Blogs A Week With Windows 8

But with that in mind is the desktop not a tablet interface? Icons basically the same size as a tile, arranged in rows and columns on the screen, which you click to run a program?

Admittedly when I first used W8, I thought a fantastic idea would be for them to have the desktop with Icons that could be scrolled across the screen like on the Start Menu, now I'm glad I have both as it removes clutter from my desktop.

 

I should if got an copy of windows 8 pro my self, but I did not want to give ms any money for an os I am likely going to have to tweak

my main issue with windows 8, is hidden stuff ,I am doing this post on mobile so it take some time to post silly things

WiFi been one, you cant remove networks unless they are in range (unless you use cmd commands to do it)

and how to remove an email account been under the add email page (there should be an manage button)

and updates that are 200-300mb is size (total updates are like 1gb or more from an fresh install bonkers)

there are other issues as well (most of them covered by this blog post)

also video divers are little flaky at the moment if you have 3 monitor setup (nvidia surrounded view was more an hack that hooked onto Aero, but that is gone so games run poorly) as to of my friends have had to go back to windows 7 so they could play games again at full speed

generally I do install startisback (I norm buy the 5 user one), I did use start8 but drag and drop and some other actions did not work correctly and your only allowed to use it on one pc where as startisback allows more for less price

there are good points as well, boot up times are faster if you still use an hdd(you not notice it if you have an SSD) programs seem to open faster

but the thing is windows 7 works does not require tweaking so I see no reason to use it on my main pc

 

Agreed on the wifi, I have no idea what MS was thinking when they did that - unless there's away to do it which no-one has found, hopefully will be fixed.

Mail can remove an account within itself, bring up the right hand side menu (charm bar?) hit settings accounts click the account remove is at the bottom. Unless its the PC account, then well I don't know how you do it tbh.

I don't recall my updates being that big, but then I'm not checking them all to see.

 

The PC account can be changed or deleted in the User settings.

 

Found something slightly odd about 8 on my netbook install.
Several programs most notably IE, Chrome and Firefox won't run in Metro mode due to low screen resolution but run fine in desktop mode without changing resolution.
WTF?
Ok so Metro is meant to be high resolution, but the screen is at it's max res and does not change between Metro and Desktop, so you'd think if it does not work in one mode it shouldn't work in the other.
Not really an issue, just seems odd.

 

I believe that was done in an attempt to force manufacturers to use higher res screens in their tablets to compete with Apple. They did the same with WP7 and WP8, with high minimum specs and it's resulted in a slick Windows Phone experience on all devices.

I believe the minimum screen res is being reduced with W8.1, so you shouldn't have an issue then.

 

It's a non issue really as my dislike 8 has pushed me into dual booting linux on my netbook, I just wanted to see what it was like on a low power machine and discovered it did that., I guess they weren't thinking about netbooks, not that they have any reason to.

 

The minimum res is to be lowered in the blue update I believe. Although you will have to google that to confirm it.

 

Yes, I was referring to the Start screen which has garish colours and large touch-friendly icons compared with the desktop. The desktop icons are not exactly touch-friendly nor do they need to be since we use a mouse in that part of Windows.

 

I used Win8 for a half hour and it was the most hilarious first impression of an OS I ever had. The stupidity of it on a non-touch laptop was just beyond ridiculous. With Steam on Linux and bluray support slowly getting there, I won't be getting another Windows OS after Win7

 

Anyone saying Windows 8 has no new desktop features over Windows 7 clearly needs to do some research.

1. As dullonien already mentioned, signing in with your Microsoft account means that a number of settings are automatically backed up to the cloud (including your desktop theme). This goes a bit further though and syncs them across PCs as well, and includes your IE history, favourites and stored logins too (and yes, I use IE over Chrome for a few reasons. It has definitely come some way since IE8).
2. File History. Easiest explanation for this is Apple's Time Machine. You now have journalled snapshots of your files to an external or network drive of your choice (if you run Server 2012, you can set the location for this in group policy)
3. Storage Spaces. Create a pool of drives, without the RAID controller requirement. You can also include external drives in the pool. There are resiliency options (2-way mirror, 3-way mirror or parity), and with support for thin provisioning the pool can be grown just by adding new disks (eg. thin-provision for 5PB with only 9TB of actual space to start with, and just grow the pool as you need more space by adding another disk). What's more, you can move the pool to another Windows 8 or Server 2012 machine and it will be picked up
4. Improved Multi-monitor support. For those of you running more than one monitor, you can now have the taskbar on each monitor so that you no longer need to keep moving your cursor back to the "main" monitor to select another application (although that option is still there). It can also be set so the taskbar on a monitor shows only the applications whose windows are in that monitor too. There's more options for your desktop background, from panorama images across all, to selecting individual images for each monitor
5. Proper UEFI support. UEFI motherboards are becoming more prevalent, and Windows 8 has proper support for it. You can reboot from Windows 8 directly into the UEFI firmware, if you have an SSD it will boot insanely quick (partly because you no longer have the old bios bogging down the POST process), and the boot drive can be GPT as well (for those who have only one disk which is also >3TB)
6. Generally runs better. I said above part of the quick boot times is from UEFI+SSD, but the other is that Windows 8 generally boots quicker, runs smoother and has a smaller footprint than Windows 7 and even XP. I say generally because it won't be true for all hardware configurations, but this is the experience most find.
7. Mount .iso and .vhd files directly from Windows Explorer (now called File Explorer). Don't think I have to do much explaining on this one
8. Desktop UI improvements. I'm mainly thinking of File Explorer and Task Manager here. Not everyone will like the ribbon in File Explorer, but there's many context-specific things it makes more accessible than the right-click menu does (including some things you would usually need to go into properties for, like disk defrag and cleanup). It also gives you hotkeys for a lot of functions that didn't have them before. As for Task Manager, you can now have heatmaps for resources your processes are using (the darker the square, the more CPU, Memory, Disk or Bandwidth that process is using), and the Performance tab has been revamped to give you more detail
9. Hyper-V. This is only available in Win 8 Pro, but you now have a full Hyper-V server running there as well (no more Virtual PC!). I know a lot of people will prefer VMware, but Hyper-V is catching up and has quite decent support for other guest operating systems.

These are just the ones I can come up with off the top of my head, and are probably the major ones. Do a little research (even just read the wiki page) and you'll likely discover more. When Microsoft were developing Windows 8 they definitely didn't have only touch screens in mind, but everyone gets so worked up about the Start Screen that they miss all these other great features and improvements

 

If you didn't use "express settings" or whatever it was called during the initial oobe setup, you would have been able to skip entering a hotmail account.

Also if you push the power button on any computer since vista, especially big oem branded computers, the default is sleep. Even the default "power" button on the start menu puts it to sleep. You have to change the options in the Power Options control panel to get an actual "shut down" button or to get it to turn off from the power button being pressed.