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Microsoft Admits Windows 8.1 Update May Bork Your Mouse, Promises a Fix
MojoKid writes "Microsoft has several valid reasons why you should upgrade to Windows 8.1, which is free if you already own Windows 8. However, there's a known issue that might give some gamers pause before clicking through in the Windows Store. There have been complaints of mouse problems after applying the Windows 8.1 update, most of which have been related to lag in video games, though Microsoft confirmed there are other potential quirks. Acknowledging the problem, Microsoft says it's also actively investigating the issues and working on a patch."
It's all borked..please be sure to fix the scroll button, too. The scroll speed is different each time i log in!!
Why bother fixing it? Just censor the problem like the other fruity company.
Obviously it's too late to censor it since they said they are working on a patch
Wow just wow now what enterprise app will get messed up with other stuff in windows 8 / 8.1 that was not tested before updates?
What are these reasons? I'm being serious. I have yet to see a reason to upgrade from Windows 7 this soon in the game
And give me the ability to hide that stupid "Secure Boot isn't configured correctly" watermark sitting on my desktop! I have it turned off for a reason, I don't need to be harassed constantly about it.
I guess that's one way to get people to use the Metro touch interface.
I have been dealing with unexpected behavior on Win 8.1 exclusively (XP, Vista, 7, 8 are fine) relating to DPI handling this week. I feel that MS aren't really as concerned as they once were for native app compatibility if it stands in the way of work to support things like Metro/Surface.
To get people to use the touch interface.
with all windows 8 or 8.1 when you scroll with 2 fingers sometime out of no where the window (chrome, ie, word) collapse in the app bar.
SteelSeries mouse drivers will cause the Windows 8.1 upgrade to fail.
Microsoft really screwed something up with the Windows 8.1 mouse drivers. They really need to get this fixed.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
It's a simple fix... they added some new mouse settings that cause the mouse to stop working while typing with a small delay... the settings are buried in the metro UI.... here is how to fix it: 1. Go to the windows setting in the metro UI, for me I just put my mouse pointer in the upper right of the screen until the "search, share, start, device, settings" pop up appears, click the settings icon. 2. click on the change PC settings at the bottom. 3. Click on PC and devices. 4. click on mouse and touch pad 5. under the touch pad settings set the delay to no delay.
never heard of it
...is to install Windows 7.
Assuming there's driver support.
In Soviet Russia, dot slashes YOU!
app compatibility is big for Enterprise the store only idea will kill windows for Enterprise and gameing.
steam on linux will be like the 1# games store if MS trys to suicide like that.
I installed 8.1 and the first two things I noticed- 1) it reset my icon size to medium, which on my 2560x1440 monitor looks ridiculous and given how they imported all my other settings... why? and 2) the HDMI output of my motherboard stopped working. After installing 8.1, I did some searching and apparently Sandy Bridge was not included in Intel's beta driver development for graphics for 8.1 and there is no known development being done for Sandy Bridge, so if I want to continue using my computer to communicate via the HDMI port to my television I need to upgrade to an Ivy Bridge, drive my 'small' 2nd monitor off of VGA (no fscking way, but supposedly analog ports off of S.B. are working fine- I haven't tested it), or upgrade my video card to one that can drive a 3rd (non-DP) monitor. Yes, I could also switch my DVI 2nd monitor to the mobo and put my TV into the HDMI on my video card, but that causes some really strange window relocation issues when waking out of sleep- I have tried that in the past.
For people using only on-board video via HDMI to their sole monitor and without a desire to upgrade S.B. or buy a new computer, it must be enraging. I guess I am lucky, upgrading this motherboard (ASRock Extreme4 Gen3) to Ivy Bridge was something I was planning to do this month, anyway. For Intel not to include Sandy Bridge, a chip only about 2 years old, in their driver development for 8.1 is pretty lame. A Microsoft suggestion was to reinstall the Intel video drivers with compatibility settings for Win 7 or 8, but that didn't work for me.
