Windows 8 From a Tech User’s Perspective
January 19th, 2013
John from Boulder, CO, a computer professional and self-proclaimed “digital dog”, has gone all out in regards to Windows 8. For example, he purchased touch-sensitive desktop displays a touchpad and a touch mouse so he could experience Windows 8 as it was meant to be. He currently has it installed on a Dell desktop system, a notebook, and a phone. Here are some of his thoughts.
“There is no performance penalty in Windows 8 (quite the opposite).”
“I am coo-coo for cocoa puffs over the blistering fast shutdown and startup behavior on Windows 8. This simply does not get talked about enough. With everything else working so well, you’d think people would at least mention what a time saver this is.”
“Windows App launch is many times faster than Win 7. For example, if I double click on an .XLS type file in Win Explorer in Windows 8, it launches as fast as Notepad in Windows 7. Very snappy.”
“Live Tiles is The Real Deal. Look for Android and iOS to figure out how to get their OS’s up to this level of convenience and power. Really, with Live Tiles on my Windows 8 Phone, I can review state of up to five different things without even unlocking the start screen — battery level, missed calls/voice mail, newly arrived texts … you pick ’em. And then once on the Start screen, there are those aspects and others (like weather — eg, outside temp, forecast high/low, percip prognosis … since the live tile is live, it can rotate through lots of things).”
“Oddly, the Win 8 Start screen is a better way to start up your common-use Desktop apps (ie, non-metro style apps). In Windows 7 you have a quick start menu that has to be searched, … but the Win 8 start screen has tiles in a size OF YOUR CHOOSING so the things you want are bigger and the things that deserve a place, though less so, can be squeezed in at a smaller size. It’s like the old Cordless Phone experience … you never knew you could check the mailbox out front, run out to the car in the driveway, or go out back with the dog, while you were on the phone … not until you got your first cordless phone.”
“I upgraded my heavily used Windows 7 eight-way processor developer-purposed notebook to Windows 8 and everything turned up ‘just as I’d left it’ — all my apps (and their configurations — registration database or not), all my desktop icons, my Quick Launch toolbar definitions, my DOS environment variable definitions, on and on.”
“My Windows Desktop apps work fine. All my drivers worked under Windows 8 – printing, monitors, external drives, etc.”
