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."

Comments

They're doin' it wrong

[lesincompetent]

Why bother fixing it? Just censor the problem like the other fruity company.

Re:They're doin' it wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:They're doin' it wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I know what you mean. It is sickening how sycophantic Slashdot is to Apple and Microsoft now.

Dice should just come out, drop the pretense that it is FOSS-friendly, and admit it's been bought and paid for by Microsoft, Apple. Oracle etc.

Re:They're doin' it wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

No, have the pilot go on internet tell the other pilots that the only fix available for the problem is a newer model of fighter plane and they are entitled to a new one from the manufacturer free of charge under warranty .

Re:They're doin' it wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a patch here which fixes it, also speeds up your computer and makes it look a lot better.

Re:They're doin' it wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

But it breaks all my apps. Though that can happen in any case when moving from one distribution to another.

Re:They're doin' it wrong

[Ol Olsoc]

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.

Re:They're doin' it wrong

[Luckyo]

This update breaks mouse in GAMES.

So your update breaks games entirely. A pretty steep downgrade.

Re:They're doin' it wrong

[locopuyo]

You can't turn mouse acceleration off on OSX without using third party software. It is pretty bad.

Re: They're doin' it wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Of cause you can turn of mouse acceleration without 3rd party apps in OS X. Start by leaning using a search engine...

Re: They're doin' it wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

s/cause/course/
s/apps/software/
s/leaning/learning/
s/search engine/3rd party search engine/

Re:They're doin' it wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Especially since games are the only reason I have windows installed at all.

Re:They're doin' it wrong

[F34nor]

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.

Re: They're doin' it wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Window +shift+left or right arrow

Anonymous Coward upgrades to frosty piss 1.0

[Anonymous Coward]

With 25% more frost, 200% more piss.

..and mouse scroll.

[Vegan Cyclist]

It's all borked..please be sure to fix the scroll button, too. The scroll speed is different each time i log in!!

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's all borked..please be sure to fix the scroll button, too. The scroll speed is different each time i log in!!

Another satiesfied Microsoft customer?

FOSS for more than ten years, baby! Hahahah enjoy Windows ecosystem that you bought into. What you own owns you. Now you feel it. What can you do about it, use your skills? Hahahah no, it's a black box. Wait helplessly and hope they fix it for you. No refunds of course. Yes, that's the ticket. Wait for them. Hope they care. Satisfied yet?

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[Anonymous Coward]

You get the same thing with FOSS, or do you think everyone in the world can program and has the time to sift through their program's code to find an obscure bug the main developers overlooked or didn't feel like fixing? At least Microsoft support won't call you a stupid noob to your face.

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[roc97007]

> Another satiesfied Microsoft customer?

Well, yes. We use it because for one reason or another, we have to, usually because a commercial product is required, and we complain bitterly about it -- who, that didn't actually work in Redmond, wouldn't? (Actually, that's not entirely true -- even there, people complain, but quietly, to trusted friends.)

As to FOSS, yeah, my website and blog and my daughter's blog all run on a Linux box I administrate, using software I partly wrote, and if all I ever did in life was use EMACS to pound out Python, I'd drop Windows in a heartbeat. But some of us have things to do that can't be had from sourceforge.

Mind you, I'm hanging onto Windows 7 with both hands. We have a touch screen laptop running Win8, and it's junk. Maybe it'll run Android some day.

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[JMJimmy]

You're not kidding - things I've found wrong with it so far (less than 5 hours of use):

  - Takes 1-2 hours to install [facepalm]
  - Corrupts some Win8 Xbox game saves
  - Adds UEFI watermark which can only be removed by installing an update (requires reboot too)
  - Changes your folder/theme settings without permission
  - Changes the folders setup in Windows Explorer to promote Skydrive (ya right!) and buries everything useful at the bottom
  - Re-installs all the garbage you've spent hours uninstalling (bing/news/finance/etc)
  - Doesn't restore the start button, just adds a button to bring up the full screen start
  - Creates interface lag/"hiccuping" across all programs
  - Removes the lease offensive drop corner\
  - Enabled touchpad clicking on my mouse, despite the ELAN options showing it as disabled
  - Forces powder blue backgrounds on tiles which make reading difficult (no personalization option to change it)
  - Pins IE to the taskbar

Everything in Win8/8.1 is counter to productivity and just makes me want to switch to a new OS, unfortunately I wasn't able to downgrade this system to Win 7 64bit and I'm still not confident in Linux's ability to remain stable/repair itself easily without having to frequently re-install.

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[Lisias]

At least Microsoft support won't call you a stupid noob to your face.

You get what you pays for, right?

With FOSS, you can try to fix it yourself or pay someone to do that for you.

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[Lisias]

I'm still not confident in Linux's ability to remain stable/repair itself easily without having to frequently re-install.

I'm using a Linux box for 4 years, without a single reinstall. Of course, I'm using a "more professional" one.

Be aware that there's more than a single Linux distro, and not all of them focus on stability or security. The ones that focus on mimicking Windows tends to mimic it too much accurately, in my humble opinion.

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[Ol Olsoc]

It's all borked..please be sure to fix the scroll button, too. The scroll speed is different each time i log in!!

How about allowing all apps to have desktop shortcuts - not just some.

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[Ol Olsoc]

You get the same thing with FOSS, or do you think everyone in the world can program and has the time to sift through their program's code to find an obscure bug the main developers overlooked or didn't feel like fixing? At least Microsoft support won't call you a stupid noob to your face.

When was the last time you used Linux? In your world, I could complain about usiung Windows 3.1.

Oh - wait. You've probably never used Linux.

As an example, I recently replaced Ubuntu with Linux mint on a dual boot laptop. Got everything I needed, all the drivers, and every thing worked perfectly after a few mouse clicks.

HeII, that's a complete OS change, and it's easier than a Windows update, which likely as not will bork something.

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[_xeno_]

Wow, you sure found a lot more problems with Windows 8.1 than I did. Really, I only had one problem with it: when booting, after making it past the Windows logo, it just sits at a black screen. You can move the mouse around at this black screen, but you can't log in or do anything.

Other than it crashing to a black screen on boot, I've had no problems with Windows 8.1.

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.

And because they're still hilarious, here are Microsoft's instructions for booting Windows 8/8.1 into Safe Mode. Note that the instructions to enter Safe Mode requires the computer to be booting successfully. Also note that they tell you that you can't use F8 to boot into safe mode any more, but don't tell you that it's now shift-F8. The bit about Windows 8 giving you no chance to hit this is actually true; I wound up powering off the laptop during boot to "trick" Windows 8.1 into taking me to the recovery menu. (As getting to the black screen counted as "booting" as far as Windows cared.)

Shift-F8 does work, by the way, if you get lucky and hit it in that incredibly short window that the OS checks for it.

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[Anonymous Coward]

Kubuntu. Ubuntu with the KDE interface. That's my advice. It looks AMAZING (look it up), and hasn't given me any bugs. I've been running Ubuntu in general for two years now and have found nothing in the stable/repair problems. I don't know what kind of a setup you have, but if there's an old laptop/desktop floating around, maybe give that a try? People love giving Canonical (maker of Ubuntu) shit for being bloated, but I think the whole OS was like 2 - 3 GB and comes with the best driver support I've seen. Off the top of my head, I can think of only two games in my 45+ library that I can't play on Ubuntu.

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[chopthechops]

I love the bit that says:

"In previous versions of Windows, you could get to this screen by pressing F8 before Windows started up. Windows 8 PCs start up quickly so there's not enough time to press F8."

Yeah right... Win 8 is just so fast it can't read a keypress at startup any more. Sounds like they get their marketing people to write the troubleshooting documentation.

My guess is that they officially abandoned the F8 startup key concept (even though they didn't) at the same time as they decided none of us need a real keyboard or mouse any more. This may also account for the mouse issues with the 8.1 update. Apparently everyone should be using a tablet by now so keyboard and mouse QA takes a back seat.

Seriously though, how do they manage to break something as basic as mouse operation?

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[im_thatoneguy]

Re-installs all the garbage you've spent hours uninstalling (bing/news/finance/etc)

Hours uninstalling? That's not even hyperbole that's just an outright lie. This is how long it takes to uninstall all of the metro apps:

1) Click Start.
2) Right click on every app.
3) Click uninstall at the bottom.

