Top positive review
12 people found this helpful
Surprising pleasant to use and for which to develop
By Robert L. Wagner-ODaniel on Reviewed in the United States on October 27, 2012
I have to say, that I when I heard that Microsoft was making a version of Windows to unify devices, I was a bit skeptical. I have since changed my views. I have installed this on a 2nd gen Asus Zenbook (that's non-touchscreen, for those that don't know). It's wonderfully simple to figure out, even with the new Start screen. Let me do my best to describe what I think. Apps: I upgraded from Windows 7 Pro 64-bit to Windows 8 Pro. All my original applications and windows software is still working, including Visual Studio 2010, Eclipse (including Java and Android development kits), pidgin, MySQL, MSSQL, the GIMP, Chrome, Firefox, LibreOffice and Cisco VPN (although, I did need to run a reinstall on the VPN drivers). I have since installed the Netflix and Hulu Plus apps from the Windows Marketplace. I haven't had much of a chance to go through the marketplace for Windows 8 applications, but I can give better reviews on these. The only issue I can find with the apps is how everything scrolls left and right. Very little scrolls up and down. There is the plus that I can search through all of them from a single unified location. Which brings me to my next point: "Charms" screen: Either hovering over one of the corners to the right of the screen, pressing the Windows key (also known as "Super", but I will refer to it from now on as "Win") + C, or on many touchpad enabled devices, swiping the touch pad on the right hand side, will open it. This gives you your basic search, share, start, connected devices list, and settings. I'll tackle each one at a time. The search option seems pretty simple at first. It allows you to search through apps and files. Okay, easy enough. The search also gives one the ability to search through the store and through apps. I can search Netflix for a movie or Hulu Plus for a specific episode of South Park, all from the desktop. This is quite handy for when you don't want to go through the start menu to look for something. The share option is meant to be used from within Metro apps that support the share option. This is meant to be app specific, and everyone will need to figure out whats apps support it and how. I'm sorry I don't have more information. The start button does exactly what you think it does: opens the start screen (which one can do by clicking in the very far, lower left corner of the screen as well). The devices list will list out all USB devices connect to the computer and give you the options to safely remove, just as this list has always done, only from the taskbar. Settings opens up the new Windows Settings tile, which to me is a bit lacking. It's one thing I think they could have expanded a bit more, honestly. For one thing, Control Panel isn't there. To get to the Control Panel. To get any admin options, or to the control panel, one can go into Windows explorer (Win + E) and click "Control Panel" in the ribbon, right-click in the lower-left corner for the list of stuff, you can go into the start screen and start typing "Control Panel", or hit "Win+I" for another settings screen to access the control panel. As a power user, I've found little shortcuts here or there, but for standard users, this change will be a huge pain, if they ever used any of these services. Yes, you read that right in the previous paragraph, there's ANOTHER settings screen, which you can open via "Win+I". This will give you options to choose settings specific to the desktop (Personalization), access the Control Panel, look at your PC configuration, and get quick help. At the bottom, there're icons to change other settings for things like wi-fi, sound, etc (essentially another taskbar location) and access power (restart, shutdown, sleep, etc). There's also an option to go to personalization settings the same as if you went into the "Charms" menu and click "Settings". Now, time to tackle the biggest change in Windows 8: The start screen. Start Screen: This screen is where the Windows 8 specific apps reside. They are laid out as tiles as you install new applications and software. ALL apps and software can be pinned here (currently, I have Chrome, VS 2010, Filezilla, Pidgin, MySQL pinned right next to Netflix and Hulu Plus). It's an interesting mix of old and new in one screen. The most helpful aspect of the Start screen is being able to search without really thinking about it. Want to find something? Simply hit "Win" to open the screen, and start typing the name of the app. I found this to be an easy way to "Add features to Windows 8" without opening the Programs and Features list in the Control Panel. This search also allows for searching within apps, the store, etc. If you don't want to search, and you merely want to look for it yourself, well, this is where things get a bit hairy. You can open the search, and not type anything, and start scrolling through the apps. It's side scrolling, as with anything else in the start screen, and to me, it's a mess. Microsoft tried to sort everything into the same start folders as they were before, but everything is tossed up as icons. Imagine going through an iPad or Android apps list with 100 things installed, because it's ALL THERE. I have yet to find a way to sort this, but if I find a way, I will update this review. Let's just say, you're not going to want to find things yourself in this way. Now, onto the one thing I've found that makes development a bit easier. Say you're making a Windows 8 application. You're in the desktop with Visual Studio open. You build it, and run it, and have it open. Great, so what? It looks fine in desktop, how will it look on a phone? Well, you can "Pin" them into areas on the left and right, and it will then show you the thinner, tall version of a phone's interface. RIDICULOUSLY helpful for finding phone interface flaws (although, I keep doing it more with my desktop, but I'm sure I'll get use to it). This also give you the ability to test out different sizes and "resolutions". This can be helpful to the user, as well, for multi-tasking a Windows 8 Metro/Modern (whatever it's called now) app alongside the desktop. Running something in Metro/Modern that you want to see while typing something on the desktop? Pin the app to an area and keep it open. Finally, onto some of the oddities I've found in my short time with it. I've already mentioned a few things (like the kludge of the start screen if you're manually searching for something). Esc doesn't always take you out of an app. to switch from app to app, you have to hover in one of the left corners, then swipe through to see all running apps (Metro or desktop). This is also the only place you can CLOSE these apps. You can always use Alt+F4, but there's no easy "Close" button. You have to hover over the icon in this left screen, right-click, and close. Alt+F4 has become my best friend. Alt+Tab still works like you'd expect to switch from software to software, so at least there's that. Also, the only place you can "Shut down" is from the settings menu (Win+I), it's no longer in the start screen. That only allows one to log off, or lock the computer. It's a minor annoyance, but one I can see coming up with some users. All-in-all, I give this OS upgrade a 5. Sure, there's some minor niggles, but for the most part, it's a great, unifying UI that gives people and developers to take mobile and traditional apps wherever they go. I give it my full approval.
Top critical review
18 people found this helpful
It's OK. No compelling reason to upgrade to it at this point except to get the special pricing
By Rueg on Reviewed in the United States on November 6, 2012
I have been running Windows 8 for 1-week now. I upgraded to Windows 8 on two PCs. One was a three year old PC running Windows 7 and the other was a six year old PC running Windows XP. The three year old PC upgrade went smoothly - I did the online digital download. Only took around 30 minutes to download. It was easy - everything was saved and I didn't have to reload any apps or drivers. I ran the assistant and upgraded/fixed as many things as I could before the upgrade. The Windows XP machine is one that I gave to my mother. I first did the digital download and that went fine until I realized it did not upgrade to the 64-bit version of Windows 8. It took nearly 5 hours to download the upgrade! I was running the 32-bit version of XP on this machine. I contacted online chat a couple of times to discuss the issue. You cannot upgrade from Windows XP 32-bit to Windows 8 64-bit though the digital online download. What a crock of crap! The upgrade assistant looks at what you have and follows in its footsteps - if you have the 32-bit version of an operating system it will install the 32-bit version of Windows 8. If you have the 64-bit version of an operating system it will install the 64-bit version of Windows 8. This made me very unhappy - that it didn't give me the choice or inform me of this fact. The hardware on this machine is capable of running a 64-bit operating system and since the machine is getting old I want to squeeze out as much performance as possible. The online chat with support told me I needed to buy the DVDs in order to upgrade the way I wanted to. So, after spending $39.99 + tax on the digital download version I now had to spend around $70 for the upgrade DVDs - and this was after any promotional offers ended. Ugh! I checked with support and they said I could re-use the product key from the digital download on another machine. And luckily I still have one more machine to upgrade at some point, so not out any money. It sounded like I could have gotten a refund if I wanted one. I imagine they probably didn't give you a chance to select 32-bit or 64-bit when doing the digital download upgrade because they didn't want people upgrading to 64-bit if their hardware was not capable of supporting a 64-bit operating system. I can believe people would select this without really understanding what they needed as far as hardware to run the 64-bit version. I am not sure what would happen in this situation - if the Windows update would stop you or if it would install and then have problems. So, I had to do the upgrade again after I received the DVDs from Amazon. Glad I didn't have to do a 5 hour download again. The DVDs are nice for that. However, if you look online there is a way to download the online digital download and burn it to a DVD to use it for installs. The directions were quite extensive and I didn't feel like dealing with that so I bought these DVDs from Amazon and with prime shipping had them quickly. For getting to the 64-bit version - support didn't initially tell me and I couldn't find it documented anywhere - but what you have to do is go into the BIOS and change the boot order of the machine so the CD/DVD drive is the first item in the boot order, stick your Windows 8 upgrade DVD in the drive and reboot and then boot from the DVD. So, had to re-install Windows 8 again, re-install the apps and drivers and then everything was rocking at 64-bit. It doesn't seem sluggish or any slower than when XP was on it (it has a dual AMD Athlon X2 processor in it). I have built several machines and am used to doing this type