For a tablet, sure the new UI is fine - although the classic desktop is of limited use. Its only the very limited small multi use machines that can morph between tablet and ultra portable laptop where it actually makes any sense.
I can cope with that better since I was never particularly into office in any version... my main difficulty is putting up with the water pistol that is Word having got used to the GPMG that was WP5.1 ;-)
[1] Had they had brought out three discrete products (or perhaps version), say "Windows Tiles" or "WinTab" that just had the new UI as a platform for Arm and x86 tablets, and then say WinTab Ultimate that is what we currently call Win 8, plus finally Win 8 Pre/Pro that was just a classic desktop Win 8 with the internal and architectural enhancements and a classic desktop, I can't help felling they would have had much better acceptance.Exactly. I've got a copy, but after talking to others its still in its box. Apparently the very latest incarnation now detects if you do not have a touch screen and puts the windows 7 type interface up if this is the case. In other words, they are admitting they were wrong to try to make it a tonka toy touch screen system in the first place. Horses for courses comes to mind and not one size fits all as it was at the start. Everyone told them this of course during development, but obviously some person there wasarrogant enough to think they knew better. Me? Day to day work is still on xp, as it works, and I'm using 7 for other stuff, and may clone one to put 8.xx on over that later on to just see if its fixed. I think one other thing might help many partially sighted folk, there are now third party shells available to make it look and feel like earlier windows did. classic Shell is one of these. Be careful though if the person is ever going to need a proper screenreader, as although looks are the same, there is no garantee that a third party will impliment UAC otr Msaa accessability for the menus etc. It may then not speak correctly. Brian
No don't do everything through metro apps. Do the reverse and just increase the font size and show her how the magnifier works. The snag with metro is that they are often purely touch and also many commercial packages with screenreaders cannot work with them well.
They are really aimed at sighted folk. As I said its idiosyncratic in the extreme to have giant tonka tiles and then present the user with fiddly touch apps. Brian
I often think people who design interfaces have forgotten the old adage. If its not broken, then don't fix it. By all means add a new front end as an option for touch systems, but leave the rest alone.
Brian
Yes, Office 2003 is now over its support life, but both it and the earlier Office XP are far easier to use than the ones from 2007 onward are. The ribbon approach sounded like a a good idea until you actually had to use it. Such is life and i suppose those who never knew the old menus and toolbars have no problems, but I do and will probably go down the Open Office route on any new machine. Brian
Ah, but then it's hard to justify an upgrade.
As it happens, I prefer the ribbon. Perhaps because I only got seriously into Office when 2007 came out.
For anyone who isn't interested in computers, the Chromebook *sounds* like a no brainer.
Not impossible, just give it time. I went from 8 to 8.1 on my laptop one afternoon on a ship off the coast of Norway.
I downloaded my 8.1 upgrade over 4G, much faster than my home ADSL connection, for some odd reason Tesco gave me 11GB during my 3G->4G changeover month.
On 18 Apr 2014, "Brian Gaff" grunted:
Well as the not-so-proud of two XP machines currently sitting redundant while I work out my next step (yeah I know, bit late) that sounds slightly better news I suppose. I'm just so seriously pissed off that M$ can get away with scrapping XP like this which is the only reason I need to ditch two machines which are perfectly adequate for my (family) needs (which cannot include Linux). But the part that's really sent me into orbit is that I have a kosher, paid-for copy of Office 2010 on one of these PCs, but it has a one-time license only that means I can't even move it to another machine. Unbelievable.
Anyone know an easy way of disabling all internet access from an XP machine, while retaining LAN capability? That might be one short-term fix for me.
I rather agree.
I find one of the problems is switching between touch and non-touch devices. I can easily remember that my Android phone is touch and my laptop (W7) is non-touch. But when you regularly switch between Windows
8 in various guises, for example, phone (my work phone), MS Surface (work "laptop"), numerous laptops and desktops, some with and some without touch, I get caught all the flaming time.
Remove the cable connecting the router to the phone socket?
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