Shouldn't take more than 10 seconds.

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[MouseTheLuckyDog]

At least Microsoft support won't call you a stupid noob to your face.

That's right what they will do is joke about it with their friends while you are on hold and after you hang up.
Been there seen that.

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[hairyfeet]

What pissed me off the most is how they pushed the "bringing back the start button" in the press when in reality all it is is a shortcut for the fucking Metro start screen. This is why I call it "WinGoatse" as like a Goatse it was all just a trick to get you to go for it and isn't what you were expecting at all.

What I have found here in the trenches is the only "work" folks want done on Win 8 is to remove the thing, I haven't seen this level of hatred from the public since WinME, even Vista wasn't THIS hated. They can give 1-100 SPs but until they let users have the choice of REALLY getting rid of the "LULZ I Iz A Cellphone LULZ, check out me appstore LULZ" bullshit I have a feeling my best business is gonna be in getting rid of 8 and selling Win 7 units.

BTW just FYI but if you wanna go back to Win 7 download the trial of Driver Magician and choose "update drivers" followed by Win 7 X64, they usually have access to drivers for just about any piece of hardware and so far I have yet to run into a piece of hardware that I couldn't "downgrade" to Win 7..

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[Anonymous Coward]

It set the sensitivity on the mouse to max. A trivial fix, but without the touchpad it was nigh impossible to even get to the options to change it.

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[rdnetto]

I'm still not confident in Linux's ability to remain stable/repair itself easily without having to frequently re-install.

I would say Linux is superior to Windows in that regard. I used to need to reinstall Windows yearly to keep the system running well, but after I changed to Linux the only times I've needed to reinstall it were when upgrading to the latest version of Ubuntu*, or changing distros.

Actually, the main impetus for the switch came when my user profiles under Windows got corrupted and there was no way to recreate them without reinstalling it. Under Linux, the same problem is trivial to fix - just delete/rename the home folders and everything gets regenerated.

*While you can upgrade without reinstalling, I've never trusted it after doing the same with Windows a few times ended badly. Since then I've changed to a rolling release distro, and now I don't even need to do that.

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? I installed it and it unpinned IE from the taskbar without asking (needless to say, it's not my primary web browsing device). Presumably it's just set to screw up your IE preferences or lack thereof, whatever they are.

Also, perhaps controversially:
- No longer pins new apps to the start screen, making them a pain in the arse to find for the first time.
- Takes away the less offensively colourful desktop themes.

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[Anonymous Coward]

Only 4 years? I don't remember if I did a new install when I went from a 400 MHz Pentium 2 to a P3-600, but I know for sure that I haven't reinstalled my Linux machine since then.

But then again, I'm the sort of person who believes that switching distro shouldn't need a reinstall, and have done just that from SuSE to Arch to now Slackware.

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[msobkow]

It's not even "adding a button." It's adding a button *graphic* in the lower left corner where there was *always* a "hot spot" to click for bringing up the menu windows.

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm still not confident in Linux's ability to remain stable/repair itself easily without having to frequently re-install.

The issue maybe that last time you used Linux, you broke it and could not figure out how to fix it so re-installed it. I'm not sure the blame can be laid at the feet of Linux for not fixing itself.

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[Anonymous Coward]

No.

Windows 8 / 8.1 finds every excuse to start reinstalling this shit with no input from the user.

Spending even a few minutes after each episode uninstalling this shit again is still too much.

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[L4t3r4lu5]

What do you use your system for? If it's not gaming, then Linux will work for you. If it is gaming, then you might have to wait for SteamOS or make do with indie / old titles / clones / WINE headaches, but Linux will work for you.

Ubuntu is great if you've come from Windows 7 / 8; I've used it from 10.04, and it's gotten better in terms of hardware support and usability. I always pinned the taskbar to the left anyway, as it released precious vertical space on my 16:10 monitor. If you fancy a regular launcher menu (Start Menu) look at Mint. Both OSs have installers which will detect your Windows OS and leave it alone, and install Linux either alongside or on a different HDD. Safest bet is to buy a cheap HDD and just keep Linux on it. If you don't like, remove the Linux HDD and repair your Windows boot sector with the install media.

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[coastwalker]

Win 7 has been screwed for a few weeks now for right mouse clicks to bring up context menus. The menu sometimes persists but usually it disappears when you release the mouse button. I hope those fuckers at Microsoft are aware that the bad experience they are giving their existing user base, particularly in the corporate world will come home to roost. If Microsoft software has become so utterly unreliable on the back of their efforts to turn their operating system into a mobile phone, then I have no real issues to moving to Google documents or any other trendy joke business software because its unlikely to be worse than Microsoft.

A mobile phone or tablet are suitable for some tasks, the one thing they do not do is creative things. So they are fine for people consuming or processing content but not for anything creative like Engineering, content creation, analysis, synthesis. But that's OK because we don't do any of those things in the West anymore.
 

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[AmiMoJo]

I know it's unfashionable but I'm actually okay with my Windows 8 laptop. It boots from cold in under 4 seconds. On Windows 7 I replaced the start menu anyway because I prefer the old "all programs" menu, so I just did the same on Windows 8 and booted directly to the desktop at the same time. No issues with the 8.1 upgrade, seems just as smooth as before and everything works.

Windows 8 itself is fine. The new task manager is nice, the flat look is nice, everything else is pretty much the same as it was in 7.

I'm not in love with it or anything, but it's hardly another Vista.

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[Anonymous Coward]

The Start Menu was outdated shit as I've explained here.

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[X0563511]

Sure, Windows 8 is fine... after you replace the UI shell.

Please tell me why that makes Windows 8 OK? That you have a third-party workaround does not mean the original problem isn't still there.

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[X0563511]

Actually, the main impetus for the switch came when my user profiles under Windows got corrupted and there was no way to recreate them without reinstalling it.

The end result is good (you ditching Windows) but this is incorrect. Safe mode, delete the profile directory in C:\Users, then reboot and log in. The user profile will rebuild. Of course, all your shit is gone unless you backed it up first, but even then you still have to put things back and fix your settings again.

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[Tsingi]

I'm still not confident in Linux's ability to remain stable/repair itself easily without having to frequently re-install.

I don't understand that either. My 76 yo mother uses Linux with no problems, because she isn't net savvy she was always screwing her windows install.

Personally I work with and use windows personally and have for 20 years. Basically the whole run. I'm sure I've had to perform re-installs, but the only times I specifically remember doing that is setup runthroughs on new installations.

Basically both ends of the spectrum heard from.

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[roc97007]

Exactly. Let's see. Stick with Win7, which works, or pay to upgrade to Win8, which even the people who like it admit they have to dick with in order to make it usable.

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[bmo]

>lists a bunch of dumb stuff
>still not pissed off enough at 8.1 to even switch to 7, let alone switch to Linux.

I don't even...

Linux's ability to remain stable/repair itself

What do you mean, repair itself? You mean that it should think it knows better than the person sitting in the chair as to what's acceptable?

It's why I switched to Linux in the first place, last century.

If it sits there and does what it's told, it doesn't need to bloody repair itself, and people like you trying to bring concepts from Windows should just stay the hell away from trying to make Linux into Windows, thanks.

>Frequently reinstalling

Your problem is that you think that "fixing" an OS is done by reinstalling it, because you've been taught that over the past 20+ years of Windows 3.0 - 88.1. Stop expecting every other OS to be as bad as Windows. Start expecting better. Stop being satisfied with whatever Microsoft keeps serving up. You strike me as someone who suffers from Software Stockholm Syndrome.

--
BMO

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[JMJimmy]

This does NOT actually uninstall the files from your computer, it simply "uninstalls" the tile. This applies to bullshit/bundled apps + advertising. The files remain on your system, you'll still be prompted to update them (which re-installs the tile) and in all they take up several GB of data on my system. I had to go in, change viewing permissions to find the hidden apps folder, change the ownership of the folders, change the permissions to give admin full control, then manually delete them - even then there were files I couldn't delete for some reason and I would still be prompted (though I know how to stop that now via PowerShell).

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[bmo]

Note that the instructions to enter Safe Mode requires the computer to be booting successfully. Also note that they tell you that you can't use F8 to boot into safe mode any more, but don't tell you that it's now shift-F8. The bit about Windows 8 giving you no chance to hit this is actually true; I wound up powering off the laptop during boot to "trick" Windows 8.1 into taking me to the recovery menu. (As getting to the black screen counted as "booting" as far as Windows cared.)

