Anyone trying out Windows 8?

[teraflame]

Its pretty neat but I can't do some of the cooler stuff that was in the keynote. Also I wish I could just click and drag to scroll in metro rather than be forced to use scrollbar or pg up/pg down.

[Findecanor]

There are some older programs for Unix/Linux (long before Gnome and KDE) that let you use the middle mouse button to click and drag. The action creates a vector, and the length of the vector determines how fast to scroll.
I have always found this to be a much better way to scroll than to use a pesky scroll wheel.

Several web browsers implement a variation of this, but you have to click to get in and click to get out of scrolling mode, which makes it less useful.
Many other programs have grab-and-drag but that is the reverse of what I am thinking of.

[arplod]

What do you mean page up and down?

Oh... you mean you aren't using it on a tablet, which is one of the key points of this preview in terms of readying developers? :tongue1:

Working fine here on my Lenovo's - most of the drivers installed just fine - although the pinching is a bit weird, and there are some issues with touch sensitivity. But this is probably the early state of the OS and not the drivers.

I have serious issues with the Explorer though... the blog alluded to 'not touch, but can be used with touch' and this is so not the right approach. It either needs to be fully touch-friendly or not, or adopt some other completely different paradigm in terms of shielding you from the file system. As it stands, the OS provides no clue about that. So while it's surprisingly complete for a mere preview, I have to say that this throws up more questions than it answers about Windows 8.

[EverythingIBM]

EDIT:
read it as windows 98 instead of 8.

My goodness... that's what happens when you use 98 in 2011 still.

[teraflame]

Oh... you mean you aren't using it on a tablet, which is one of the key points of this preview in terms of readying developers? :tongue1:

actually using it on a tablet PC but without a touchscreen. Glorious pen input doesn't act like a finger unfortunately.

[IvanIvanovich]

I gave it a test out. It's still too rough to be of much interest to me. Since I'm not a developer I'll wait for a later build / rc that is more complete and polished before I pass judgement. I do like some of the new features, but am not sure about the metro interface on the desktop. I can see what they are trying to do with it, but it doesn't really grab me.

[Hydroid]

I downloaded the ISO, but haven't bothered to install it yet. From what I've seen in other people's videos is that I love this on tablets and am likely to go back on my previous opinion that I never want a tablet. But I'm still not sure about it on a desktop, hopefully they polish it a bit more to cater to those of us who like the good old windows experience. I'm all about now innovation, but to me the metro UI breaks your experience on a desktop by breaking you out of your desktop and going to something full screen. I have dual monitors because I want more space to be able to see everything of mine at once, which means I have a lot of medium/small windows everywhere and I despise fullscreen things aside from games. So the though of having my full 24" screen covered every time I just want to hit start would annoy me. It works on the small screen of a tablet, but not for my daily workhorse when I am trying to multitask. And also the way how everthing is hidden in a side menu that needs a gesture to bring up. When you can't just move your mouse and click to exit a program or change your volume or access something in the system tray, but have to swipe in from an edge to get a pop-out that then shows the options you want, just seems inefficient to me. Looks pretty, but not very practical.

[Chobopants]

Have they solved blue screening yet? My Windows 7 box blue screens like a mofo in fits and spurts. Seriously considering a reformat which is disgusting since the computer is less than a year old and I've literally installed nothing on it except Steam games and Starcraft 2.

Using OS X as my primary computer for the past 5 years has spoiled me. Outside of kernel panics caused by my installing a goofy kext once I've never had OS X fully crash, and worst case I can ssh to it and manually restart the window manager. <3 *nix.

[itlnstln]

It's about time they got rid of that garbage BSOD and add something a little more "pleasant" when your PC takes a dump.

[Daniel Beaver]

I tried it out for they day yesterday on my spare laptop. It's snappy, and it seems like a good tablet interface. As a desktop OS, it is atrocious. It makes a mistake even worse than forcing a new interface on you: it forces you to switch between interfaces constantly. I am sort of in disbelief that they are actually going to go through with it.

[NamelessPFG]

actually using it on a tablet PC but without a touchscreen. Glorious pen input doesn't act like a finger unfortunately.