Yes. My steam library has 84 games in it. 4 of them are available for Linux.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
I upgraded and got a helpful "just swipe to see other apps" help bubble stuck on my screen, I don't have a touch screen so couldn't swipe it, and nothing I did with keyboard or mouse would remove it.
I had to Google how to disable help tips and edit the registry - not a friendly os. still haven't got it to boot to desktop instead of metro either
Previous versions of Windows have had DPI settings. Why is this problem new in Windows 8.1?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
How the hell does a company that made their billions off the mouse go and screw that up.
If you want my come back you can scrape it off your mother's teeth - Jimmy Carr
If you truly work at Microsoft - tell them there are legions of people that just want a plain old desktop - and not a slick, uncluttered interface shouting "Bling".
Assure them that the apple fan boys love the slick uncluttered stuff, then go straight back to their apple stuff - they won't be switching.
Last job I worked at the apple guys LOVED win 8. They pirated it , played with it - then went right back to their apple stuff. Me, I just cringed and started looking to move to Ubuntu when XP finally dies.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
There's a patch here which fixes it, also speeds up your computer and makes it look a lot better.
I'm amazed something like this even passed Quality Control.
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
Previous versions of Windows have slowly introduced this astounding concept that people run different size displays, but they have ALL been fucked, horribly.
I'm sorry, I don't buy it. ("It" meaning that this is the cause or that you are a Microsoft employee.)
*How* are the mouse coordinates getting messed up? Because the developers at Microsoft can't write scaling code? It's very simple math. A few unit tests and it's golden. Are you telling me, as a Microsoft employee, that your developers can't write unit tests or do basic geometry for one of the primary functions on the project responsible for the biggest profits of one of the richest companies in the world?
Give me a freaking break.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
An OS update that breaks something that was working before?
Only Microsoft....
You are welcome on my lawn.
I worked at a place where a big piece of production code, a 17 year-old MS-DOS application likely written in C or assembler, was nowhere to be found. The executable form was copied and used at least 10 times a day to ship product, and yet nobody knew where the actual code was.
More disturbingly, that same place had implemented FPGA code which was programmed at the board-house, and one of the internal reasons for the big push to our latest product is that nobody now in the company understands that FPGA code, and yet as with the example before those things are used on a daily basis in a production environment. That company is a division of a big and instantly-recognizable name in technology.
One company I worked for that makes optical transceivers for your big-name optical switches/routers/etc. like Juniper used Excel as a database. No shit. The manufacturing test "database" was just one goddamn Excel spreadsheet written to by VB over Labview. I distinctly remember having to manually redraw the border lines to keep up with the resizing of the spreadsheet due to test data constantly being written to the spreadsheet.
And those aren't even the worst of my stories. And I'm just a lowly technician.
-- Ethanol-fueled
...were already broken in 8.0 with all that swipe and hot corner crap.
I just did the update on my Surface today. Not a happy experience.
Took 2+ hrs to download a 2.1GB install. Took another hour or so to install. Then download all the updates for another 30 minutes.
Win8.1 borked a lot of things:
1) Maps application on my Surface has stopped working
2) Forcing signing to a Microsoft account when you restart until you fail signing in 3-5 times then it lets you do a local account
3) IE has been crashing on me constantly. Could just be ESPN.com doing something weird. But it wasn't do it before.
I just want you guys to know that as a developer I have been debugging what I believe to be the side effects resulting from these changes all week. It's not just "mouse co-ordinates" that are affected, you have some very common APIs scaling window co-ordinates in totally unexpected and inconsistent ways now. You have totally broken certain application behaviors, and only in 8.1, and while I found a workaround for my use case I can also see that the workaround I'm using will break more things for others.