I've given up using F8/shiftF8 in virtual machines. I directly edit boot.ini (in notepad) to turn on safe mode and later turn it off. WinFLP also boots too fast to hit F8.

The boot switches for boot.ini:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/239780

You can also edit boot.ini from booting a live Linux distro and doing it that way if it's totally FUBARed.

--
BMO

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[JMJimmy]

By "repair itself" I mean have the tools available to diagnose problems and repair them without having to lose all the configurations you've applied to the system.

I've tried to switch to Linux 4 times now in an attempt to get away from Windows. Every time there's some random problem that prevents me from booting to the desktop. I could spend hours researching the resolution to it, or I could re-install. As bad as Windows is, there's never been a time in recent memory where I couldn't get it to boot to the desktop with very little trouble. Back in 98se days, sure I had to re-install a few times, but XP/7 I never had the need.

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[JMJimmy]

Tried Ubuntu 4 times, always ended up at a terminal with it refusing to boot to desktop.

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[Anonymous Coward]

Andpleasefixmybrokenspacebar.Thisisarealpainintheass.ThisisveryembarrassingbecausepeoplethinkI'matotalidiot.Thanksinadvance,Microsoft!

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[bmo]

>insults and namecalling for people who don't like a "feature" of Windows, parroting a Microsoft talking point, but in the most offensive way possible.

You're one hell of a salesman.

--
BMO

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[bmo]

- Takes away the less offensively colourful desktop themes.

When 8.2 comes out, it's all going to be Hot Dog Stand.

And if I could use colors here, I would use red and yellow for this entire post.

--
BMO

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[JMJimmy]

The start menu is not outdated. While I personally used Launchy the start menu provided a compact access point to all the needed functions. The metro system is a glorified desktop with shortcuts. I stopped using desktop shortcuts back in 98se. They're clutter, inefficient to access/read, and time consuming to manage. Tiles are no different. The worst part though, when you do need to access things like the Control Panel, if you haven't created a tile for it, there's no visible way to get to it for non-techie users. Pre-8.1 it was only accessible via searching, which search itself is not visible so you must know it exists to use it, or via WinKey+X. Post 8.1 they've added a right-click on the start button which performs the same function as WinKey+X but it's still not visible.

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[bmo]

By "repair itself" I mean have the tools available to diagnose problems and repair them without having to lose all the configurations you've applied to the system.

You mean a text editor and access to /etc/ as root? Right?

RIGHT?

"But I want it to be done for me as a one-click dumb-user application"

No. This kind of shit barely even works in Windows. Kindly shut up about stuff like this.

Every time there's some random problem that prevents me from booting to the desktop.

I've been using Linux since 1994. The only time I couldn't get to a desktop was last century when I installed the wrong driver and I wound up with a >X crash >text login loop which I was still able to log in to by waiting for the login: password: prompt to show up in between X crashes.

At a minimum, you should be loading the VESA drivers, which come with every single Linux distro, and are available to you in recovery mode in Ubuntu these days.

You're doing something seriously wrong, or you have a hardware problem. I suspect a combination of both.

--
BMO

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[JMJimmy]

4 different systems all have hardware problems and all had different failure points? Riiiiight

I'm talking about simple things like sfc /scannow, chkdsk /f, nfc winsock reset. Some tools exist but not enough. The last 2 problems I had with linux, I couldn't even find anyone who'd even heard of the issue before. One I was able to track down to a problem with specific laptops refusing to resume from hibernate - it took them 6+ months before they patched that problem. The other the only advice I could get was "reinstall".

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[KingMotley]

So you complain they got rid of the start button, and they add a start button. Now you complain that you wanted a non-full screen start menu.

As if this is a hugely epic problem. I like the new start screen. If you don't (for whatever reason), feel free to install any of the dozen or so replacements, many of them free.

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[im_thatoneguy]

Sure, Windows 8 is fine... after you replace the UI shell.

Please tell me why that makes Windows 8 OK?

Let me guess... you have no problem though with dumping Gnome for KDE or vice versa though? Complaining about Windows not being exactly the way you want it out of the box... coming from linux advocates is comical at best.

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

... ... ... My Fiancee had no shortage of issues thanks to this. What's worse, the upgrade nuked any System Restore point before upgrading to 8.1. *so much hate*...

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[X0563511]

There's a big difference: Microsoft provides what Windows 8(.1) comes with and that only - any and all of the linux distributions I often work with supply Gnome, KDE, and more - they are not third-party interface overhauls you run off and download but tested components of a distribution.

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[mcgrew]

Install Linux dual-boot, you'll find that it's a lot more stable than Windows (I have W7 on a notebook). So far of the distros I've tried, kubuntu is my favorite.

Linux is rock-solid stable, and you'll be happy to find that you don't even need to rebook, let alone reinstall. No reboots needed for patches, and you'll discover that KDE has had features for years that Windows still lacks.

Windows' only advantage over Linux, from a user's perspective, is that it's prettier.

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[bmo]

4 different systems all have hardware problems and all had different failure points? Riiiiight

Then it's PEBKAC or you don't even know what the real problem is in even a general sense.

>chkdsk /f

This is the command that made me switch permanently in 1998, because it ate the entire file allocation table and left me with:

DIR 001
DIR 002
DIR 003 ...

and under each:

FILE.001
FILE.002
FILE.003 ...

Because that's what you get when long filenames fail and chkdsk (or scandisk) "fixes" it.

>number of command line tools

There are orders of magnitude more of these in Linux than under Windows, and they actually work. Your argument is specious at best. You are using your ignorance of the tools themselves to argue that they don't exist.

So like, whatever, man.

> I couldn't even find anyone who'd even heard of the issue before.

What, that X crashes?

>One I was able to track down to a problem with specific laptops refusing to resume from hibernate

So now it's not X crashing but resuming from Hibernation? So which problem is it really?

Assuming that your problem was resuming from hibernation (likely) and not being unable to get to a desktop from boot (unlikely).

That's because the standard for power handling, ACPI, is horrible and badly implemented by hardware vendors. Because they don't follow the fucking standard themselves. If they did follow the fucking published standard, then we wouldn't have this fucking problem in Linux. The solution has been to just not use hibernation or suspend-to-RAM. The situation is just that bad and has nothing to do with the Linux kernel, and everything to do with OEMs like Dell and HP doing whatever the fuck they want and "HAHAHA fuck you WE HAVE YOUR MONEY" This is especially a problem with HP DV series laptops. I own one. Never again. It's crap.

>The other the only advice I could get was "reinstall".

This is blatantly false or you were not even asking in Linux fora, or you were calling up the useless HP or Dell tech support.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmD_8cBqhW0

--
BMO

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[AmiMoJo]

My point was that I used the same add on, which BTW replaces the start menu and not the entire UI, on Windows 7 so basically nothing changed for me. Well, except that it boots even faster now, and the UI is flat.

I'm a geek who came from a heavily customized Amiga OS. I also sometimes use Linux, again customized. I wouldn't expect Windows to suit my exact preferences out the box either.

All I'm saying is that it isn't as bad as some people like to make out. It's not Vista bad - so bad you can't fix it with any amount of tweaking because it's just fundamentally broken. After installing a single tweak, which is nice and clean and doesn't hack its way into the system, I'm pretty happy with it. I tend not to get too excited about the OS these days, but it doesn't get in my way, is quick and looks okay. I certainly don't feel rage every time I use it, like some people seem to.

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[norminator]

I wish I could have those issues... I tried several times to install the update and every time it would install, reboot, start setting things up, then freeze. On rebooting, it would say it was restoring the previous version.

The error code it gives apparently has something to do with either a driver problem or an issue with a startup program (but I tried disabling all startup programs). Windows Update says I'm all up to date on everything, so there's nothing I can really do, unless there's some driver update in the next few weeks, or if MS releases an updated updater (not likely).

Also, this doesn't have much to do with the gripes I listed above, but since Windows Update has been the place to go for service packs and updates to Windows, why don't they just make the 8.1 update available there, instead of in the stupid Windows App store? Most of the time when I've gone to the app store, I can't find anything about the 8.1 update, so instead I have to go to the MS website, where I can click a link to the update in the app store. I get that OS X does their updates through the OS X app store, and MS is trying to gradually turn Windows into a touch-based iOS/Windows Phone-style interface, but it seems like the app store is a stupid place for an update to the entire OS, since other OS-level updates happen through Windows Update.

