The Glade 4.0

A coworker of mine bought a Windows 8 laptop and cannot use it to remote log in to our systems and has had nothing but weird problems with it (can't use a hardwired LAN, settings resetting themselves, etc) so I was going to suggest he wipe it and buy a copy of Windows 7 to load onto it. Has anyone here tried it before?

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As long as drivers are available, from mfgr's site? Sure.

I can't imagine that any manufacturers have stopped supporting Win7 yet, but always good to check. Trying to find drivers if they're not published on the OEM's site is a PITA sometimes.

I don't recall Windows 8 requiring a new driver model over 7. That said, has the world forgotten the following axiom:

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I warned him up front Khross but he wouldn't listen.

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Tablets are teh futuer!

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

I think they are, but I wouldn't run a laptop on Droid anymore than I would run one on Windows 8.

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Windows 8 is way better than 7...

...as soon as you stop using the "Start Screen" and replace the start button using http://www.classicshell.net/

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

So I need a third-party add-on for Windows 8 to make it appealing.

That's failure.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Shame that a graphical annoyance is worth disregarding all the improvements Windows 8 brings over 7.

Yes.

And, as Lenas says, it's a shame, because from a technical perspective, 8 is much improved over 7. It's more stable, better performing, smaller footprint... and yet, it lacks a **** start button.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Not for long..
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2036094/ ... s-say.html

The shame is that people think they need a start button.

A GUI based on user preference? How dare they?

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I tried using the start screen.

It's far less efficient.

I also don't like the new "start button" they're adding, because all it does is invoke the start screen. One of many problems with the start screen is it completely takes over the screen. The classic start button is better for multitasking.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Gonna go out on a limb here and suggest that you're probably a heavy mouse-user.

I hit the Win key on my keyboard and type the name of the app I want to launch, then hit [Enter].
The handful of apps I launch every day, sometimes several times in a day, I pin to my taskbar to make them quicker & easier to get to.
Functionally, it works in Win8 exactly the way it does in Win7.

Initially, I thought I'd never get used to not having a Start button.
I got over it. Pretty quickly.

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Go back to zero, take a pill, and get well ~ Lemmy Kilmister

I don't touch the keyboard if I don't have to. (Despite typing rather quickly.)

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Well, you're not very efficient at using a computer then. Funny that you're talking about what's "better" when that's not really what you're interested in.

Yeah, yeah. You don't strike me as the type that'd prefer going back to a CLI for basic computer tasks, either.

The mouse is by far the simplest way to use a PC. The keyboard is fine for when you're really focusing, but it's very inefficient for regular use. You eventually have to take your hand off the keyboard to use the mouse, or drink your coffee, or push buttons on the phone, and that brings you to a standstill, whereas if you were only using the mouse to start with, it's not even a speedbump. The keyboard is also horrible for window management (When working I tend to have 20-30 open at a time that I'm constantly switching between)...instead of directly and instantly selecting the one you want from a taskbar, you are cycling through them all to find the one you want. Then try to line up your windows on your screens the way you want them without the keyboard. Resizing and dragging is a ***** with a keyboard, and is pretty much instant with a mouse.

The same is true for the much-vaunted CLI. I make heavy use of CLIs, but seriously, anyone who thinks its faster to type out a full path (that you never have memorized, anyway, because you deal dozens of them in a day and never the same one twice) rather than navigating through the GUI is nuts. Hell, even if I do know the path, C:\Users\{Username}\appdata\local\{application}\{data} takes longer to type, even at my 80 wpm, than the 7 double-clicks it takes to get there (between 2 and 3 seconds at 2-3 double-clicks a second).

_________________
Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Speaking as a programmer in a large company, I open commonly-used network folders by keyboard alone several times a day. Win+R, start typing, arrow down to the path I want as soon as it's visible in the auto-complete list.

Also, I often navigate the folder GUI by keyboard. Start typing the name of the next folder in the path and focus jumps to that folder. Hit [Enter] to dive in, start typing the name of the next folder ...

I'm not knocking the usefulness of the mouse, although it makes me weep to see our SCOM Administrator trying to perform daily tasks with nothing but left- and right-clicks. I'm not an exclusive keyboarder, either. I'm just saying that the keyboard is a lot more efficient than most people give it credit for; and you've got two peripherals, why limit yourself to only using one?

