(no subject)

[camwyn]

Went to Best Buy the other day after my REI camping class. I was interested in looking at laptops, but they only had Windows 8 models; when the salesman asked what I disliked about Win 8, I told him that if I wanted AOL as of 1996 I'd build a time machine, that I didn't particularly like the 'oh, you don't need a start button' attitude when the start button was possibly the smartest thing Microsoft had ever put in Windows, that I didn't like the weirdness of having to shuffle from one interface to the other when I wasn't planning on buying a touchscreen, and that if they had a copy of Windows 7 on the shelf I'd buy a laptop and that and blow the hard drive away and install the older OS. He apologetically told me he understood and that they used to have Win 7 on the shelves, but that Microsoft recently 'cleaned them out'. I told him I'd wait and see how Service Pack 1 made Win 8 before buying anything and wished him a better day.

On the way home I took my sweatshirt off. I'd dressed in a base layer, a T-shirt, and a sweatshirt for the class, as well as a base layer and a pair of trousers from REI. The T-shirt got me a startled look and a call of "Hey, wrong city!" from a guy I passed on my bike.

I had to laugh. It was the t-shirt they gave me for my Climb to the Top fundraising, and it said I [insert graphical rendition of a flight of stairs here) NY. I'd've explained to him, but I was on a bike going one way and he was pushing a stroller the other way.

Comments

[kyrielle]

I just got a new laptop with Windows 8 and was *seriously* grouchy about the Start Bar. And thank you for the laugh re comparison to AOL!

Today, foxipher on Twitter pointed me at the solution: a beast called Start8 at http://stardock.com/products/start8/

Yes, it's a commercial product. It costs all of $5 (and has a 30-day trial, but I paid in less than 12 hours). And I have a start menu back, and can turn the new Windows 8 features on/off as I prefer, keeping what I like and tossing the rest.

Having to skin back on a start menu is *dumb*. But...if you end up having to go Win8 or wanting longer support...well. It does the job, nice and clean. Including being able to add all the standard old menus/options (recent documents, etc.) or not as you prefer.

[camwyn]

Ooh. That does sound promising. I may wind up going with that, since the alternative is ordering a business laptop from Dell (there's quite a few Windows 7 machines in their business section yet) and working from there. Samsung and Asus have already put utilities onto their Windows 8 machines to restore a Start button, but this thing sounds like it has an awful lot of really good features...

(Congratulations, Microsoft. how does it feel to know that your ass-tacular OS did more to kill the PC market than the iPad ever could have? seriously, the business magazines are all reporting that the major reason PC sales are down is because people hate Win8 that much.)

[jothra]

There's a free program called Classic Shell that also grafts Windows 7 capabilities like the Start button onto Windows 8.

[ymfaery]

(Congratulations, Microsoft. how does it feel to know that your ass-tacular OS did more to kill the PC market than the iPad ever could have? seriously, the business magazines are all reporting that the major reason PC sales are down is because people hate Win8 that much.)

..okay, that's pretty hilarious. =Db

Local computer guy who builds computers mentioned the other day he gets people buying customized desktops with Windows 7 just to avoid 8. :)

[laudre]

The Windows 8 everything-must-be-tablet-friendly fungus even spread to Chrome in an update that got pushed about three weeks ago, but that only seems to have affected the Windows version. Specifically, they changed the menus: the spacing between items increased by a factor of two or three, and the background color was changed to match the text boxes in whatever theme you're using. Working hypothesis is that the change was to make it touch-interface-friendly. Fortunately, people quickly discovered that if you invoke Chrome with the runtime option --disable-new-menu-style, sanity would be restored.

Also, Windows 8 shows that MS really never did get why their own efforts at promoting the tablet form factor never got any traction. A mouse-and-keyboard desktop UI is a poor choice touchscreen tablet interface, and a UI designed around touchscreens and tablets from the ground up is an equally poor choice for a mouse-and-keyboard desktop.

I'm sure some UI blue-sky-type research engineers at Microsoft are (and have been) hard at work making a Kinect-ish peripheral as a primary input device for an office-ish computer (rather than a media console that also has other input peripherals), a la Minority Report or what-have-you, but they're probably working off the idea of fitting it to a Windows 7-style desktop or Windows 8-style tablet UI. Inevitably, someone else will come up with a ground-up UI that'll make the whole thing work in a way that'll feel intuitive with only a slight learning curve (just like the iOS UI).

[minkhollow]

My personal theory of what happened with Windows 8: They made what is probably a great tablet interface and put it on laptops and desktops, where it... isn't so great actually.

Granted, I haven't used Win8, but that's my guess from all the break-dancing tablet commercials.

[camwyn]

My Asus Transformer tablet has the equivalent of a start button for when I want to call up all my possible apps at once. It runs on Android. I do not understand why Microsoft thought that this was a bad idea when it works really well on tablets what the hell.

[minkhollow]

Well, after as popular as 7 was, I guess 8 was just doomed to the Microsoft Development Curse? I mean, it seems lately that every other system is great and every other system is horrible (look at how long people held onto XP).