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[operagost]

Microsoft spent 20 years trying to remove all the desktop icons that were a legacy of Windows Program Manager, putting them into menus. Once that was accomplished, they put all the icons back on a "start screen" and removed the menus.

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[JMJimmy]

I triple booted a MacBook Pro for 18 months to try all 3 systems. OSX does what it does well but it doesn't do much. Ubuntu failed 3 times during that period. Windows was the only thing that did what I needed it to and didn't fail. Ultimately the hardware failed at 18 months (couldn't handle the video processing load I was putting on it and seemed to have issues with the PMC drivers which resulted in excess heat even on idle)

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[JMJimmy]

I should rephrase that - "Windows was the only thing that did what I needed it to and didn't fail in such a way that it wasn't quick and easy to recover from". There were a few chkdsk /f that I had to run to be able to boot during that period but it was a quick fix and didn't require me to re-install, spend hours on support forums tracking down issues, or require hours of work to re-configure my preferences.

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[JMJimmy]

File recovery issue with chkdsk - you're absolutely right it's a pain and useless in many cases. That is a failing. However, it's rare that you ever get those files most of the time it's fixing indexing/journal issues and don't have to chunk files.

>number of command line tools

There are orders of magnitude more of these in Linux than under Windows, and they actually work. Your argument is specious at best. You are using your ignorance of the tools themselves to argue that they don't exist.

You're making my point for me. Even if they do exist you've got to go hunting for the right one, then learn how to use it properly or you'll fuck up the system even more. With 3 commands (chkdsk, sfc, nfc) and a couple GUIs (msconfig, services.msc, etc) I can diagnose/fix most common non-malware issues with Win7. Sure I may be ignorant of some of the Linux equivalents but in my experience 99% of the problems I've run into on Linux require specific knowledge of specific files/flags which quite frankly I don't have time for. In my youth I may have, like I used to have time to mess around with autoexec.bat, but now I need the system to work so I can work.

> I couldn't even find anyone who'd even heard of the issue before.

What, that X crashes?

No, boots to a terminal with no error message, I have to go hunting through various log files (without an "EventViewer" to make it easy) to figure out why it's booting to the terminal instead of to the desktop. When I finally did find the right log file, the error message was too generic for anyone to help me, it was just a non-descript problem with the theme files which, instead of just gracefully failing to display the theme I'd selected, it failed outright.

>One I was able to track down to a problem with specific laptops refusing to resume from hibernate

So now it's not X crashing but resuming from Hibernation? So which problem is it really?

I never said "crashing", I said refusing to boot to the desktop - whether by crash or failure to resume the result is the same.

>The other the only advice I could get was "reinstall".

This is blatantly false or you were not even asking in Linux fora, or you were calling up the useless HP or Dell tech support.

Fuck you - I participated here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/568711 as well as a few forums/lists where ultimately it was found to be a kernel issue

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[JMJimmy]

Probably because they know it's borked so they're doing a slow rollout, fixing the problems the early adopters find before they push it via update. That or they're just stupid which is entirely possible.

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[bmo]

Even if they do exist you've got to go hunting for the right one, then learn how to use it properly or you'll fuck up the system even more.

Because you didn't have to learn how to use the tools in Windows? Because misusing Windows tools won't fuck up Windows?

You're arguing that you were born knowing how to use Windows and that you should never have to learn anything, ever, you know that? An argument *for* ignorance.

Gott im Himmel.

> whether by crash or failure to resume the result is the same.

No it's not. Language has a use. While being a stickler for precision is not always productive or possible, being kind-of accurate in a broad sense helps people help you.

(without an "EventViewer" to make it easy)

Because /var/log doesn't exist and google doesn't exist. And grep and head and tail don't exist, and more doesn't exist, neither does pico, vi, or emacs.

>participated in launchpad thread

Yes? And? Your failure to describe the problem correctly even in broad terms means that your participation in such threads just muddies the water.

--
BMO

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[roc97007]

What X0563511 said in reply.

Plus, at work you don't necessarily have the latitude (or even the permission) to replace the shell in your Windows computer. Which may be one of the reasons my company has no intention of adopting Win8. We're going to leapfrog over it, as we did with Vista, and hope for the best.

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[JMJimmy]

Even if they do exist you've got to go hunting for the right one, then learn how to use it properly or you'll fuck up the system even more.

Because you didn't have to learn how to use the tools in Windows? Because misusing Windows tools won't fuck up Windows?

You're arguing that you were born knowing how to use Windows and that you should never have to learn anything, ever, you know that? An argument *for* ignorance.

Gott im Himmel.

Misusing Windows tools is a lot harder to do because they actively warn/outright prevent you from doing something stupid. Linux community opinion is much like yours "it's not our fault you didn't research it fully" - which, while accurate, is a complete copout because not everyone has the time/inclination to do so. It's great that you've got the time to be a Linux geek - I don't, nor do the majority of people who use computers.

> whether by crash or failure to resume the result is the same.

No it's not. Language has a use. While being a stickler for precision is not always productive or possible, being kind-of accurate in a broad sense helps people help you.

I was accurate in my description: Linux repeatedly ran into issues which prevented it from booting to the desktop for 4 distinct reasons. I'm not going to detail every freaking issue here but the end result was always the same: I was unable to access the desktop.

(without an "EventViewer" to make it easy)

Because /var/log doesn't exist and google doesn't exist. And grep and head and tail don't exist, and more doesn't exist, neither does pico, vi, or emacs.

>participated in launchpad thread

Lets look at the processes:
Event Viewer: Load it up, create a custom view -> select the time frame, the level of detail/type of error, the source(s) or log file type(s) you want to search, and if you want more detailed limitations (keyword/eventid/etc). It creates a nice report, very easily readable.

grep? sure that gives me keyword search. head/tail, sure that'll give me the first/last 10 of 1 log file, pico/vi/emacs sure they're great text editors but won't generate a report across multiple logs. System Log Viewer is the same deal, it'll view one log at a time but forget trying to isolate a needle in a haystack unless you know exactly what you're searching for.

Yes? And? Your failure to describe the problem correctly even in broad terms means that your participation in such threads just muddies the water.

--
BMO

The problem was described quite clearly but here's one just for you: My experience has been that, when you run into a system breaking or unusual problem with Linux you must either spend an inordinate amount of time researching the resolution, devising a fix yourself, or re-install the OS; ether for expediency or because no resolution can be found.

I want to like Linux, I really do, it's just not there yet. Add to that, there's too many people like you who expect everyone to become a linux geek/want to use a command line. Command lines are great, they can be very efficient, but they also require preexisting knowledge to operate. GUIs allow users without that knowledge to simply process the information and discard it when done. I'll freely admit that there are several in Windows that I've mentioned in this thread which do require preexisting knowledge, however, the number required to remember is tiny compared to Linux - the rest are available in GUI form.

There's a great quote which goes something like this: "If you were to learn 10 new methods in Java every day for the rest of your life, you'd be dead before you learned them all". While intended for programers, the same principle applies here. grep alone as 22 different flags, not including special characters/pattern matching/expressions, that's one command among hundreds. Then there's the combi

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[bmo]

I want to like Linux, I really do

No you don't.

You just want to bitch and moan and not read a damn thing. You've demonstrated here: diagnose/fix most common issues in under 30 minutes without the need to research commands,

You are unwilling to even open a manpage or use Google.

Stick with Windows. You deserve it.

Windows keeps getting worse and people want to move away but there's no Linux option that can fill the gap between Win8 idiocy and OSX walled garden.

My 60 year old "Uncle Joe" (He's not my uncle, we just call him that) with an 8'th grade formal education from the Old Country (Madeira) has been using Linux since Ubuntu's Dapper.

"I don't see what's so hard about it. It's just like DOS and Windows" - Uncle Joe.

And the grandkids like the games.

Your problem with Linux isn't Linux. It's your intransigence.