That's not a good sign. My HP 2730p has no finger touch input whatsoever, and I wasn't willing to pay hundreds more for a model that did.

At least it's said that you can disable the Metro bits entirely and just use the classic Windows interface. That might be bearable.

[arplod]

Have they solved blue screening yet? My Windows 7 box blue screens like a mofo in fits and spurts. Seriously considering a reformat which is disgusting since the computer is less than a year old and I've literally installed nothing on it except Steam games and Starcraft 2.

Using OS X as my primary computer for the past 5 years has spoiled me. Outside of kernel panics caused by my installing a goofy kext once I've never had OS X fully crash, and worst case I can ssh to it and manually restart the window manager. <3 *nix.

Just because you can't build a PC worth a damn doesn't mean you need to blame the BSOD's on Windows.

Windows 7 on decent hardware is more stable than OS X on any Mac. Heck, it's even halfway acceptably stable (read: almost as stable as the native OS) on a Mac.

[EverythingIBM]

It's about time they got rid of that garbage BSOD and add something a little more "pleasant" when your PC takes a dump.

I thought the frivolous italian horse loved BSODs?
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[Chobopants]

Just because you can't build a PC worth a damn doesn't mean you need to blame the BSOD's on Windows.

Windows 7 on decent hardware is more stable than OS X on any Mac. Heck, it's even halfway acceptably stable (read: almost as stable as the native OS) on a Mac.

Oh man. Learn who the hell you're talking to kid before you speak up. This makes me laugh out loud.

I was a professional custom server (and home PC) builder for two years as my first job out of college. I've literally built HUNDREDS of high grade machines that are mostly still in production today, the majority of them running Server 2003 when I delivered them.

I've built whole arrays of intel blade server racks that power the back ends of uptime critical businesses. I've been building my own PCs for almost 20 years. What have you done?

I know my BSODs are likely being caused by a faulty/overheating video card but I'm still annoyed that I have to install three different admin tools and then backdoor the built in permissions just to access the minidump to figure out what went wrong. I know wtf I'm doing.

I was half joking to be honest but if you want to start with personal attacks I'm ready for you. Peace kid.

[arplod]

Oh man. Learn who the hell you're talking to kid before you speak up. This makes me laugh out loud.

I was a professional custom server (and home PC) builder for two years as my first job out of college. I've literally built HUNDREDS of high grade machines that are mostly still in production today, the majority of them running Server 2003 when I delivered them.

In which case, you should know better.

/argument

[Chobopants]

In which case, you should know better.

/argument

Should know better? I figured it out last night, actually, and was up until 2:30am fixing it. nVidia drivers released from Feb 2011-Sep 2011 have an nvkrnl.sys exception on 64-bit versions of Vista/Win7 on 480 GTX cards. The only solution is OLDER drivers or the very latest beta drivers. I ram memtests and Furmark burn-ins overnight to verify that this fixed it.

Please tell me how that is a good computing experience? nVidia releases bad drivers that cause random BSODs around 10% of the time. I should have spent my night playing Deus Ex or Starcraft 2, instead I was scouring forums and minidumps trying to find my issue. I build a solid ****ing computer that was brought to its knees by nVidia's driver writers.

You know how I found the solution? Googling **** on my MacBook, that just works. I don't know **** about Darwin internals (though I'm quite well versed in BSD/Linux kernels) and I've been using Macs for ~5 years now.

I know TONS of crap about making Windows PCs work that I really don't want to know and shouldn't need to know. I don't need some eighteen year old kid on the internet telling me about building PCs because his Alienware wank machine hasn't crashed recently.

Driver issues like this have been a core problem with PCs since day one because of the generic architecture possibilities. I used to spend hours upon hours reconfiguring HIMEM.sys, config.sys, and autoexec.bat as a young kid just to get the video games I wanted to play to run because Bill Gates was so shortsighted about 640k of memory.

When I was 10 years old I thought the tinkering was novel and fun, now it cuts into the little free time I have and it really is starting to grate on me, this is something that should, at the least, be minimized by now. I'm now doing the same **** I was doing 20 years ago and there are no signs that it's changing.

Piss off, scrub. Go be immature on OCN or Hardforum or wherever it is that little wanks like you get off belittling people who know way more than they do about something.

