Windows H8 - On Physical Hardware

[Stoic Joker]

So I finally got a spare 8 seconds with which to try and collect my whits. Which is when it occured to me that we have had a batch of HP TouchSmart PC sitting in the corner of my office for months that I'd completely forgotten about.

So... De-box One HP Pavilion (310-1124F) TouchSmart PC - It's an All-In-One with a touch screen that will tip back ~45deg. Flattened it, and install Windows 8 DP x64 on it.

AMD Athlon II X2 240e (2.80GHz) Processor.
4GB Ram
And a 22" Touch Screen.
HDD was/is large enough, there, and mechanical (SATA) ... I don't feel like walking over there again to check the size.

Setup was basically just like Win7 for the most part, and then went into a first boot/OOBE wizard that was actually kind of nice. Logon with live ID or local account, and an accept all defaults an get on with it option. So you don't have to troll through the whole stupid wizard (this I like).

From off to login screen was 23 seconds. Which to be honest was actually 20 seconds + 3 more seconds for me to figure out what the hell was happening with the you gotta swipe up to view the logon.

Logon to desktop was another (about) 10 seconds.

Navigation of Metro was ... Agonizing. Mainly because I kept wanting to close things when I was done with them ... And you can't do that.

The Metro/IE10 UI makes perfect sense on my phone ...(kinda)... and is mind blowingly annoying on a desktop. I hate full screen anything. Put it in a window where it belongs so I can monitor other things running on my desktop at the same time.

Task manager is a bit totally friggin weird, but I kinda like it. ...Mainly because it was the only thing on the desktop that I recognized.

[Ath]

Thanks for sharing this, SJ

The Metro/IE10 UI makes perfect sense on my phone ...(kinda)... and is mind blowingly annoying on a desktop.

-Stoic Joker (October 27, 2011, 11:39 AM)

That's what I read in about 95% of all reviews so far and ppl talking about it, so let's hope for MS to hear the complaints.

[Stoic Joker]

Two side notes:
1. The drive in the test machine is 1TB, so there is plenty of room for testing whatever if I can leave it on the bench long enough.

2. Once I figured out how the screen flick thing worked as the half inch black border was not a sufficient dead give away...(I'm not much of a tables user)... It does flip from screen to screen in a reasonably instantaneous fashion. Sales manager had half a dozen (of the in-box) games running on it at once and it still zipped along just fine on the old-ish TouchSmart.


Also they really need to get the Search Programs and Files feature back like imediately! I had to do Win+R to get to notepad ... Which of course sucks beyond words.

[f0dder]

Sales manager had half a dozen (of the in-box) games running on it at once and it still zipped along just fine on the old-ish TouchSmart.

-Stoic Joker (October 27, 2011, 05:12 PM)

AFAIK, Metro apps are suspended when you switch to another app.

[Stoic Joker]

Sales manager had half a dozen (of the in-box) games running on it at once and it still zipped along just fine on the old-ish TouchSmart.

-Stoic Joker (October 27, 2011, 05:12 PM)

AFAIK, Metro apps are suspended when you switch to another app.

-f0dder (October 27, 2011, 05:43 PM)

True, but on older hardware - which this is - you'd still expect it to lag a bit when flipping through them as they're being activated and suspended. Yet it didn't bog, drag, or hesitate in the least as I spun through them...Which was a rather pleasant surprise.