--
BMO

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[rdnetto]

It's been a while, so I don't remember the full details, but I believe I did try this. IIRC, the issue was that I had a backup of everything except C:\Users from one installation, and backups of C:\Users from a different installation. Windows didn't like this because the SSIDs in the per-user registry hives were wrong. The only way that I was able to get it to work was completely deleting the accounts and recreating them, but that caused it to change the locations of the profiles (which was a problem since the Users folder was shared across the network and a bunch of stuff depended on it).

In the end I just got frustrated with trying to fix a system that Microsoft clearly didn't want me to understand, and gave up on getting the installation to work. Linux actually worked much better than I'd expected - Office worked almost flawlessly under Wine, most of my commonly used programs were cross platform anyway, and KDE is way more functional than the Windows desktop.

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[Anonymous Coward]

tested components of a distribution.

lol.. "tested" by whom? Linux distros just dump the shit onto their websites the moment they can get it to build. The users are the guinea pigs.

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[L4t3r4lu5]

Which version? I (fresh) installed 13.10 on release day and had no issues at all. My PC is less than one year old. If you're concerned about hardware compatibility, stick with the LTS releases, currently 12.04.1

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[hairyfeet]

Oooorrrrrr..I could NOT BUY THEIR PRODUCT and along with millions of others refuse to be dictated to and told "You don't need that" and watch it go down in flames and wadda ya know, that is exactly what is happening as folks refuse to buy new PCs or switch to android devices.

Huh, a company treats the users like crap, refuses to listen and has their flagship product go down the shitter, who'd have thunk it?

Re: ..and mouse scroll.

[KingMotley]

Hairy feet, as usual, you are misguided. People aren't switching to tablets because of anything Microsoft does are did. The switch was inevitable. A large portion if the population previously bought PCs to consume content, and when a better platform arrived, cheaper, mobile, and better for consuming content became available, those users switched to it.

As for Microsoft listening, perhaps you should listen to yourself. The masses has spoken, and they wanted a more mobile, more touch friendly environment that gets out of their way while the user is consuming content. Lo and behold, that is EXACTLY the UI changes made to windows. It's touch enabled, it gets completely out of the way while the user is running the apps (consuming content), yet still allows them to continue running their old applications they are familiar with. Sounds like Microsoft listened pretty damn well.

Or are you saying that people hate touch enabled devices that get the OS UI out of the way, and in order to protest their absolute hatred for how Microsoft has done that, they've all flicked to tablets... Which DO THE EXACT SAME THING!

Lol.

Re: ..and mouse scroll.

[Anonymous Coward]

Is Bork a technical term?

Re: ..and mouse scroll.

[hairyfeet]

Uh huh, that is why its selling so well and folks have so much "fun" with it is because they really wanted a sailphone for a PC, right.

Look its REALLY simple, Ballmer lost his shit because Apple became the largest company and instead of accepting that PCs had gotten "good enough" for most folks and that he should be trying to sell value add to the OS he instead....makes a sailphone OS. A sailphone OS that admins don't want, and gamers don't want and to top it off OEMs don't want it either.

Ya wanna know the REAL reason Android is selling? Its NOT because of mobility, its because Android IS WINDOWS, its Windows as it USED to be. Its simple to use,yet still easy to get to the system settings. It has an appstore sure, but it takes a single click to allow programs from anywhere. Its as easy to customize for Joe and Jane Average as changing a Windows wallpaper was, and it runs quite well on a multitude of devices. At the same time Android was rising MSFT was putting out the bloated piggie that was Vista and while 7 did well instead of learning and listening somebody decided that they could just "be Apple" and put out locked down high priced hardware...nope, I got better odds of winning the powerball.

You give folks what they want and they buy, give them shit and tell them "you don't need that" and watch them walk away...what is so hard to understand?

Re: ..and mouse scroll.

[KingMotley]

Wow. Nothing you said is right.

Android isn't selling because of anything you said. People were moving to smart phones and tablets before android had a workable solution worth a crap. Android just hitched a ride as a cheaper low cost alternative that is almost-but-not-quite what Apple had for years.

If android/Linux was everything you claim, it would represent more than 0.5% on the desktop. Which it isn't.

I already told you the why the market is moving the direction it is. Do with it as you will, but your crackpot theories are just that. Keep deluding yourself if you want.

Re: ..and mouse scroll.

[hairyfeet]

I provide citations you provide...bullshit. Either back up your statements with citations or please quit wasting my time, thx.

Re: ..and mouse scroll.

[KingMotley]

You provided citations that don't prove what you said you retard. Go google the citations yourself. I got better thing to do.

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[Anonymous Coward]

" It boots from cold in under 4 seconds."

When you shutdown Windows 8, it doesn't actually shutdown. It does a type of hibernation instead, so it feels like it's faster.
Kill the power completely on it instead of doing a shutdown, then time how long it takes to start up.

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[Anonymous Coward]

> I'm still not confident in Linux's ability to remain stable/repair itself easily without having to frequently re-install.

I don't even...

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[Anonymous Coward]

Idiots like this guy are why the year of Linux on the desktop has been 10+ years in the coming but still not here.

There's some psychological commonality shared by those that feel they are part of some Linux Community that results in the air of arrogance and condescension that pervades these communities.

Why be inclusive when you can berate people into agreeing with you, right BMO?

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[bmo]

Refusal to learn something new when trying to do something new is a kind of disease. It is madness.

And you are a douchebag.

--
BMO

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. I use Linux (Ubuntu) as my daily workstation since 2005. Yes, I reinstall rather than upgrade every time there's an LTS, but I would do the same with windows. Keep your personal files (home directory, my documents, whatever it's called) on a separate partition and make your life painless. Before I switched full time I dual booted. I went from win 98, to win 2000 to win xp, to win vista. At the same time upgraded from debian to Ubuntu warty, to every regular release of Ubuntu until Lucid, to Precise, and now I'm waiting for Trusty. No more windows though. And that alone helps me sleep at night.

Re:..and mouse scroll.

[Anonymous Coward]

What's hilarious about this? I think it's just sad. It was sad in the first place that windows (and mac, to be fair) assume you need to "install drivers", but to take away your goto recovery option? I had no idea. Shame on MS.

You have to test the mouse for OS updates now?

[Joe_Dragon]

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?

Re:You have to test the mouse for OS updates now?

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

Yes, if there was changes to the way mouse handling works.

Apparently Windows 8.1 includes changes to how the mice/trackballs/etc work. Also, there's more than one way to interact with the mouse via the set of APIs available to windows developers. Some games exhibit odd mouse behaviors, some don't.

This is a huge downside to the touted "backwards compatibility." Sure you're supporting a lot of apps, but a lot of those apps certainly do things the wrong way.

Re:You have to test the mouse for OS updates now?

[fermion]

The biggest problem with MS Windows was that it required a different device driver for common devices. Every time a USB drive was put in, a new device driver, and probably malware, was installed. With a camera, PTP was not implemented for a long time so device drivers were again needed. It is not surprising that they are continuing this device specific philosophy instead of adopting the open standards.

Re:You have to test the mouse for OS updates now?

[larry bagina]

Yeah, check the release note. Previously, you only had to fondle the dirty mouse balls. Now you need to suck the dirty mouse balls while rubbing the click wheel.

Re:You have to test the mouse for OS updates now?

[RespekMyAthorati]

I am having the stuttering-skipping problem mentioned above. Funny thing, it only happens with a Microsoft Mouse!

Re:You have to test the mouse for OS updates now?

[cheater512]

Its curious that Linux has leapfrogged Windows in this area.

Re:You have to test the mouse for OS updates now?

[roc97007]

Good point... The "M" in KVM is kinda basic...

Re:You have to test the mouse for OS updates now?

[Jmc23]

fricken new-fangled hermaphraditic mice!!

The best of both worlds they said!

Re:You have to test the mouse for OS updates now?

[Opportunist]

Maybe only they are 100% bug compatible.

Re:You have to test the mouse for OS updates now?

[Ol Olsoc]

Yes, if there was changes to the way mouse handling works.

1986 called, and they have some ideas about how to make a mouse work.

So what is next? Windows going to go to escape codes for printers?

I hear that in the Windows 8.2 upgrade, they might even have landscape printing!

Cutting edge, this Microsoft!

Re:You have to test the mouse for OS updates now?

[Ol Olsoc]

I am having the stuttering-skipping problem mentioned above. Funny thing, it only happens with a Microsoft Mouse!

That's a feature, dude! You want things to work right, ya gotta have the original equipment.