[Mitchellderp]

Successful troll is...

[Chobopants]

Successful troll is...

The nice thing about GH is it's small enough that pure trolls don't last particularly long. There's a reason I rarely interact with strangers on the internet and GH is one of those places. This kid will either smarten up or peace out, either way I don't mind refuting his garbage.

[Daniel Beaver]

Now that that's resolved, onward Windows Eight Hate Machine!

Chugga chugga chugga chugga....

[arplod]

The nice thing about GH is it's small enough that pure trolls don't last particularly long.

No they don't.

In my position, I don't really need to wave rather pathetic e-peens around the place, especially when the guy I'm talking to has basically sold himself out already. Engaging in what the Land Of Topre may term as "Itachi No Saigoppe" (or in more normal English, needlessly convoluted and angry explanations to defend the indefensible) won't gain you any more respect.

And yes indeed, on to the Win8 hate machine.

I think actually the main problem with the preview is that there is definitely something off with touch, or maybe it's certain applications. Perhaps it was coded only to work well on the Samsung tablet? But I get frequent subtle misregistrations of touch, especially gestures. For a developer preview where the main focus really is learning to develop for touch in Windows 8, this element does kind of worry me a bit.

Apart from that, it really is too early to tell from a user's perspective and I do also wonder if Microsoft made the right decision to make it publicly downloadable / wrapped in a full installer in that it does kind of resemble a beta in terms of how easy it is to get on your PC, while clearly not even being alpha in actual function. I can almost predict some moron complaining that he can't migrate his data over to a beta in six months time.

[Chobopants]

I like that, i'll need to remember that some time.

I'm on board with your comments though for the most part.  The problem is though, that Microsoft isn't writing everything themselves, which leaves these holes for crap drivers to expose.  WHQL or bleeding edge, that's the trade off.  really, what this means to us is that if you plan on installing drivers that  haven't been rubber stamped from Microsoft, you run the risk of BSOD.  If you buy questionable hardware, you run the risk of BSOD.  But really, if you buy decent hardware and run qualified drivers, Windows7 will BSOD about as often (based on user base) about as often as you'll get a sad mac on your desktop.

Yeah, sadly in this case I bought a 100% legit card (eVGA 480 GTX, not overclocked) and built a really clean basic machine just to play a couple games on, only used the latest WHQL drivers. The BSODs started out of nowhere after ~10 months of the computer running perfectly, most likely failing memory on the video card.

I know it's not 100% Microsoft's fault, it's the nature of the beast. I've had failing Mac hardware too, nature of the manufacturing beast. Just wish they made it a little easier to diagnose

That's why I'm so incensed. I make ZERO mistakes in building this computer, BSODs likely caused by failing hardware (it happens, kids), and this random forum troll wants to start **** about it? rofl.

Anyway: Win8 -

Touch interfaces just don't translate well to Mouse/Keyboard. OS X is ****ing this up as well with Lion by putting iPad interfaces into OS X. I actually find most of the interface changes of Lion a distinct downgrade from Snow Leopard and have chosen not to upgrade. Luckily you can turn these options off in Win8 but, as we all know, defaults win out in the end.

[Daniel Beaver]

I think actually the main problem with the preview is that there is definitely something off with touch, or maybe it's certain applications.

That doesn't bode well. One of the great things about the iPad/iTouch is the incredibly responsive touch, something not shared by a lot of Android/WM devices. They have to get that right.

[arplod]

That doesn't bode well. One of the great things about the iPad/iTouch is the incredibly responsive touch, something not shared by a lot of Android/WM devices. They have to get that right.

Windows Phone gets it at least as good as iOS, and there's ample evidence that they're faster on the release-to-release uptake curve than Apple now, so I don't think that's going to be a problem at release. My issue is solely its validity as a developer preview since these guys have to get a feel for the look & feel. Out of curiosity I'd like to get hold of one of those Samsung tablets to find out if it's just a hardware / driver mismatch on the Lenovo. My developers and I haven't talked about it (one went to Build, so he has one of those things) yet in any real detail but it's something we do have to discuss - I nixed Android to concentrate on iOS and Windows Phone+Windows 8.

