Are you going to wait for Windows 9?

[Curt]

You guys are not making it easy for me. Some time ago I purchased a copy of Win 8 Pro, but because of you people I have not tried it yet. I was also telling myself that it would be smart to wait until I also have a new and more powerful machine to match the Pro's 64GB RAM option - but I seem to never quite have the cash!!

Darwin: "I really don't see a difference between 7 and 8 other than the start menu."
tomos: "I'm only using the desktop in Win8"

My first question to tomos is: "the desktop", as opposed to the start menu?

The subject makes me uncertain because the desktop is one thing I never use. But you may of course not be the right person to ask for advice because of your anti-Explorer attitude... hehe...  

Anyway, the more important question:
a few weeks ago an advert from Microsoft said that version 8.1 is more "old-style desktop user friendly". Isn't it?  

[tomos]

Darwin: "I really don't see a difference between 7 and 8 other than the start menu."
tomos: "I'm only using the desktop in Win8"

My first question to tomos is: "the desktop", as opposed to the start menu?

The subject makes me uncertain because the desktop is one thing I never use. But you may of course not be the right person to ask for advice because of your anti-Explorer attitude... hehe...

-Curt (July 24, 2013, 11:50 AM)

Sorry Curt - I need to clarify there:
by "desktop" - I mean the OS as we know it from Win7 (and XP) i.e. working with the OS and avoiding the touch-screen world of "the tiles". It works out slower for me than Win7 and I get annoyed by it, so it's not conducive to work for me.
YMMV!

Re hardware, I've read that Win8 will work better than Win7 on less powerful hardware (I dont know anything about driver for older hardware though).

Re explorer - they've changed it a lot, but yeah, I dont use it so cant really comment :-) (note it's now called File Explorer).

[40hz]

@Curt - I've loaded and run Win8 (before the latest update) on an older Core2 laptop w/4Gb RAM from Dell and it installed without any issues. Ran ok too although I nuked it off the drive without giving it too extensive a workout since it started to annoy me so much.

FWIW I felt a similar annoyance (mostly with myself) when Win95 and Win7 first came out. But I acclimated very quickly to them since they were (IMHO) definite improvements over what came before. Can't say the same for the Win8 experience. I went in with an open mind - and even read some documentation so I wasn't just thrashing around at first like I was with Win 95 and Win7. But even with that I still couldn't get myself to like Win8 or see where it was better than what I was already using.

 YMMV.

[Shades]

I have been trying out Windows Server 2012 for several days now. The changes in workflow and the limitations these changes impose...they are definitely irritating to say the least.

However, there are some changes that do make sense (to me and how I like to do things). Until now, this Server edition of Windows tips the scale into a positive experience. Not by much, but still positive.

The testing I have been doing in a VM (VirtualBox) and it is very responsive. Then again, as I use portable versions of applications within a folder structure that makes sense to me, the OS becomes less and less relevant.

Most if not all of my apps worked straight out of the box and Windows is hardly "nanny-ing" in the folder structure I have setup. This might be reason why my scale has been tipped to the positive side...and I'm surprised, because I really(!!) like my XP machine...

[side-note]
Microsoft touts that they want Windows administrators to use the Windows Server 2012 Core version where possible, managing the Server through PowerShell. This strikes me as an odd thing...because this would implicate that running through a shell is the better way of doing things in server-land, which is what Linux is already doing (very) well for years.

With this strategy...there is (again) a reason less to run a Windows Server. It is for me as I already have been running very reliably the same set of Ubuntu Servers since 2008 (before that CentOS, and that misery I don't wish to worst enemy).
[/side-note]

[Stoic Joker]

I have been trying out Windows Server 2012 for several days now. The changes in workflow and the limitations these changes impose...they are definitely irritating to say the least.

However, there are some changes that do make sense (to me and how I like to do things). Until now, this Server edition of Windows tips the scale into a positive experience. Not by much, but still positive.

