it should take no more than 72 hours, but one of my email addresses hasn't received one after 2 requests, my other email address works fine
I was trying to find out whether the Win 8 Preview i got would work, in the small print at the bottom it says it would "To install Windows 8 Pro, customers must be running Windows XP SP3, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8 Consumer Preview, or Windows 8 Release Preview." If i decide to get it to save time i might see if i do a clean install of 8 pro and activate it with my preview code. I remember back in the day i had a Win 98 upgrade disc and when i did a clean install it made me put in the Win 95 disc to make sure i had a genuine copy.
Having issues with the media center product key. Tried a few different emails now and just says something like cannot process your request please contact microsoft .
I've got 2 since I got annoyed waiting for the 1st to arrive and used another email address, check your PMs.
i've just ordered it, its downloading now. I will see if i can burn a copy to disc without the need to order a backup disc
I finally received media centre keys to 3 email addresses all at the same time. Must have been a back log. I've installed windows 8 on my laptop and I'm impressed. Yes it takes getting used to, but I actually like it. Not totally convinced its worth an update but for £25 to be on the latest OS kinda makes sense. The only thing I don't like is where the shutdown button is. Does anyone have tips to make the 8 experience even better?
Yeah: Ex7 for W8, or the more superficial (but still effective) GUI mods, Classic Shell and Skip Metro Suite. The latter are just mods that readd a start menu and other bits of the Vista/7 shell and skip the lock screen, login screen and Metro Start so you boot straight to the classic desktop. The former is a community hack that forces the Windows 7 explorer.exe back into Windows 8, so it's literally the Windows 7 shell in every regard and looks exactly like W7 - but with all the improvements of Windows 8. Speaking of which, It's a really, really well-optimized version of the code Vista and 7 were built on. I don't read dev logs or anything, but from using it I can say that it's damned quick. Boot times and interface responsiveness are much improved. Unfortunately, the interface is a giant pile of terrible design decisions and illogical thinking, so unless you're going to mod it, it's a step backwards in productivity and ease of use. (It's not even really up for debate. Anyone who says they're more productive and can get more work done in vanilla Windows 8 GUI than they could in that of Windows 7 is deluded: most of the ordinary tasks you perform whilst using a computer take two to three times more keystrokes/clicks in Windows 8.) I'm torn over whether to buy a promotional license, because I don't want to encourage them and support this terribly designed front-end with my money - but I do want to benefit from the optimized code.
I have to disagree with this. I got used to Windows 8, and I have to say, I don't want to go back with the Start Menu anymore. It find it limiting. With Windows 8 Start Screen I can start my games directly. I can get to any folder I want, project, DropBox or Skydrive, or Downloads, etc, and not have folders that I don't need. I can also pin control panel panel items for quick access to them, and most used programs. Everything is organized in a way from the most and easy access to the bottom left to the least where I have to scroll to get it. Also the large tiles makes it a breeze to use on a laptop touchpad, where it's difficult to get any sort of accuracy, even on a MacBoko Pro. So, big tiles is a big yes. You should try doing such layout. Here is mine for inspiration: http://www.helpweaver.com/dss.png Moreover with Metro apps, it clears your desktop of gadgets, and are MUCH more useful and nice looking I think it is a debate, as I think people that say how bad it is, simply don't know how to use it. There is a learning curve to pass through. It reminds me a friend who is a console gamer. He likes FPS games on console. When he uses mouse and keyboard, he hates it as it finds it he loses control. Heck even at my place, with a normal office mouse and no crazy sensitivity.. he can use my mouse just fine, but when it comes to FPS, he flies all over the place as he is not used to the small movements form the input control and how fast the games go. It's much slower on console. It won't go away. The Start Menu will not come back. The code was deleted from Windows.
I should've clarified, it's full of terrible design choices if you're using a desktop PC with a keyboard and mouse. I do know my way around W8, and after much fiddling I could get it into a condition where it was perfectly useable, but that's not the concern. My concern is that, to less talented and more everyday computer users, the obtuse, unobvious, bizarre design choices and lack of guidance or consistency will be a real problem. If you're a techie, it's easy enough to acclimatise yourself and get it into a shape where you can use it, but it involves huge amounts of customization and messing about, where Windows 7 was fairly transparent (no pun) and self-explanatory out of the box.
I don't know about this. As a hobbie I suggest computers to people and if they request custom build them. I recently (just two weeks ago) I suggest a Dell computer to a person, that person comes from Vista and isn't tech savy at all. He doesn't know keyboard shortcuts. I gave him Windows 8. Explain the Start Screen concept (that its a start menu but full screen, and opens when you start your computer.. that is all), and he recently asked me of some help to transfer data from his old computer to new one. When I arrived, to my surprised he has a full customized start screen, with even Documents, Downloads and Computer folder pined. He says that he discovered he could move the tiles like icons on his iPhone, and that he look up on the internet on how to add stuff, and did it. He already tells me how much he likes Windows 8.
Well for me, I like it. It reminds me of an apple product, as in you don't need any instructions to be able to do all the everyday tasks, it's just intuitive. I need to change my default program associations though as its a pain photos opening in the metro app thing. I'm that impressed that I have installed my desktop license too (thanks snow!) only took 3 hours to back odd bits up, install, update and be finished. Boot times are epic with an SSD too.