What they've tried to do in terms of bridging the classic OS / Metro interface differences when you're on a touch device is a fast-acting 'retroactive aim circle' to confirm that you touched the right area - which is actually a good idea certainly (and is implemented to variable levels of effectiveness on lots of other current Windows 7 tablets) for non-touch-specific elements of the UI, but certainly I have big questions as to how much of the rest of the OS will be touch-friendly because no matter if you have the assistance of the aim circle, for too many controls outside the Metro home screen you have to consciously aim for something - and that is not touch friendly. The new classic Explorer definitely isn't for example, whatever they might say about the Ribbon UI making buttons bigger.

[Hydroid]

I just installed Windows 8 today. Ragequit and uninstalled after 30 minutes. I cannot live with that metro interface on my desktop. I still want to get it in a tablet, but I really didn't like it on the desktop. IDK if it is just me, but none of the gestures worked, and can someone tell me how you are supposed to close programs without going into the task manager every time? I had to shutdown via the cmd. If they don't rework some stuff there before release I'm not buying it. That experience was so bad I wouldn't even miss anything by switching to Macs.

[arplod]

I just installed Windows 8 today. Ragequit and uninstalled after 30 minutes. I cannot live with that metro interface on my desktop. I still want to get it in a tablet, but I really didn't like it on the desktop. IDK if it is just me, but none of the gestures worked, and can someone tell me how you are supposed to close programs without going into the task manager every time? I had to shutdown via the cmd. If they don't rework some stuff there before release I'm not buying it. That experience was so bad I wouldn't even miss anything by switching to Macs.

Is everyone hard of thinking? This is a developer preview.

I guess what I asked before about whether it was a wise move for them to publicly release the OS in a format easily installed by anyone is actually a genuine point of concern.

[Hydroid]

Yeah, I am fully aware this is a developer preview, but for crying out loud. If they are going to do a public release of it then make damn sure the basics work so people can run programs and try using it for a while without getting frustrated. I played around with Windows 7 before release too and there wasn't really anything fundamentally broken with the general use of the OS and so you still could test it out and try using it for a couple of days and see how you felt. When I click on IE only to have it blow up full screen on me which I hate, and then not be able to find the exit button anywhere for the life of me despite trying swipes, drags, modifer + clicks/drags or anything like that and having to resort to CTRL+ALT+DEL to be able to shut down my program...? The whole experience of being forced out of your desktop when you want to run anything aside from basic explorer is a huge PITA and is more of a gimmick IMHO.

[arplod]

Yeah, I am fully aware this is a developer preview, but for crying out loud. If they are going to do a public release of it then make damn sure the basics work so people can run programs and try using it for a while without getting frustrated. I played around with Windows 7 before release too and there wasn't really anything fundamentally broken with the general use of the OS and so you still could test it out and try using it for a couple of days and see how you felt. When I click on IE only to have it blow up full screen on me which I hate, and then not be able to find the exit button anywhere for the life of me despite trying swipes, drags, modifer + clicks/drags or anything like that and having to resort to CTRL+ALT+DEL to be able to shut down my program...? The whole experience of being forced out of your desktop when you want to run anything aside from basic explorer is a huge PITA and is more of a gimmick IMHO.

Once again, hard of thinking?

The Windows 7 release was A PUBLIC BETA.

[peda]

Actually to not being able to shut down a program is called a feature in win8.

I read somewhere (forgot where) that programs are sent to sleep without taking up system resources.
But nevertheless i agree with you that a user should be able to shut down a program easily!

Overall i have to say (without having it tried out) that i dont like the merge of mobile/tablet/desktop UI into one.  It seems that it will be a tradeoff from everything.

[Hydroid]

I still don't get your point. I'm saying they need to make sure basics work regardless of what official name you want to place on the release. It'd be like letting people test drive cars without seats and saying, it's fine because this is halfway through manufacture. There is no point in having a public release for people to try things out if the basics aren't there.

@peda - then it would be nice to atleast have a way to minimize the program or switch to another one. I became frustrated having to hit the windows key to bring up metro so that I could click on the icon for another program that was open so I could bring it to the foreground or clicking the desktop icon to bring up the desktop with the taskbar that more often than not didn't even show all the stuff I had open.