JorgeA

Charlotte, What a fantastic rundown!! For those who haven't made their way through all of the links, here's one of the best comments in the MSDN blog: --JorgeA P.S. Are those really the taskbar icons MS is proposing for Office programs? OMG. Wonder if I'd still be able to squish the Taskbar so that I could get word labels instead of hieroglyphics...

Yeah, it's not 100% clear what he means by that. I took it to mean that he had believed that ALL of these sorts of solutions (the Task Manager + script approach, the Start8 approach) were intended by MS to go the way of the dodo. If expert folks manage to bring Aero Glass back, along with the other current elements of the Desktop, Win8 will be a somewhat tolerable experience (for me). I had a brief comment on this over in the Deeper Impressions thread. Not only is it an abomination, but they keep narrowing users' scope for customization, at least via "official" methods, so that you can't mitigate the awfulness of it. --JorgeA

User choice only decreases with every new build of Windows 8. Now you can't even make the Taskbar a different color than the window borders! --JorgeA

Paul Thurrott has an update on the information that got this thread started: He's recommending Start8 for people who wish to boot directly to the Desktop and preserve the Start Button/Start Menu experience. IMHO the UI not as nice as Classic Shell or Start Menu X, as Start8 maintains the hideous look of the Metro start screen, but it's miles better than anything Microsoft is offering for Windows 8. --JorgeA

If I had any computer artist skills, I'd paste faces of those two gentlemen and Julie Larson-Green on something like this image: Microsoft Executives React To Windows 8 Criticism (Thanks @xpclient for the reference to the third culprit in the group.) --JorgeA

dencorso, Thanks! It's not a big deal, just a tiny little annoyance. Like you, I'll work around it. --JorgeA

Thanks, Tripredacus. So when the time comes, generally speaking I'll need to ask the vendor (1) if I can buy downgrade rights, and (2) to go ahead and install Windows 7 on the new PC. Right? --JorgeA P.S. Forum software complaint: That little list up there, I'd originally put in as lower-case "a" and lower-case "b" inside parentheses. But each time I hit Preview Post, it kept changing that "b" to a capital B and making it look like the emoticon for "cool."

Hey dencorso, Great find! As several of us have pointed out in the Win8 threads, the Windows 8 UI is in some important ways a throwback to primitive versions of Windows with the tiles, the lack of multiple-window functionality, and the flat 2D look. The logo selection seems to lend official weight to that view -- far from constituting an advancement, Windows 8 is a regression! --JorgeA

LOL The automotive analogy to Windows goes back a long way. I remember back in, what, 1995/96, during the antitrust litigation over IE vs. Netscape, Bill Gates testified that the browser was an integral part of the OS, and that splitting it from the OS was like taking the engine out of the car. I thought at the time (and would be surprised if somebody didn't say), that the browser was actually more like the car radio -- something to receive information from the rest of the world while the machine (the car, the OS) is going. So, to me, Bill was saying that he had designed a car that wouldn't run if you took out the radio... --JorgeA

@xpclient The discussion over at AVS Forum has turned decidedly against Windows 8, with basically one guy trying to fend off all the people objecting to various aspects of the new OS. Here's the funniest recent comment: --JorgeA

All good links! This caught my eye in the Office 2013 article: The writer says that Office 2013 is not adapted well enough for touch, and that's a fair point. Trouble is, adapting it better for touch would mean either hiding or removing visible onscreen features (commands/menus), if not also making the content elements (individual words in a Word document; cells in an Excel spreadsheet) bigger for easier selection by finger, thus leaving less information on the screen and requiring more scrolling. Any of these changes would of course make the software that much less useful for serious purposes. So Microsoft is stuck between a rock and a hard place... a predicament of their own creation. Incredible. Some posts back we had talked about the dangers of relying increasingly on cloud services, such as those MS is pushing with Win8, to store files and data. Here's a cautionary tale. --JorgeA

Fredledingue, Thank you. Here are some thoughts -- Yes. That's why I'm curious to learn if there is a process for switching to Win7 after buying a Win8 computer, that works like the process for switching to Win8 after buying a Win7 computer (only in the opposite direction). If there isn't such a way, then I'll think hard about buying a separate Win7 license now. All very good questions, the answers to which I would love to know. Well, if it's not possible to downgrade Win8 to Win7 except by buying a separate license, reformatting the drive, and installing Win7, then letting Win8 to install and applying a patch to eradicate Metro is a real option for me. If possible I'd prefer to avoid unofficial patches, but I can live with them if the situation comes to that. And the best solution of all would be for MS to release a Metro-free, Start Menu enabled version of their own!