Re:You have to test the mouse for OS updates now?

[Anonymous Coward]

this also applies to network controllers, new installs of windows vista/7 never detects them, you need the original driver disk or have to install it with a usb flash drive (ie windows needs the network to find drivers for the network card, good luck)

Re:You have to test the mouse for OS updates now?

[wildstoo]

This is purely anecdotal (as are all the other comments on here, tbh) but I've been gaming on 8.1 since it came out and have had absolutely no issues whatsoever. If anything it's better than before.

Maybe the fact that I have a Logitech gaming mouse with its own special software and drivers helps? I always turn off Windows' control of the mouse drivers in the Logitech panel and set it up in there, which means I get a consistent feel, even across reinstalls.

Re:You have to test the mouse for OS updates now?

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

I know right!

However, given that Windows 8 is also about touch screens working nicely with mice, I'm not surprised they are experimenting with changing the way mice work.

Re:You have to test the mouse for OS updates now?

[mikechant]

Every time a USB drive was put in, a new device driver, and probably malware, was installed.

It's even worse than that. It reinstalls the device drivers every time you plug the *same* device into a different USB port. I'd hoped this behaviour would go away when my WinXP work PC was replaced recently with a new Win7 PC, but no - plug USB headphones into each of the 4 front USB ports and it reinstalls the drivers 4 times. That's pretty brain-dead.

Re:You have to test the mouse for OS updates now?

[Vintowin]

This is easy to fix.. Just do a Windows Update and it'll download the... oh, crap

Re:You have to test the mouse for OS updates now?

[F34nor]

Oh yeah and the ability to move apps from one monitor to the other! Incredible.

Re:You have to test the mouse for OS updates now?

[idontgno]

So, your anecdote suggests a good general rule: "To maximize the user experience of using Windows 8.1, use as little Windows 8.1 as you can get away with."

Makes perfect sense.

Re:You have to test the mouse for OS updates now?

[operagost]

and probably malware

Stopped reading here.

Re:You have to test the mouse for OS updates now?

[Ol Olsoc]

I know right!

However, given that Windows 8 is also about touch screens working nicely with mice, I'm not surprised they are experimenting with changing the way mice work.

Way back in time, there was a lot of experimenting with mice. We had several of them at work. Joysticks, A sorta cool stationary mouse that used pool balls and side clicks, smaller ball shaped stationary mice, weird XY grid center the crosshairs over a gridded mousepad gastraphaguses, even to an extent, the drawing tablet.

These days we have the gaming mice added to the genre. But really, it is pretty hard to beat the simple optical mouse with a scroll bar, and 2 buttons.

Even on my Mac Mighty mouse, I have most of the gesturing disabled for standard mouse action.

Re: You have to test the mouse for OS updates now?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah because USB as a malware vector is just fantasy. Silly paranoid nutters.

Next thing they'll be telling us is that you can get viruses and malware from files downloaded over the Internet! When will these silly fuckers grow up and stop being so paranoid?

Re:You have to test the mouse for OS updates now?

[_xeno_]

It reinstalls the device drivers every time you plug the *same* device into a different USB port.

It's even worse than that. If it were just reinstalling device drivers, that would be time consuming and pointless, but it actually treats the thing as an entirely new, different device. Which means that I have like five different copies of my USB headset in the device list, and every single one of them has a different set of settings.

Which is especially annoying because my headset driver pretends it's a "surround" device, but it handles surround sound horribly, so I always disable that in the device settings. Which I had to do again every time I used a different USB port for whatever reason. Thankfully, I'm pretty sure I've got all the USB ports I'd actually use it in set up now...

Valid reasons?

[bhcompy]

Microsoft has several valid reasons why you should upgrade to Windows 8.1

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

Re:Valid reasons?

[walbourn]

Actual technical content in a /. article... Hmmm. not sure if that's really an option, but here goes a partial list of stuff you get in 8.1 and not with 7:

• DirectX 11.2 hardware support including tiled resources, Feature Level 11.1 hardware support, etc.
• Much improved Direct3D capture support when using VS 2013 Graphics Diagnostics
• Native USB 3.0 support
• 200% High-DPI scaling support
• Bitlocker has been improved, particularly when initializing a new drive

Re:Valid reasons?

[batkiwi]

-Faster boot times
-Better SSD support
-less ram used by OS
-storage spaces if you have a bunch of disparate disks and want data redundancy

And you can boot to your desktop so you never see "metro" if you don't like it.

Re:Valid reasons?

[Anonymous Coward]

History has taught me to never upgrade. Ever.

Windows? Fail.
Ubuntu? Fail.
I can't speak for Mac, but it's too pricey for me to care.

Use the new OS that comes with your next PC/laptop/tablet/whatever. Never upgrade.

Re:Valid reasons?

[Anonymous Coward]

They are probably talking about an upgrade from 8.0... but one reason to upgrade from windows xp is that patches will stop soon if they haven't already.

Re:Valid reasons?

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows 7-->Windows 8

-Faster boot times
-Better SSD support
-less ram used by OS
-storage spaces if you have a bunch of disparate disks and want data redundancy

Conclusion: Windows 8 has a tiny amount to offer.

Windows 7 or 8 -->Windows 8.1

- you can boot to your desktop so you never see "metro" if you don't like it.
- your mouse won't work.

Conclusion: Windows 8.1 is essential if you hate working for someone. "Mouse no worky, I'm going to lunch."

Re:Valid reasons?

[Anonymous Coward]

1 - Dont care. W7 boots fast enough
2 - Possibly valid
3 - 1Gb vs 1.1Gb isnt compelling
4 - So that's different what was availible in w7 how exactly?

And of couse W7 doesnt have Metro

So why is W8.1 a compelling upgrade again?

Re:Valid reasons?

[Anonymous Coward]

DirectX 11.2 hardware support including tiled resources, Feature Level 11.1 hardware support, etc.

Seeing as I have nothing that supports 11.2 I don't care.

Much improved Direct3D capture support when using VS 2013 Graphics Diagnostics

I'm sure all 5 people in the world who know what this is care deeply about this very important feature.

Native USB 3.0 support

OMG like Installing the USB 3 driver on Windows 7 is so much harder than installing the latest graphics driver from your favorite GPU vendor.

200% High-DPI scaling support

Try again ... so does Windows 7.

Bitlocker has been improved, particularly when initializing a new drive

Don't care.

I would settle for just one reason that is not total BS to upgrade just one.

Re:Valid reasons?

[smash]

The Windows 2012 R2 RSAT requires the Windows 8.1 client OS. There are a number of improvements in 2012R2 in particular with regards to hyper-v, directaccess, etc. Also (and this is the point for me in particular), Windows 2012R2 and Windows 8.1 have vastly improved PowerShell support (vs. Windows 7) for doing stuff from the command line. Yes, I know the UI is a bitch, but 8.1 fixes some of the Windows 8 brain damage, and if you're in any way involved in IT you owe it to yourself to keep up with the times so you can actually slam/praise whatever OS based on actual experience rather than hearsay.

Re:Valid reasons?

[smash]

Powershell improvements, and support for the Windows 2012R2 RSAT mostly.

Re:Valid reasons?

[cheater512]

Legit Question: If it needs less ram, then can you actually run it with less ram?

It seems that line gets mentioned with every new release but it actually means ram usage quadruples.
Remember that XP only needs 128mb of ram to function.

Re:Valid reasons?

[gl4ss]

Legit Question: If it needs less ram, then can you actually run it with less ram?

aahahahahhahaahahah .

no.

do you think those tiles work with zero ram? active tiles, with active code behind them you can't kill, which are displayed with high resolution buffers that need to stay in ram?

I thought I upgraded to 8.1, but I didn't. it botched something. what I got was a fullscreen popup/reminder that I should update. I pressed yes, it started downloading.. but nothing has happened since. I suspect it's because I'm on an user account that's local only, which was converted from a ms online account into a local only.

number 1 reason for 8.1 is actually to get people on the store. that's why they market the update is available from the store.. the other updates are neglible.

and I'm using 8 purely because windows phone 8 sdk requires windows 8(why? to get people to install windows 8. NO OTHER REASON for why the sdk needs 8). no other piece of sw that I use requires windows 8.

Re:Valid reasons?

[bill_mcgonigle]

This friendly computer support tip brought to you by your local NSA extension service.

