Windows 8 - Thoughts and experiences

[amintha1992]

have been using windows 8 for a while now on both my Gaming Desktop and my Notebook and neither of those have a touch screen, though the notebook have a touchpad that is natively optimized for Win8. changing from win 7 to win 8 i did not have any problem or loose any time learning the OS. the main reason is that windows 8 is a more faster and secure and also compatible with a wider range of devises having different hardware. touch or no touch.

i never missed the start menu. but the thing is that they never took out the menu. they just redesigned for more productivity and optimized for touch interface.

i never use the "apps". i just open the desktop and go along my merry way doing what i do.

but i have seen a lot of improvements on the OS.

1. the file transfers are amazing now,

2. task manager is also very useful now.

3. every day work feels more responsive and stable.

4. all the other changes are done behind the end user.

there are many more things that are being improved in Win8. but these are the things that i have noticed right away.

so at the end of the day Win 8 is a great OS that will have a longer life time and support from MS.

so if you have the chance to upgrade then i would recommend doing it.

[Guest]

I really loved the Metro start screen on the Surface and the Asus tablets! That being said though, despite it being seemingly faster and more refined than Windows 7 on a desktop computer, I found the Metro more annoying to use with a mouse than anything else, despite all the great features it has. I'm super excited for the power and competition to start to build on the tablet market, as I think they really hit it on the button this time. Definitely going to replace my aging laptop with one soon!

[MunsonedForLife]

I've had an issue with idle temps on Windows 8. When I'm not at the computer then cpu load soars and temps then follow. CPU shouldn't be running at 30-35C when I'm not using it. When I'm at the computer and just on the internet or what not, temps are normally around 23-25C. I just don't get it. Anyone else have an issue with this?

Yea, that didn't work :(

[lutzee]

I recently bought a new laptop (ultrabook) with windows 8 my first impressions were good, i felt for my use i didnt need the start menu, but things quickly turned sour when i took a good look at the apps

First i will state i will not be using any app that requires a microsoft account (EG hotmail)

My experiances with hotmail are as follows

First account just vanished, gone, nothing

Second account i am at the point of every time i log in, i have to go through the account recovery thing, which involves them sending a text to my phone with a code etc

I now use gmail, its great, much easier to use too.

Anyway, as far as apps go we can exclude: People, mail, messenger, skydrive, calender

Other apps eg news, weather and games work fine, music is the xbox thing, not a fan to be fair, but i did install foobar2000 when i first got it (thankyou ninite)

launching a program that isn't pinned is still as easy as windows 7, (hit win key, type the app name hit enter, i never usually look through the start menu to find an item)

The windows fastboot thing is a bit of a gimmik but i think it works well... even if it is just the old hibernate feature, using it as the default option when i close the laptop lid is great, but for those with win8 on an SSD i advise that you move the hibernate.sys file to a HDD to save IO on the SSD

As for the rest of the OS its windows 7 with an improved explorer UI

[Kilmer02]

I love windows 8. People say navigation is very hard but i find it somewhat faster with windows 8. Everything runs very fluidly with it. I wouldnt go back to win7 if i had the choice.

[SomeRandom778]

Looks like most people have similar opinions. I have used it on my laptop, and I actually didn't find the "Metro" UI too bad, I just wish it didn't have its own apps as if its a completely different OS. It Windows, so the desktop environment should be the main area that the computer defaults too and that everything opens in, although this can be received with some tinkering and some third-party applications.

The changes that were made in the desktop environment are really good.

File transfers are more accurate.

Task manager is 100 times better than the old one.

​Solid colour schemes look better in my opinion, and are slightly less heavy on the system.

With all that said I wont be upgrading my gaming rig any time soon because ive heard about some games not running properly. I guess we'll have to wait until service pack 1 to see if all this gets fixed.

[GoodBytes]

All my games run fine. I have not heard any games with any issues with Windows 8. All I can assume that the people who had issues didn't have the latest drivers. They probably had old drivers found by Windows Update or built-in Windows 8. I recall when I was using Windows 8 public beta's, my laptop GPU could not do many OpenGL things, so basically all OpenGl based games didn't run at all. But with the latest drivers, everything runs perfectly well, and even better for that mater. Both my laptop and desktop got a visible increase in performance in my games. I have the Quadro NVS 160M 256MB on my laptop (its a 4 year old laptop), and my desktop still runs a GeForce GTX 260 (waiting for the Nvidia GeForce 700 series and AMD Radeon 8000 series).

[JustDenDimi]

I barely/Never use the Metro interface since I downloaded a Start button, but I definitely like it how Windows 8 is less resource heavy. ^^