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Go back to zero, take a pill, and get well ~ Lemmy Kilmister

I typically am operating with 20-40 applications a day, some of which I'm only passingly familiar with, that using the mouse is really a necessity. If you're only using 5-10 programs a day, i can see how memorizing commands would be useful. However, some of the programs I have to use (Lotus notes for example) don't even follow Windows conventions for keyboard commands. Some of the programs I'm forced to use are 20+ years old, and the keyboard commands aren't even remotely close to existing programs. As the number of web-based application interfaces increases as well, the keyboard shortcuts fall even further from use.

Beyond that, so much of my work is handled through remote tools (remote desktop, dameware, sccm, Tivoli RC, and a couple of other proprietary tools, many of which don't pass keyboard shortcuts)
Even if I did remember the various shortcuts, I couldn't use them.

Based on this, you don't need any sort of start menu at all, just a text search launcher like Launchy: http://www.launchy.net/index.php. I tried to use Win8 for several months, and I found like many are saying, the "Start Screen" is just totally unnecessary on a non-touch screen PC. I can understand it on phone, tablet, even a PC (like a kitchen PC for recipes that is screen only), but it makes no sense as a PC primary user interface, designed for multitasking. I immediately jumped to the desktop mode, and would never see the start screen again. Metro apps are absolutely useless for multitasking. As well, it's absolutely distracting when you're deep in a task, and think "Oh, I need to launch this app to do such and such", hit the win key, and BAM your focus has to completely shift from the existing windows to a brand new full screen interface. For some reason, it really bothered me that it took away my entire focus from my task at hand, much more offensive than the old start menu overlay. I'm not opposed to entirely new UI's for the conventional PC, but it's painfully obvious they designed this as the "OS of the future", to be on tablets/phones/touch screen PC's and completely ignored the standard PC.

Regarding the business side (where all the money in the PC market is made,) I would never, EVER recommend this for my standard users. Two versions of Internet explorer? With two different sets of settings, two different plugin configurations? Oh, you're having a problem in IE? Which version? Install chrome, you get two different versions with two different settings hives as well? Yeah, that's supportable. If I could lock the users out of metro entirely, and just give them Win8 "the desktop operating system", then maybe. As it stands, it's an unsupportable nightmare.

The majority of my casual computer usage is done as a consumer of media. i.e. clicking on browser shortcuts, using netflix/slingbox, etc.. and doing it with a pointing device. I've tried every manner of pointing devices to replace the mouse, but I still find myself going back to using it. Using a keyboard shortcut to search for and play a movie in Netflix in chrome is not easier than clicking with a mouse.

I'm still using a PC to do this because it's still the best platform to access my slingbox. When an appliance (i.e. Roku, game console, etc...) makes this possible to do with a remote, I will likely retire the PC I'm currently using for this purpose. Until then this PC is almost exclusively primarily a mouse controlled device. I have very little use for the keyboard, other than to occasionally access a URI that is not in my shortcuts, or input a username/password. Then I begrudgingly reach for my keyboard.

Do you guys use the dvorak layout for your keyboard? If Windows 8 came with dvorak as the default keyboard layout and you had to install third party add-ons to enable qwerty, would that be an acceptable UI decision on their part?

A good UI isn't about what's most efficient or what works best for the ideal user. It's about making an interface that is intuitive and meets the expectations of the actual people who are going to use it. If Microsoft wants to move people over to using a keyboard to navigate their operating system because it's more efficient, it's their job to implement that in a way that encourages users to use their keyboard more often while still being intuitive and not breaking the average user's expectations.

Anyone who has watched an average computer user attempt to navigate Windows 8 for the first time should know that the interface is far from intuitive. It's downright confusing. That's bad UI design, there's no excuse. The countless complaints online about it reflect that. Their sales numbers reflect that. The failure is Microsoft's, not the users.

If you can't see that, then I hope you're not using the QWERTY layout for your keyboard. Because if you are, then you obviously do not care about efficiency and therefore relinquish all rights to complain about the inefficiency of using a mouse.

Windows 8 Metro UI is actually excellent in a Tablet or Touchsceen environment.

For me it just fails as a desktop user interface for work and personal computer use where a keyboard and mouse are still the most practical and efficient way to get things done.

Metro just gets in the way of getting to the things you really want to do and see.

Whether you use a mouse to see/do things, or your keyboard, unless you are actually using the tiles on the Metro screen, the tiles being there is kind of pointless.

Exactly what Midgen said, and Amanar's analogy to arbitrarily switching native keyboard layout support is a good one to shape the conversation, too.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades