Anybody tried Windows 8?

[davej99]

And now for something completely different: http://www.pcgamesn.com/article/why-i-m-uninstalling-windows-8. Anybody here tried Windows 8?

I wonder why you can upgrade for just £25. http://www.techradar.com/news/software/operating-systems/windows-8-uk-upgrade-pricing-confirmed-as-24-99-1093943

[pctech]

I have (as have to be able to support it for work) and I hate it with a passion, just like Vista, I know they want to capture the tablet market but they have really gone back to where they were before Windows 7 which I think will turn out to be another XP in popularity terms.

The £25 upgrade is to keep the demand for new systems up before the launch.

[davej99]

The £25 upgrade is for any machine. A new machine is £10 less.

[zappaDPJ]

I've used it quite a bit but I'm still undecided whether or not I'd want to use it on a PC that I use every day. One thing I would say is that the PCGames article is quite misleading. The author's experience seem somewhat at odds with my impression of the product.

[psp83]

I've got it as a VM & I hate it. Staying with Windows 7 until Windows 9.

The desktop looks like they gave the skinning job to a kid that's just left school & has no experience in UI design.

[Simon]

How do you know Windows 9 will be better? 

[psp83]

Going by the usual windows.. you get a good OS then a bad one that follows.

XP = Good, Vista = cr*p, Win 7 = Good, Win 8 = cr*p

[D-Dan]

I tried it (early preview), hated it, tried it again (current preview), and counted myself lucky that I'm now almost exclusively Linux at home.

[Technical Ben]

How do you know Windows 9 will be better? 

It's that or no more windows. 
They could not pay me £25 to use it. Drop metro, and it's "Windows 7 but better" IMO, but with Metro, it's "Windows 7 with Vista". 

[psp83]

I'm thinking about moving over to a mac but it's going to cost me a lot to buy versions of all my software for mac  biggest one will be adobe!

[davej99]

It turns out if you buy a new machine with Windows 8 the licence permits a downgrade to Windows 7. Sadly if you buy a W8 upgrade for XP or Vista you cannot. So its £83 to upgrade Vista or XP to W7 and £25 to upgrade to W8. See http://www.zdnet.com/how-the-new-windows-8-license-terms-affect-you-7000003028/. It also turns out the Windows Live products we laboured to adopt are scrapped in favour of the cloud.

Seems to me the PC platform is forked; with W8 for finger painters who prefer a designer toy for social networking on one side; and W7 for those who use a computer to do something useful on the other. The Twitface market represents growth and the rest little. I guess pads are doing to PCs what PCs did to mainframes.

The overall market is growing, segmenting and maturing, for example phones, tablets, PCs, workstations, supers, mainframes. Think more of the automotive market than the computer market. Internal combustion and semiconductor technology were the big game changers. The latter is now half a century old; more of a commodity than a technology; more like cola and hamburgers; spawning toys; driven by social networking and finger painters.

The PC segment as we know it will probably tick along. The problem for the user is which operating system; legacy Windows 7, Linux or the hermaphrodite Windows 8?  The problem for MS is will it survive as Apple eats its consumer lunch and open source its enterprise dinner? The problem for me is do I care?

[Technical Ben]

I'm sure someone with give a "dll hack" to change win 8 into a close version of Win 7. 

[pctech]

Stardock have created a free piece of software that restores the start menu http://www.stardock.com/products/start8/ but whether it will work with the retail/RTM code is another matter as MS are supposed to have put code in place to prevent hacks to restore the start menu and to prevent direct boot to desktop.

Quite why it bothers them that much is beyond me, let people choose.