Next time you ask yourselves, "should we make these APIs suddenly behave differently than in all older versions of the OS?" there should be a very, very high barrier to saying yes, especially for a service pack release.
somebody must have screwed up the mandated NSA mouse logger daemon
Microsoft's been borking my mouse for over 15 years now!
no one in QA uses a mouse? WTF?
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Don't forget this is the company that claimed in a court of law not so many years ago that they:
1) Didn't know how much money they made from sales of their Windows or Office products
2) Couldn't uninstall Internet Explorer as it was an intrinsic part of the operating system
You might need to suspend disbelief a little less...
Microsoft still tows the line, One-Computer One-Desktop One-User.
This philosophy and mind-set is abhorrent to UNIX and Linux.
This Microsoft, aka micro management, mindset is the Achilles Heal to Kill Microsoft and its human hosts should a "Company" Dare.
Where Eagles Dare.
I don't even know anybody who games on Windows any more. You gotta deal with incompatible drivers, malware, constant stream of patches, this game needs that version of the driver to fix all the bugs, meh...
Indeed. That's why I mostly play games on Linux through Wine.
i have 29 games in steam, 28 of them are available under Linux.
Try a mighty mouse and firefox and let me know what you think.
Just use it for awhile it will hit.
still released it that way in spite of the problems. Arrogance is the only logical explanation.
This has been a well documented problem from earlier preview builds and was specifically not fixed in the RTM code because... well because MS seems to think it can make unilaterally bad UI decisions again and again and get away with it.
Try setting your Win8.1 display to 150% on a 1920x1200 monitor. This is exactly where I've used WinXP, WinVista, Win7 and Win8, yet in Win8.1, a random assortment of applications (including many MS utilities and 3rd-party programs) deliver barely readable fuzzy characters. At least in Win8.0, you could set a master switch to tell the OS to disable DPI scaling, but in their infinite wisdom, some group within MS decided that to hell with useability, they're going to simply remove the master switch and force ALL users to disable DPI scaling on an app by app basis, making it bloody well a gargantuan effort to avoid either fuzzy or tiny text.
It's absolutely appalling... About as appalling as MS deciding that Win8.0 users shouldn't be able to boot into desktop mode on a non-touchscreen device and then completely removing the start menu as if giving the middle finger to the existing install base was some kind of magical shortcut back to a dominant market position.
If you're arrogant, but generally make good or at least non-destructive UI decisions, most people will forgive you. When you're arrogant and make butthead UI decisions, well, then you're MS.
They've managed to marry Apple's arrogance with butthead UI decisions.
I'm guessing you just buy indie bundles and don't have any AAA titles other than Portal or Half-life 2.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Good luck with the new generation of consoles. I used to play on consoles more than PC as it was less hassle. Nowadays the situation is reversed. Drivers aren't a major problem, console games are also shoved out and patched later, many console games demand online play and updates before they will run, etc. Malware isn't a problem if you only use Windows for gaming - I don't do mail or general web browsing on my Windows gaming box, so malware isn't going to get installed on it. Literally, all it does is act as a boot-loader for steam.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Because constantly dealing with patches for wine and hacking the configuration file to make things works is less hassle right? Plenty of the games I still play do not work under wine unfortunately.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
The "fix" will be for everyone who developed any piece of software still in use to recompile including and a properly linked xyz.dll or alternatively recompile with a modified manifest.xml to override high DPI "adjustments". M$ cares nothing for their [third party] developers. This is why I switched from native windows to webpage programming a long time ago. Web pages/services can be consumed by any type of system and the tools to make them are quite often free and/or opensource. To the credit of M$ IE has become a lot more standard compliant, but there are still some weird issues with "compatability view" breaking pages viewed on the LAN.
But it breaks all my apps. Though that can happen in any case when moving from one distribution to another.
If you want an XP interface, you don't want Ubuntu.
Windows 8.1 borking your mouse is an improvement over Windows 8, since 8 totally borked the user interface and basically took a reasonably good OS and turned it into a pile of shit so Microsoft could unload more tablets.