Re:Valid reasons?

[PhrostyMcByte]

8.1 fixes some of the Windows 8 brain damage

Could you elaborate? The main differences I see are boot to desktop and a pointless start button that you can't disable.

Re:Valid reasons?

[bhcompy]

To be fair, Ubuntu continues to devolve, and from XP->Vista->7 was positive while it does seem that 8 is a regression of sorts while they change gears to be like Ubuntu. Basically, if they continue this course, they're on the Unity death spiral.

Re:Valid reasons?

[Lisias]

The Windows 2012 R2 RSAT requires the Windows 8.1 client OS.

So if I stay away from Windows 2012 R2, I can keep my Windows 7 boxes? Good to now!

Re:Valid reasons?

[smash]

The start button does actually help when doing RDP of VMs. Every single program isn't automatically pinned to the start screen any more. More of the settings are available in metro, and now you can configure graphics for the metro desktop background the change isn't so jarring between metro and desktop. But yes, there is plenty of brain damage still there.

Again, the big reason for running 8.1 is support of 2012r2 servers. We skipped Windows 2012 on the server side and skipped 8 on the clients. But if you start skipping too many versions of Windows migration starts to become a bitch.

Re:Valid reasons?

[Anonymous Coward]

Tried it, it still sucks. I compared Kubuntu running on a live cd and it blew the more recent (Win 7 - 8.1) out of the water: 15 sec boot, snappy UI, 2.5 second shutdown. Oh and the mouse worked GREAT. The only reason I haven't dropped Windows entirely on my work desktop is that the PDF editors only seem to exist in the WinWorld.

Re:Valid reasons?

[Anonymous Coward]

-Faster boot times
-Better SSD support
-less ram used by OS
-storage spaces if you have a bunch of disparate disks and want data redundancy

Like parents still waiting for a useful reason to upgrade.

Even if you are impressed by the Win7 v Win8 startup consumption comparisons out there this difference represents ~0.6% of total RAM capacity on my system. In reality most of it would be paged out to disk if ever needed and DIMM costs on order of $10/GB. In abstract I am happy Microsoft is working to make Windows more performant and consume less resources... In reality this has no effect on me in any tangible way.

Boot times are irrelevant especially when you reboot only to install patches. Wake from sleep takes as long as it takes for disk drives to spin up to 7200 RPM.

What does storage spaces get me that disk manager already does not? Mirrors, volume sets, parity have been in windows for decade(s)

Storage space appears to be implemented above IFS. This is really great yet I don't understand where it would be useful. USB stick in a storage pool with SATA drives seems silly not something I would contemplate and while double redundant storage seems cool anyone using it is likely misguided .. Mirror != Backup.

And you can boot to your desktop so you never see "metro" if you don't like it.

Not a reason to upgrade.

Re:Valid reasons?

[Opportunist]

I sure hope those are not the killer, must-have features and you just omitted the ones that only a tiny subset of users could possibly care for.

• DirectX 11.2 hardware support including tiled resources, Feature Level 11.1 hardware support, etc.

Is there any game maker crazy enough to make games that are NOT compatible with a Windows version below 8?

Much improved Direct3D capture support when using VS 2013 Graphics Diagnostics

Since I don't even know what this might entail, I'm fairly sure that I don't really care too much about it.

Native USB 3.0 support

I don't really think that the hassle of installing a USB 3.0 driver in Win7 outdoes the hassle of having to deal with Win 8 in general.

200% High-DPI scaling support

See two features above.

Bitlocker has been improved, particularly when initializing a new drive

Why should I want to use an encryption service that has a better chance to keep me out of my files than the average three letter agency?

The features you mention are nice, but they are not even remotely coming close to outweighing the troubles that I'd have to deal with when installing Win 8.

Re:Valid reasons?

[Opportunist]

8 is the usual "odd" version of Windows. For generations of Windows, you could only use every other generation.

Win95? Good.
98? Average
98SE? Good
ME? (this space left blank in the name of good taste)
XP? Good
Vista? Crap
7? Good
8? Do I really have to say anything about it?

So, essentially, if the history of Windows teaches us something, then to simply sit and wait 'til the successor of 8 emerges, and hope that our Win7 installations will tide us over.

Re:Valid reasons?

[bhcompy]

So, 98SE counts, but 95OSR2 doesn't?
Windows 2000 doesn't count?

And Vista was actually fine. The major difference between 7 and Vista is that hardware was too far behind the improvements in the interface.

Re:Valid reasons?

[walbourn]

The key features are the Windows Store, Windows Style apps, and the touch-enabled UI. I was just listing some other technical features that are present in the OS that are useful, relevant to developers, and used for/by traditional desktop apps.

Re:Valid reasons?

[locopuyo]

I use 8 not 8.1. The only real noticeable improvement over 7 is startup time. My PC boots up in 10 seconds. It is on before I finish turning on my monitors.
The full screen start menu bothered me at first, but I actually like it better now. Pretty much everything else is the same as Windows 7.
A lot of people complain about the metro stuff but they are just being stupid. There is nothing forcing you to use the metro apps on a PC, just use the desktop versions.
If you're building or getting a new machine I would put 8 on it, but I wouldn't upgrade an existing machine form 7 to 8.

Re:Valid reasons?

[Anonymous Coward]

I may have rose tinted glasses but I think the list should be more like:

Win 3.11 - Good
Win 95 - 50% crap until the release of OSR 2.0 (4.00.950 B) and best at OSR 2.5 (4.00.950 C)
Win 98 - Crap. No saving it.
Win 98SE - Pretty good as long as you had at least 64mb ram and rebooted every few days.
Win Me - I would have been further ahead to just put a 6 pack of Dr. Pepper in the microwave.
Win 2000 - What people switched to after trying Me and instead of downgrading to 98SE.
Win XP - About 50% crap until SP1, then it was good.
Win Vista - Mostly hobbled by system builders and OEM's installing it on low spec machines (not enough ram, 5400 rpm HDD's, slow GPU & CPU).
Win 7 - Good. Better with a SSD.
Win 8/8.1 - And we're back to crap again but for historically different reasons.

The thing about Win 8/8.1 is that it's not the hardware or drivers holding it back but the interface itself that gets the most complaints. Of course, if they'd just updated Win 7 under the hood and left the interface as it was, people would be screaming that it should've been a service pack and not an "I have to pay another $XXX" release.

Re:Valid reasons?

[antdude]

Or XP SP3. Oh wait, newer games don't run on it. :(

Re:Valid reasons?

[smash]

If performance is all you care about, Windows is not the OS for you and has not been for some time. However if you need to administer a corporate AD environment (or want to be able to run pretty much every game on Steam), Linux is a non-starter.

Re:Valid reasons?

[Anonymous Coward]

I imagine he started counting from 95OSR2, referring to that as Win95, so Win95? Bad; 95OSR2? Good.

Windows 2000 didn't succeed any of the releases listed, so it doesn't belong there. That was a completely separate line of operating systems until Windows XP.

Vista was fine by the time 7 was out, but was very problematic prior to that. It was highly-anticipated and left good first impressions, but drove people insane within the first few weeks.

Re:Valid reasons?

[smash]

Pretty much. But if you are involved in the corporate world and AD networks, you'll end up with 2012 boxes to administer sooner or later.

Re:Valid reasons?

[Anonymous Coward]

I use 8 not 8.1. The only real noticeable improvement over 7 is startup time.

Are you talking about the hybrid boot feature? Because sleep and/or hibernate are better in pretty much every aspect, so I don't know why you'd ever want to use hybrid boot.

Re:Valid reasons?

[dbIII]

Sod that. I've had people just last year sniffing around pretending they are authorised by Microsoft wanting to know what happened to the single NT4 server licenced in 1998 (by an idiot that wanted to migrate away from Solaris and failed) and if they can hit us for big $ in licence fees since then. You never sign up with MS Server unless you absolutely need to and are prepared to be locked in for life, and a cut down version of LDAP is not enough of a selling point for my workplace

Re:Valid reasons?

[dbIII]

Sounds like FreeBSD to me :)
Or there's those embedded versions of linux that are down to well under 5 seconds boot times. Or ... oh wait, there's a very long list.

Re:Valid reasons?

[dbIII]

Remember that XP only needs 128mb of ram to function.