-Shades (July 25, 2013, 09:31 PM)

We just spun up a new rack system a few months back which is based on 2 physical servers running Server 2012 datacenter edition. The physical servers run is a separate domain from the 20+ virtual servers that provide company services.

Having spent a good deal of time jumping back and forth between server 03, 08, and 12 .. I gotta say I'm really liking 12. The new server manager finally makes sense by showing a quick at-a-glance view of what is going on. SM in 08 was to me really just a poorly designed uninformative nuisance that got in the way. The 08 SM's incessant whining about there being an error from 6 freaking months ago made its output utterly useless to me. I could either completely clear the logs (Bad...) or deal with the fact that any new information would have to come from somewhere else.

However... Finally... FINALLY in the 12 SM there is a newly beloved option to kindly piss-off about any freaking antiquated errors regarding already resolved (or non) issues that have happened prior to (well...) now. Brilliant...absolutely freaking brilliant option that actually allows the thing to inform me of what is happening now...

The new integrated NIC teaming feature is so idiotically quick & easy to use that it almost makes me giggle.

Natively partition resize/move anything on the fly ... Is so fast and easy its just got to be wrong.


All the old 03 servers are now gone, and the new VM are a 50/50 mixture of 08 R2 and 12. Most of the 08's are only (for upgrade practice) transitional, and will soon be updated to 12.

Personally, I'm totally loving the new 12 servers.

[Shades]

Yep, Server 2008 is not that great. Its decent enough, but the feature set from 2012 makes one want to play with the OS in more ways than I expected.

Having said that, Windows 8 appears to have all the irritations of 2012, without the fun stuff from 2012. I'm still not convinced about that OS (or the direction MS takes with their consumer OS's lately).

The day GPSoft brings out Directory Opus (9 or 10) for Linux, I'll make the jump. 

[Darwin]

I have Windows 8 64-bit running on a five year old Core 2 Duo notebook with 4GB RAM and it is noticeably quicker than Windows 7 on the same hardware. Love it. However, it's not something I would run out and buy to upgrade your Windows 7 machine.

[4wd]

I've got Win8Pro x86 running on my Acer netbook, Atom N270, 1.5GB RAM, 60GB 4200RPM HDD.

Booting from cold: abysmally slow - a lot slower than XP
Booting from hibernate: fast, about 15-20 seconds not counting BIOS startup

Hybrid sleep is disabled, it just flattens the battery.  Boots to Desktop, none of that 'tile' rubbish.

And for some reason the WiFi glitches after a while, needing it to be turned off then back on - something that never happened under XP.

For what I use it for on the netbook, it's fine - but XP would do just as well, take up a lot less space, and run better because I wouldn't need a pagefile, (which I needed to turn on for Win8 to stop it complaining about lack of RAM).

I'll probably reinstall 'nlitened' XP on the netbook since its requirements are a lot less, and maybe give Win8 a go on my Desktop after 8.1 comes out.

[zridling]

And to think, all this fuss and frustration is why I moved to Linux seven years ago. It's fun to read it, but I don't have to live it.

 

[40hz]

And to think, all this fuss and frustration is why I moved to Linux seven years ago. It's fun to read it, but I don't have to live it.

 

-zridling (July 29, 2013, 07:58 AM)

This.

Amen.

[rgdot]

This needs its own thread (split the posts into a thread later?) but since the previous posts talk about the comfort of using Linux...I need some help in fixing laptop wifi.
Previously had Windows 7 but I installed Mint 13 over it earlier in the year. wifi is iffy some of the time and it takes a long to time to connect especially coming out of sleep.
What steps (may be start with iwconfig?) do I need to perform to diagnose and fix?

[superboyac]

And to think, all this fuss and frustration is why I moved to Linux seven years ago. It's fun to read it, but I don't have to live it.

 

-zridling (July 29, 2013, 07:58 AM)

I totally remember that.