of thing. I used to re-install the operating system on a regular basis to clean things up. But for others if they are doing this for the first time I can imagine it might be more difficult to understand what you need to do. It would have been better (and cheaper) if Microsoft somehow could give you the option through the online digital download to upgrade to the 64-bit version of Windows 8 - for those still on a 32-bit OS and have capable hardware. I find this poor customer service on Microsoft's behalf. Major issue #1 - IE would not work on the machine that was upgraded from Windows XP. I would click on it on the desktop and it would do nothing - act like it was going to open since the hard drive would click away a second or two - but then nothing would happen. From the new start menu it did the same thing except the screen would go blue as if it was going to open, but then would close. It was really annoying because I couldn't go online to try to find a resolution or contact online support - and I couldn't find a support phone number included with the DVDs to call. Went home and looked online but didn't find anything useful. Did get a phone number and called support, but they had just closed by the time I called since they are in a different time zone. I am on Central Time, so support here ends at 6 PM I think. So, I did a `refresh' which brought the system back to as if Windows 8 was just installed. Then I turned restore/recovery on. I installed the apps one at a time creating restore points. I never ran into the issue again. I think something may have been corrupted while installing apps. It did work after initially installing just Windows 8 - so it makes sense that an app corrupted something? Not sure. Major issue #2 - couldn't find a driver that would work for the video card on the XP machine. Since the install wiped out all drivers and apps I had to reload everything. Apparently the video card was too old and does not have Windows 8 (or Windows 7) drivers for it. It is an ATI Radeon X1300 Pro card - a very nice card (128-bits). It would still be fine if it had recent drivers for it. Really this is an AMD/ATI issue support issue. However, since I initially used the download assistant - it would have been nice to have been forewarned that the video card was not supported under Windows 8. Guess the download assistant isn't capable of analyzing hardware. Everything display-wise worked fine except for solitaire - very slow and jerky and my mom likes to play it. So, now I have to buy a new video card. Granted because it is my mom's machine and she is not a gamer I can get away with a 64-bit inexpensive video card. I had to verify before purchase that the new card actually has Windows 8 drivers for it. This machine is a Dell and the power supply in it isn't very powerful (305 watts), so very limited to the video cards I can use. The video card (from Amazon) should arrive soon and this should resolve this issue. The new UI is a lot to get used to at first, but it isn't too bad. The tiles are kind of cool - wish they would have included shutdown and restart tiles automatically instead of having to create these manually on each machine. It is much easier to use a tile to do these actions than having to go into settings, then power and then selecting the action. It will take some time to get used to the UI and finding things in new locations and in different ways. I spend most of my time in the desktop anyways which is like being in Windows 7 except no Start menu - which I am fine with. I don't mind having to go to the new tiled start menu to occasionally find/get at something. Here are some things I have noticed on my machine - a 3-year old PC running a quad core I7 processor, 9 gigs of ram and a GeForce 460 GTX video card: Starting up doesn't seem any quicker. Sure, you may get to the Start screen sooner, but if you click on anything from there it is really slow because the machine is still booting up. Startup times seem the same as when under Windows 7. Shutdowns take a lot longer - and I don't understand that. I thought that was supposed to be faster under Windows 8. So far, shut downs have been much longer than with Windows 7. So slow that I walk away from the machine and come back later to verify it turned off. There have been a couple of times where Windows 8 just starts opening over and over the last thing you clicked on - very annoying. Hopefully this bug gets fixed. For example - I click on Microsoft Outlook once and it opens dozens of Outlook windows. Very strange and annoying to sit and watch all these windows opening by themselves. Well, that's my experience so far after 1-week of using Windows 8. Knowing what I know now about Windows 8 - I would not have upgraded right now. The $39.99 special price goes until the end of January 2013. I may have waited until sometime in January to upgrade to just get the special pricing before it ends. Otherwise I see no compelling reason to upgrade to Windows 8. End of support for XP is currently scheduled for April 8th, 2014. So, it would be good to get off of XP before then. Windows 7 was a great OS - the OS we always should have had. XP was good too. Vista was not very good. I even liked ME. Windows 8? Meh. If you are on Windows 7 I don't see a compelling reason to upgrade to Windows 8 at this point except to get the special pricing. 11/7/12 - I was looking thru what the upgrade assistant had said was compatible and what needed to be reviewed (I printed it off)- and it said the Radeon X1300 WAS compatible. So, the upgrade assistant failed and got this wrong. So, you can't trust it 100%.
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