Tired of being "punished" by the Slashdot $rtbl since 2002. I'm now over at http://soylentnews.org/ .
MS employee here
What? This mess could be avoided? Please come to my office and tell me about it, I'll be happy to understand why you needed to use Slashdot instead of our marvelous bug tracking and internal communications process.
Truly yours,
Ballmer.
p.s.: Bring your own chair.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
Why bother fixing it? Just censor the problem like the other fruity company.
You're right, I never heard about Apple censoring their OS screwing up mice. They really censored that pretty well.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
2 words: "Mouse" and "keyboard".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I somehow do not think that MS is completely dense. I could somehow imagine that they might by now noticed that a portion of their users is not completely in love with Metro.
Your analysis, i.e. that they try to win back users that went to Apple, is correct, I think, but I think they didn't yet fully understand just why people went there and how to counter it. Because MS cannot counter that phenomenon. For a very simple reason: MS makes no hardware. Or at least, no "computer" hardware, no main units, only periphery.
People who buy computers by the "design" approach don't think in terms of hardware vs. software. To them, their computer is that box that goes on the floor or the desk (if they get that far and don't see their screen as the computer and that box... umm... well, probably a distributor for the computer since that's where everything gets plugged into). They don't "see" your OS as an entity by itself. And it can be as slick as fuck, if tossed into an ugly, plain grey box it just doesn't get sexy to them.
So as long as MS doesn't offer any kind of stylish hardware with their OS, they can be as Appl'y as they want and they won't ever score with the "design" crowd. But they might just lose the professional crowd that wants to get their job done with an OS that can destroy productivity better than 3 PHBs can.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Uninstall internet explorer on a lot of business desktops at that time and watch half their software stop working. They all used internet explorer for the input/output ie form. I know at least one current 3d cadd program that has gone to directx and embeds the ie form for text editing. Remove either and your business stops.
All depends on what kind of requirements QA gets to fill.
I'm fairly sure the main cardinal rule for QA is valid for QA in MS too: Never, ever, under any circumstances, no matter how obvious, no matter how logical, no matter how well intentioned, one thing you may never do: NEVER EVER THINK.
You get your QA sheet, you tick it off, and when you're done you put it aside and you don't think about it. If that was not on the tick sheet, QA might even have noticed it but usually the only thing you could possibly get as QA by finding a bug that nobody wanted you to find is that you get into trouble.
Never ever think.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
when I switched to a Windows 8 laptop I reused the mouse from my Windows 7 laptop and encountered phantom double clicks if my mouse pointer moved a couple pixels from the start of the click to the end.
also Windows 8 features more times where I get graphic artifacts where it didn't redraw completely, usually when scrolling
and the built in vpn client would randomly fail after coming out of sleep to where I had to reboot the computer to fix it
I prefer my HD games to be rendered at 1920x1080 rather than some sub-720 resolution and scaled up. Actually, I'm running three 2560x1440 monitors but that's even farther (further?) removed from what current consoles can do. And I like having a keyboard and mouse for the games that play better with them. Not having that support on the PS3 and XB360 is stupid.
Having played the Glorious PC Gaming Master Race card, I plan to pick up a PS4 when they hit the streets.
Maybe you missed the fact that GP asked about upgrading from Win7 to Win8.1. Or maybe you're confused by the (wrong) terminology used by apt-get and forgot that we're talking about Windows (for some reason apt-get chose to call updates "upgrade", and they chose to call upgrades "dist-upgrade").
I didn't say "never update" or "never install service packs". In fact, I strongly support installing updates and service packs on every OS. Also note that I also said it's okay to use the next OS version when you get it on your next PC.
What I said was "never upgrade" and I meant never do an OS/distribution upgrade. Stuff always breaks. Always. For example, Ubuntu "upgraded" to a different release of VirtualBox; my host OS immediately crashed when I tried to start my virtual machines. My experience with Windows upgrades were even more catastrophic: Microsoft botched the Win95 -> Win98 and I had to do a cold reinstall + upgrade to avoid BSOD, so I haven't tried a Windows OS upgrade since. And their product upgrades are just as bad; they usually botch it so badly that you also have to completely uninstall the "upgraded" version and then install the original and then upgrade. Often you have to manually edit the registry to make it possible to install the old version again after attempting the upgrade.
p.s. Don't bother with Windows 8 unless you have a (touchscreen) tablet; wait for Windows 9 if you use a desktop or a laptop. Personally I don't hold out any hope that Microsoft will come to their senses. Right now I recommend Ubuntu 12.04.3 LTS with gnome instead of unity.
"I'm waiting for 8.1, dammit! Seriously!!!"
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
keyboard still needed for typing / coding.
I don't see any big typing work being done on a keyboard.
universities with there theory loaded coders & MBA's who don't really real experience are running the show or people who have more of a tech background.
This update breaks mouse in GAMES.
So your update breaks games entirely. A pretty steep downgrade.
I'd grab a bean bag one :D
You can't turn mouse acceleration off on OSX without using third party software. It is pretty bad.
The Official Site of 1337 Pwnage
Of cause you can turn of mouse acceleration without 3rd party apps in OS X. Start by leaning using a search engine...
Windows 8.1 was the last chance for Microsoft on my Intel Core i5 laptop and it still didn't fix things, many problems still exist like the one's stated above and my wireless is now flakey, so even though I paid top dollar for Windows 8, I've taken it off and installed Ubuntu 13.10 which worked out of the box and in my opinion a lot faster and smoother.
s/cause/course/
s/apps/software/
s/leaning/learning/
s/search engine/3rd party search engine/
It isn't. Lots of apps looked shitty if you changed the DPI settings in previous versions, too. What's changed is that Windows now automatically changes the settings if it detects a high DPI display, when previously it would have given you tiny text.
Seriously, I have customers now asking seriously about switching to Macs.
And, or me Steam Os is starting to look really tempting.
Thank you Microsoft.
The lesson here is not unique to Windows: new releases will have annoying bugs. The first six months of any newly released software's existence is more like a large-scale beta test, and the only surprise by now is that anyone gets upset about it. In the linux world, Ubuntu is more or less the extended beta for Debian, and Fedora and RHEL share the same relation. Time spent dealing with a partially broken operating system is time that you'll never get back, and philosophy has driven me straight into the arms of Debian stable. As long as you're not mixing in packages from testing, you're pretty much guaranteed for things to keep working as they should no matter what you install, regardless of updates. Also, I'm continually amazed at how well text based configuration files work. For one thing, there's none of this crap about not being able to change settings, and for another, you can keep them under version control. Puppet is pretty brilliant in its niche as well. The only thing is, now I've been memetically infested with shell scripting and think that's a normal thing for people to want to do with their computers.
A clusterfuck of old APIs comes back to bite them in the ass.
Why can't MS just drop some of that old stuff once and for all, and make a modern and somewhat future-proof product?
They can still afford to do this now, they can (temporarily) upset some legacy users for the greater good and recover successfully, because at this moment they have no real competition in sight. But in a few years things might change and then it will be too late to deliver a good product.
Newb gaming is on consoles.. I guess they call them 'causals' instead of lamers, now, in this politically correct world, but, yeah.. PC gaming is pretty much as it always was..and the consoles need patching now too, btw, breaking stuff on occasion.
Easy, they were "downsized" in 2000 and everything has been best effort of whoever happens to be around since then.
DPI is dpi.. why should the mouse handling be any different than it is at 96dpi? High dpi desktops require high dpi mice. Just add a checkbox that optionally auto-scales the GUI elements and fonts in vector space accordingly when the screen is not set at 96dpi.
How do you expect me to sleep without nightmares tonight after reading that you bastard :)
Labview is a graphical manifestation of spaghetti code - a 3D representation with lots of lines crossing over if the project is not completely trivial.
Likely they gave only touchscreens to QA or even the QA was not using the Win8. It did not help either, that MS did not give 3rd party developers any preview to test, as before.
Yeah, now you have to worry about per-browser breakage, and your customer has to wonder if his tools will be available to him the next morning...his crappy ones...that work within a stupid browser.
No thanks.
Why is it Intel's problem? If linux can get their drivers sorted out then why can't such a well funded company as Microsoft get their shit together and write a driver to be part of their own kernel?
Especially since games are the only reason I have windows installed at all.
Windows 8.1 breaks the whole computer. Having a non functioning mouse is the least of your worries.
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
No fanboy here either way, but the Windows 8.1 update upset me so badly that I went out and bought my wife an iMac. I'm still running Windows 7 on some of my laptops, but as they die off I won't be replacing them with MS machines. From here on out I'm an OSX/Linux guy.
Consoles are almost entirely lacking several genres (MMOs are close to non-existent, RTS are almost completely non-existent, TBS are rare and often gimped). Also, KB+M is objectively better for one of the primary "console" genres: FPS. PC games are being held back by consoles. With the latest batch of awful from console makers making PC gaming even more appealing, plus new tech in the works like Occulus Rift, I wouldn't expect to see PC gaming going anywhere anytime soon. But you're welcome to delude yourself into thinking otherwise if it makes the fanboy in you feel better.
Downside - SetPoint is a boot-time killer.
Could that be due to the newly added ability to independently adjust scaling per monitor? Because that is a feature I LOVE. I can finally read the text on my TV without screwing up my other monitors!
From the original article: "which is free if you already own Windows 8"
/.)
This just made me register a username. (Hello
Since when is service pack's "freeness" a feature worth mentioning? It's just a bunch of bugfixes and improvements (pun intended).
8.1 lets you scale monitors independently. A very useful change (that I love), but perhaps it is the cause of the problem. I haven't had any problems whatsoever though.
Lol. moderation as troll. No, genuine curiosity as the only AAA games in my Steam library on Linux are Portal and Half Life 2.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
8.1 also borked by Intel HD 4000 video controller :(
The behaviour of several APIs, like "GetCursorPos" and "WindowFromPoint" is weird when DPI virtualization is on. Maybe you should make them to read the information of the process calls it and deal with coordinations returned.
To app makers: Use "GetPhysicalCursorPos", "WindowFromPhysicalPoint" and "PhysicalToLogicalPoint".
Maybe you could use the technique in `IsProcessDPIAware` API. It returns the DPI awareness of the CURRENT process.
It is true MS are never going to be synonymous with style but that is the least of their problems. They need to just make good products that people actually want to use. They're still pushing the line that everyone must use Windows and Office in order to do 'serious' work and trying to push that old school thinking into the mobile and tablet markets. Meanwhile they simultaneously devalue their desktop products by trying to make them work with a mobile/tablet interface.
That's not a style problem that's just faulty thinking.
Mine has 47 but I have no idea how the FUCK they got that number. I know I play like 25 games and all but 2 are on Linux.
Not just games. On my Surface Pro the arrow cursor is invisible, none of the other cursors just the fucking arrow. That is not a gaming lag issues that is a "WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON" issue.
Oh yeah and has anyone else figured out how to move an app from the primary to the extended monitor? They claim windows+PgUp does it but they are wrong.
Well, OK, I've posted about this on Slashdot before, and finally got it fixed. Apparently Windows 8.1 decided to nuke the drivers that came with my laptop and use broken ones instead. Reinstalling the original drivers fixed everything. So, thanks for that, Windows 8.1 upgrader.
Same thing happened to me, except with the ethernet driver. After upgrading to 8.1 the network was dead - no problems indicated, it was like the cable was unplugged. Re-installed the Windows 8 driver that came with the motherboard and all was fine. Apparently the upgrade just replaced a perfectly fine device driver with one that is completely non-functional. Sheesh.
I would grab something with some real weight behind it... ;)
I've always been surprised to hear of other people having issues with Windows updates since I never ran into them myself, until now. After installing 8.1 I had the following problems (all of which have been resolved):
1.) AMD driver disabled and Catalyst crashed when trying to open
=Fixed by installing the latest Beta driver, had to reset all settings including turning off Underscan
2.) Logitech touchpoint DLL crashed after login
=Uninstalled it entirely, don't know if they have released an update, don't care. Mouse+Keyboard work fine without it.
3.) Metro apps re-installed that had been previously uninstalled (Bing, Stocks, News, Music, etc...)
=Uninstalled them again
4.) Secureboot watermark on the desktop
=Booted into the BIOS and selected the option "Install Default SecureBoot Keys"
No lingering problems after all of that and no issues with mouse lag. The only thing that seems worse than before is the Charms bar on the right seems to be more difficult to bring up with a mouse than it used to. No biggie. Still works better than any Linux distro.
The good news is that the solution for the user is pretty simple, go into the resolution settings and set everything back to "small".
Nope. That just makes other things blurry, and the blurry things look normal. :(. Not a fix for me.
I said: That's because the standard for power handling, ACPI, is horrible and badly implemented by hardware vendors.
The situation is so bad that power handling under Windows is hit-or-miss, EVEN THOUGH MICROSOFT WROTE THE ACPI STANDARD THEMSELVES. You would think that power handling for Surface would be easy for Microsoft and that battery life would be a no-brainer, but the power handling for even that is flaky. Because even they, themselves, don't understand their own standard.
--
BMO
Windows 8.1 - if it doesn't bork your mouse, it might bork Windows 8: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2058683/new-windows-8-1-requirements-strand-some-users-on-windows-8.html
I was thinking that there must be some folks over at MIT with both cognitive science and software background. I also know for a fact people in the aero/astro department do human factors research; I even helped run some of it when I worked at the Center for Space Research (now the McNair Building).
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
As someone who recently installed windows 7 last month on a new machine, I can tell you that took much longer than 1-2 hours...
just saying...
What certainly did not help was that certification is required, over the internet, but it didn't come with updated ethernet drivers for the MB, making internet impossible.
I was eventually able to download the correct drivers on my phone, then copy them to the new computer, run them, and then proceed. However otherwise I would be waiting until the next day to do it at work unless you have another computer handy. However even without that, with all the updates and reboots (which I made very fast with a mSATA SSD system drive) required made it a much longer than a 2 hour install.
I had less problems physically building a new system using an untested configuration than I did simply trying to get the OS installed functionally. That included forgetting to install the back retaining clip for the cpu heatsink on an itx case with no back plate access... *insert lots of cursing here*
Window +shift+left or right arrow
So much for the mouse. The thing that I hate the most. I had the 8.1 preview installed on 3 of my PC's. One is my main PC. I had that backed up. One is a laptop throw away and the other is an Intel quad core throw away. So I had to restore my main PC to the state it was before I installed the 8.1 preview beta then I had to run all the updates to make it current. Then I was able to upgrade. The upgrades take like forever and a day. That is done no problem. I have not had any problems at all with that. The other 2 since I don't have full image backups to go to, I ran the 8.1 upgrade on them and they installed fresh. The did activate alright but MS forced me to re-install all my apps again on those 2 boxes. Really MS? I have re-install all my apps again, just because I was running the 8.1 preview beta? Are you lazy bastards no better than that with your updates. The final thing that pisses me off totally. On version 8 I was still running the disk image backups from versoin 7. Not great but not bad either. After 8.1, no more disk image backups from win 7. Thanks MS, you had something that 1/2 worked and replaced it with what? Shadow copy or some crap that makes me ill when I think of it.