OT: Windows 8

[David Lang]

Got the new laptop which came with Windows 8.

Avoid this like the black death. It was clearly designed by a retarded gerbil and is virtually unusable.

[Andy Burns]

Spend £3.25 on Start8, 30 day evaluation available ...

[Simon263]

It's very usable once you get used to it.

[The Natural Philosopher]

spend 0p on Linux Mint and erase the MsMalware immediately

[John Rumm]

I seem to recall mentioning something about that last time ;-)

However, it can be "trained" into something that is almost as usable as Win 7.

Start by going here:

download and install that. You will be somewhere closer to sanity.

[John Rumm]

On a small screen laptop with a touch screen - perhaps. On a desktop with mouse and KB it needs work.

[Simon263]

It works fine with a mouse and keyboard when you get used to it and just type the name of what you want into the text box. That has worked fine ever since 7 too.

[Michael Chare]

Works fine with Classic Shell, starts and runs better than Windows 7. Probably worth upgrading to 8.1 I almost never see the Metro GUI.

[Lobster]

On 28 May 2015, David Lang grunted:

I've bought two laptops in the past few months, and went out of my way to buy second-hand, specifically to get Windows 7 (though IIRC somebody here mentioning recently there are still places flogging new Win 7 machines)

[Mark]

Agreed. Win 8.1 seems generally quicker than Win 7 and is usuable with Classic Shell.

[Andy Burns]

Definitely, as 8.0 (Microsoft don't call it that, but whatever) is unsupported from January 2016.

[David Lang]

By which time it will have been upgraded :-)

[Brian-Gaff]

Well underneath is Windows 7, you just need to hack away the gerbil designed front end I understand. Brian

[Brian-Gaff]

Classic shell works, but is not totally good for blind users. Brian

[Simon263]

Sure, but 10 isn't that different.

[Brian-Gaff]

Yes like a leg amputation. Brian

[T i m]

I have installed Classic Shell on quite a few W8 machines now and whilst it is much easier for people already familiar with earlier versions of Windows (or most desktop OS's for that matter) it still didn't seem to remove all the other stuff that pops up when you do something stupid like move the mouse into a corner, near an edge or too fast? (That or I've not configured it fully).

I installed Classic Shell on a laptop for someone the other day and the report coming back via our daughter is that they say it's now 'more sensitive'. By that it seems the stuff that they don't want popping up (from the OS), now seems to pop up more easily / often (it probably doesn't, they just don't have all the other junk running in the background slowing everything down). ;-)

So, is there a(n easy) way of turning *all* those sorts of things off and really having it work like W7?

Cheers, T i m

[John Rumm]

Spread over a couple of 24" monitors a trip to the "start screen" is like a voyage into toy town. Once the entire "metro" interface is banished it becomes a little more realistic IMHO. The charms bar also works badly on multi screen setups.

Forcing the metro / modern apps to run full screen also renders them useless. (if the reduced functionality alone did not do that)

Still if you like it, go for it, it just does not work for me.

[Mike Tomlinson]

En el artículo , Simon263 escribió:

Oh, look, another Wodney morph for the killfile.

[John Rumm]

They have put much more work into making it work sensibly in a traditional desktop environment from what I have seen so far.