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What the Heck is Happening to Windows? Article on Windows 8 Disaster

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wraith808:
The whole *world* would be happier.  Especially because that would mean MS was changing.  But...

40hz:
^ ...that is sooooo NOT gonna happen....

zenzai:
I'm quite happy with Win 8.1, have it on 3 desktop machines now. The only thing I don't like is UAC which IMO is even worse than in Win 7 so I've turned it off completely (unlike in Win 7 this must be done via registry otherwise it won't be completely disabled).

oblivion:
I've read this with some interest.

My main home desktop machine is an aging Vista box. I have used it to dip a toe in the Windows 8 water, by setting it up to dual boot to 64-bit 8.1.

My initial reaction was: I hated the Metro interface. Get me to the desktop, Jeeves, and make sure I never leave it again.

(It was worse than that. I have a Wacom graphics tablet that I use all the time as a mouse replacement. Under Vista, that's completely okay. Under Windows 7, once you've disabled flicks and all the other allegedly helpful things Windows does when it sees you wanting to use a stylus, that's okay too. Under Windows 8, some of the behaviours you don't want are really hard to get rid of. Some of them won't go at all. The right-click is really laggy, the left-click unresponsive and sometimes fails entirely. Yuck. I have tried to put up with it.)

The best solution to the loss of the start menu (Classic Start Menu) is pretty good.

However... I decided, after a week or three, that I wanted to see just why Metro was worth potentially alienating tracts of previously happy Windows users. So I set it back to the default screen.

The news app -- quite likeable once you get into the idea of horizontal scrolling -- tries hard to be useful and configurable and attractive. But I have to say, that's about it, on the apps front. I've dragged, stretched, moved, deleted, added and personalised and it still doesn't feel like MY working space. (That's because it's not? Well, quite.)

And at some point recently, something has gone terribly wrong. Now, all the apps do is load to a wash of colour then open the desktop. And apparently the only way to fix it is a full Windows reinstall. (Will I bother? Good question.)

You know what? It's only advantage is better security. (And I'm generally okay taking responsibility for that stuff anyway.) That aside, I actually don't think it's better than Vista. (But don't get me wrong: 7 knocks Vista into a cocked hat.)

I thought the fact that Vista occasionally just stops for a think -- CPU not maxed, no serious disk activity, nothing obvious going on apart maybe from the fact that you're trying to move all 60k of my documents\bilgepumpdiagram47.doc to my documents\bilge\2014\diagrams\ -- was one of the many known problems that Vista suffers from. If so, they fixed it in 7 and threw out the fix in 8.

Like many, I shall probably wait for 9 rather than fully migrate my desktop PC to 8.

IainB:
Well, I have just upgraded from an HP laptop with Win7-64 to a Toshiba laptop with Win8.
I have to say I don't like the UI.
The system keeps urging me to upgrade to Win8.1 for free, but when I click the Download/Install button, the thing sits for ages trying to download an umpteen GB update file, then hangs at 50% with Error code: 0x80240031. This is consistently repeatable. A search of forums indicates that this is a common problem, with no defined fix/workaround.
The built-in Toshiba utilities updater has just downloaded a Toshiba utilities update which claims to prepare the Win8 OS for update to Win8.1.
We shall see.

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