Thanks, Tripredacus. What I had in mind is that the "downgrade" from Win8 to Win7 would take place after you take the PC home, in much the same way as today you can take an existing Vista machine and upgrade it to Win7, by going through an online procedure like the "anytime upgrade." But it sounds like I would somehow have to make that choice while the PC is still in the store (let's say, at Staples)? How does that work? Would I tell the Staples folks that I want Win7 instead of 8 on my new computer, and they'd take care of it somehow? What would they be doing that I couldn't do myself after taking the PC home? And would I be paying full freight for the Win7 license in lieu of Win8? Just trying to understand the mechanics of the process, that's all. And also whether it's worth it to buy a Win7 license now (while I still can?? before Win8 goes retail). --JorgeA

Before long, retail PCs will be coming with Windows 8 preinstalled. This presents a problem for those of us who don't care for the Metro interface, but won't be ready to buy a new computer this fall before Win8 becomes the factory default. Does anybody have hard information on whether in fact it will be possible to upgrade a store-bought Win8 system to Win7, via official channels? In light of the chance that that will not be possible, I'm considering purchasing a boxed copy of Windows 7 so that when -- eventually -- the time comes to get a new PC, I can wipe out the Win8 installation and put in Win7. Any thoughts on this? --JorgeA

Another right-on-the-money commentary on Windows 8 and the Metro interface. Scroll down to the long paragraph replying to the moderator: [emphasis added] --JorgeA

Good, this gives me another cannonball to use next time I get into a discussion with a PC salesman over Windows 8. In addition to recounting all the annoyances of the new UI and all the things it's lacking, I can tell him that it's outrageous that I should give up my right to sue MS in conjunction with others even after I paid them money for their OS. OTOH, this new EULA clause is quite the devilish ploy -- you can participate in a class-action lawsuit sue them only if you haven't used the software, which allows them to claim that you can't possibly have been harmed since you haven't even bought the merchandise. They can also dredge up the tired argument, "how can you say that the release version of Windows 8 is so bad, if you haven't even tried it?" --JorgeA

Is it conceivable that Tihiy might post a procedure for accomplishing what he did, rather than uploading OS files? (The assumption would be that the user already has the necessary files, and only needs to port and modify them accordingly.) Or would the procedure be too difficult to replicate? --JorgeA

Looks to me like we have here a classic case of GIGO. The "GO" part being Windows 8... Yesterday I was struck by yet another annoying aspect of the flattened Win8 look. I wanted to scroll up and down a window, and -- I couldn't find the scrollbar!! Took me a while to realize that they'd made the scrollbar so faint that I could hardly see it! So, what -- are the MS geniuses going to tell me that their "telemetry" suggested that people don't scroll up and down in their windows much anymore, so that it was OK to deprecate the scrollbar?! :angrym: --JorgeA

no, no, no. I don't need a new teletubbies Windows like XP :no: LOL Things got much nicer for me when I discovered the "silver" theme for XP. Looks pretty snazzy. (And with any different desktop wallpaper.) The only remaining Fisher-Price element is that bright red, square X button for closing windows. --JorgeA

Yeah, I go back and forth between hoping for a "good enough" fix for Win8, and hoping that nobody fixes it well enough to save it. I guess that either result is acceptable to me. LOL --JorgeA

tsampikos, So then you don't share Stardock's concern that, as they say: ? The concern is that Microsoft is intent on ending the "old" way of doing things, and that by outsiders creating workarounds to MS's vision for Windows, they might therefore decide to work that much harder to eliminate the possibiity of such workarounds. This would be a sharp turn from past practice, where as you point out MS was happy to allow third parties to provide whatever features people thought were missing from Windows. Again, the Stardock CEO's concern is that they want to root out all possibility of bringing back a Start Menu. Is that concern exaggerated, do you think? --JorgeA

Good news: Stardock is coming out with a new version of Start8 that will enable users to boot straight to the Desktop. Stardock's CEO also addresses the issue of the Start Menu's removal in Windows 8: Apropos of some of the discussion in this thread about Microsoft trying to kill the Start Menu: So Microsoft's intention is clear and Stardock seems to be playing a bit of a cagey game, hoping not to provoke the MS lion into cutting off the Start Menu's head completely. --JorgeA

Appropriate new signature, too... You were on a roll there, Charlotte! Love it!! --JorgeA

Speaking of taking away choices and destroying a great product, it's come out that Gadgets will not be supported in Windows 8. I know that Gadgets aren't everybody's cup of tea, but I do use them and actually like them. (I follow certain stocks, the analog clock gadget gives me instantaneous time info, and the rolling picture gallery is nice.) And unlike with the Metro screen I don't have to completely shift away from whatever else I'm doing to take a quick look. Yet another way Windows 8 is inferior. Hmm, if I had the time I would take a cue from xpclient, and run down all the ways in which Win8 is less (not more) functional than previous versions of Windows. --JorgeA

Another tech observer predicts that Windows 8 will flop: Echoing a sentiment that's been expressed in this thread, the writer asks: (I do have a possible, personal answer to that one. As a Windows Media Center user, if the WMC pack that we'll be able to buy in addition to Win8 ends up having the same life cycle as the OS, then I would get three more years of WMC support for my HTPC. Of course, there's that big "if" in there -- as a separate add-on, it's entirely possible that MS might treat it separately and eventually forget about WMC as they seem intent on doing. But this would be the only reason for me to buy a single copy of Win8.) And then there's this writeup, looking ahead to the consequences of a Win8 failure. --JorgeA