That's interesting, and promising, I suppose. We've had the opposite reaction from many of our customers, but the key difference would be that they're mostly older people who are very used to using Windows XP or 7 for light work and home purposes. They're all fairly computer illiterate and have at some point in the past been set up by an ambitious child or grandchild with the sort of point-to-point algorithmic instructions that allow them to do precisely what they want but which make it difficult for them to learn or adapt at all. By contrast, my younger cousin was immediately drawn to Windows 8's interface, and now wants a copy. Perhaps it's generational; the unusual breaks of convention in Windows 8 probably don't seem like such drastic breaks for people now growing up on Android and iOS. Thinking about it, previous versions of Windows have their own arbitrary conventions too - the fact that shortcuts on the desktop don't equate to actual programs (and deleting them doesn't uninstall them), the folder structure and the actual location of the Desktop and other user folders on the hard drive, the fact that most items in the interface can be right-clicked to bring up context menus, via which they can usually be customized. They're just arbitrary conventions that I'm more used to and no longer notice. I suppose switching from one set of idiosyncracies to another is reasonable given the other benefits of Windows 8 - performance, visual appeal (once properly customized - your desktop does look pretty sexy), compatibility. I was just disappointed that Microsoft didn't take this opportunity to fix the presence of idiosyncratic GUI features altogether, as they've failed to do before. I'll try to explain what I mean by idiosyncracies with some examples. To access the All Apps menu, you have to right-click the blank space around the tiles in Metro, which is a prerequisite of finding all your installed programs and pinning things to the Metro Start. In Android systems, this is just a single button, usually an arrow or Apps logo; right-clicking the background space isn't intuitive or obvious, and it took me ages to find it. On touch screens it's somewhat more obvious - you drag up from the bottom to bring up that menu. But still, why not just have the All Apps button always present somewhere in the bottom of the screen? The space isn't used for anything else, and it's clearly going to be regularly needed as programs are added and moved about. There's the left-hand pane, too, through which you close running programs. This is the opposite problem: with a mouse, it's easy, you just mouse to the top-left corner, then down, and it brings up a list of your installed programs. On a touch screen, the gesture to bring this pane out is so unintuitive and obscure that I never got the hang of it (I only had access to a touchscreen W8 PC for about two hours, it wasn't mine). Having this bar always present, or having it appear along the bottom of the screen like the old taskbar, would have been more obvious, as - again - the space isn't being used for anything else. With it autohiding, you forget it's there and forget what programs you have open. I found myself constantly making the gesture to reopen it just to remind myself what else I had open. The new Metro Start has the benefit of being able to pin your frequently used programs to it, like the W7 taskbar, but unlike the W7 taskbar it doesn't give you any information about which of those programs are already running or how many windows/tabs you have open in them. A third example, a pretty obvious problem which Nielsen describes: you can't have multiple windows open at once, side-by-side. You can't resize, stagger or arrange them around your screen, which I've always found invaluable: I know it's an ungodly mess, but it's also the quickest way to access all this information. I don't always need to access so much different material at once, but when I do, it's nice to be able to throw it all over the screen at once. When I imagine how long it would take to access this information on Windows 8 - and how little of it I could leave on my screen to be seen at a glance - it feels like a step backwards. Lastly, the dual interface itself. It's the heart and soul of Windows 8, but I just see it as cumbersome. If there's an app that I prefer to use for a particular file type - the music or reader apps, for instance - opening one of those files will throw me into the Metro environment. If I want to easily close a number of things (since the left-hand pane is a slow and clunky way to do it) I might launch the task manager, which is hugely improved and does the job very quickly. But that drops me back to the Desktop environment. It seems like a small thing, but that constant switching between the two depending on what kind of task you're performing is really disorientating - more so because the distinction between what goes on in each, between Programs and Apps, is quite arbitrary. If I want to tab between my browser and a PDF that's open in the Reader app, I have to juggle the two environments, which is headache-inducing. And there's no communication between them - nothing in the Desktop environment quickly informs you what Apps are running, and nothing in the Metro environment tells you what Programs are running. Even basic system components like the User Accounts settings are divided arbitrarily between the two, with some account management tasks being performed via the classic control panel and some via the Metro user settings section. These are all things which, for me, overshadow the benefits of W8 - and really, I do see the benefits. The task manager, copy dialogues and various other bits and pieces are greatly improved, and the core performance is fantastic. The Metro Start and All Apps inferfaces, if they were all there was, would be useable. But the entire system is spliced between two environments, each of which operates in entirely different ways, which doubles the number of arbitrary methodologies and tricks you have to remember.
Except that isn't true. 1) you can click right click anywhere, even on an tile - All apps is there all the time. 2) you can press Windows+Q to bring up Search, by default it is the Apps search, with no filter. 3) you can click on Search icon in charms bar, it is the same as option 2. 4) right click on bottom left screen corner, select Search. Same as 2 and 3. You mean the "swipe a half centimeter from the left side, then back" move, which is super easy ? Horizontal screen space is not used for anything else ? Huh ? Because it is irrelevant. If the resources are needed, application will be closed automatically. Not sure about you, i see all my running Metro apps in the Alt+Tab list.
Man, what is wrong with Bit-Tech? Why can nobody respond in a constructive and polite manner and without sounding like you've insulted their family honour? This is why I stopped frequenting this place. You guys are constantly highly strung and itching for a good, aggressive argument.
Which of my responses were "unpolite" or "not constructive" ? I pointed out errors in your argumentation. Which of my responses are not true ? Should i provide screenshots and videos ?