It was unusable in a little VIA low power usage machine with 256MB of non-upgradable RAM so Win2k did the job. I've got fedora17 on that thing now but it can't do much.

Re:Valid reasons?

[epyT-R]

1. probably 1 little 800kB dll's worth of code.. if that.
2. How many people use VS 2013 graphics diagnostics?
3. Define 'native'. All usb controllers will need a driver of some sort. So what? It comes packaged with the install disc? Big deal.
4. I'll bet that can be set in the registry..
5. Who the hell trusts bitlocker? If they're concerned enough about security to encrypt their files, they're not going to trust crypto from a company in bed with the NSA.

Re:Valid reasons?

[epyT-R]

You call those features? I guess, if you're on a tablet.. No one does serious work on those.

Re:Valid reasons?

[dbIII]

IMHO Win2k was far better than XP until XP hit SP2. In the context of an office instead of the home Win2k was probably always better due to a higher limit on the number of computers you could share your disk with at once. NT4 workstation was even better with that but poor USB support (not quite non-existent) has made it unusable now.

Re:Valid reasons?

[dbIII]

The entire point of an OS is to let the applications get to the hardware, which is why Vista was fine for some and utterly useless for others.

Re:Valid reasons?

[AmiMoJo]

Yes and no.

On the one hand Windows 7 tends to run better on 512MB RAM and old hardware than XP does. On the other hand it won't go right down to 128MB like XP does. If your old machine has 512MB or more of RAM it is a worthwhile upgrade.

Windows 8 requires 1GB RAM minimum but I don't know if it actually prevents you installing on less. In any case it boots faster and runs a bit quicker than 7 on 1GB. The main thing is the boot time, actual application performance isn't very different to 7. Again, both are a lot faster than XP on 1GB RAM.

Re:Valid reasons?

[AmiMoJo]

And Vista was actually fine. The major difference between 7 and Vista is that hardware was too far behind the improvements in the interface.

No, the major difference was that Microsoft used performance tuning tools to get rid of all the sluggishness in Vista when they were developing 7. Try running Vista on modern hardware, you will find it is still slow. The problem is that there are choke points, delays waiting for things to happen or time out that make everything slower no matter how quick the hardware is.

Microsoft are actually quite competent when it comes to performance tuning these days. I think they gained a lot from doing their XBOX consoles.

Re:Valid reasons?

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember that XP only needs 128mb of ram to function.

actually, xp's minimum requirement was 64mb of ram and 233mhz processor. but try running xp, now, with all updates, and an antivirus, on even 4x that. sucks hairy donkey ass; just as vista or newer does on 2gb or less and with any native single core or slow dual core (e.g. atom) processor.

i wouldn't use vista, 7 or 8.x on less than 4gb ram or without at least a dual core processor that scores 1500 passmarks or higher, nor would i recommend anyone 'upgrade' their xp to one of those newer versions of windows if their system doesn't meet at least those specs.

Re:Valid reasons?

[smash]

Workplaces may vary. Management tools for my SAN are windows based. Health and Safety system is Windows based. Plenty of industry specific apps we need to run are both Windows client and require Windows servers for licensing (Surpac, Mine24d, Minecad, etc.).

We don't have much choice but to have a significant Windows infrastructure - many if the industry standard apps that have feasible alternative in the mining industry are Windows only these days.

Re:Valid reasons?

[smash]

"that have NO feasible alternative", i mean.

Re:Valid reasons?

[Anonymous Coward]

apparently halved boot times and better SSD support are small things now..lol!

now you're going to tell me the new task manager is useless, the HUGE increase in out-of-the-box driver support is just a gimmick, windows update now being almost unnoticeable is a bad thing, same resource requirements as win 7 (if not a bit better)....

Re:Valid reasons?

[Opportunist]

I can see why you left out the key features and tried for some other technical features.

Why the hell would I even want any of these "key features". I have a desktop, for crying out loud. One without a touch screen. Yes, the features sound quite useful if I had a tablet. But I do not have one. And I certainly do not plan to turn my desktop into one. It would kinda put a bit of strain on my arm to use the screen which is at arm's length in front of me as an input interface!

Just to pull a car analogy, Windows 8 feels like someone puts the engine and transmission of a sports car into a truck because people love sports cars and how they feel, so it just has to be better for trucks too.

Re:Valid reasons?

[KingMotley]

That depends. There are many things on Windows that outperform the equivalent replacements on linux. Using blanket statements is bad, especially when they are wrong.

Re:Valid reasons?

[unique_parrot]

Last week I installed win 7 sp1. All updates were under 1gb to download.
Today I got a new Notebook with win 8 from a friend to make it usable. After the first update (620 to 650mb (wtf? they can't tell you how big the updates are)) and an hour, hitting the button a second time it wants to download 1042mb (this time precise).
And this is without the 8.1 update. For now.
For me this makes win 8 look like a complete, rushed mess!

Re:Valid reasons?

[KingMotley]

Just to pull a car analogy, Windows 8 feels like someone puts the engine and transmission of a sports car into a truck because people love sports cars and how they feel, so it just has to be better for trucks too.

Not a very good analogy considering that the brand new 2014 corvette took the engine from its trucks (the silverado 1500 6.2L).

Re:Valid reasons?

[Anonymous Coward]

reluctant win8 user, and, yes, the reduced boot time is fine, BUT that has NEVER been a huge issue for me, ever...

the usual work flow doesn't mean i am chomping at the bit to get on the system within 5 seconds of turning it on, i'm usually taking off my coat, arranging my phone, tablet, water bottle, grunting hello to fellow droids, etc...
the reduced boot time is NOT getting 1 minute more of productivity out of me...

(NOT that a reduced boot time (and shut down, as far as that goes) isn't a good thing, they are just minor...)

AND that in NO WAY 'makes up' for all the rest of the retarded shit... AND this is not even from a technical/programmer type perspective, it is from a dumb user perspective: win 8 offers me NOTHING but annoyances and workarounds (bought Start8 to have some semblance of sanity upon startup)...

oh, i've been using that steaming pile of crap for months, am a normally abled person, have normal (if not above normal) eye-hand coordination, and I STILL CAN NOT GET THE STUPID RIGHT HAND BULLSHIT TO COME UP UNLESS I SWIPE MY MOUSE 2-3-4 FUCKING TIMES TO GET TO THE HIDDEN SETTINGS CRAP TO GET ME BACK TO THE REAL WINDOWS... fuckers...

HATE win8, HATE IT...

*and* its on a stupid UEFI machine, that I still need to parse about a dozen extraneous settings to figure out how to boot linux... (the monkey-see-monkey-do UEFI instructions i saw to boot another flavor did NOT show the 8-10 other Asus settings that i have no idea what they do, so don't want to mess with them until i do)
IF i could switch to linux, i would, but too many of my mainstream progs aren't usable (Revit), and i'm not enough of a techie to (waste) time figuring it out...

Re:Valid reasons?

[gl4ss]

it wasn't a troll. just pure truth.

I got the same fucking popup today.

maybe one day they'l fix it so that it actually downloads and installs the update after I press "yes".

Re:Valid reasons?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget the exceedingly clunky UAC interface of Vista, which was improved enough in Win 7 for people to stop complaining about it.

Re:Valid reasons?

[Anonymous Coward]

What are these reasons? I'm being serious.

Haven't you seen the commercials? The main and pretty much only talking point that they could come up with for upgrading to 8.1 is this new invention of a start menu that you can click on quickly. It is amazing how fast software is progressing!

Re:Valid reasons?

[dbIII]

Oddly enough in the minerals exploration industry there's a lot of "industry standard" stuff from places such as Halliburton with enough of a legacy that it's never ended up on that "new fangled" MS Windows thing.

Management tools for my SAN are windows based

That's some serious irony since those things probably run some kind of *nix these days.

Re:Valid reasons?

[smash]

Yeah, the Netapp runs on a FreeBSD variant. however all the management, reporting (Oncommand, DFM, etc.) requires a Windows host.

Re:Valid reasons?

[smash]

And yeah, we're not in exploration, but actual mining (digging ore out of the ground) so most of our applications are focused on mine design, production reporting, etc. I know a lot of that sort of stuff used to run on Unix (Vulcan, for one) and Alphas, but for the past decade or so it's been shifting pretty comprehensively to Windows.

Re:Valid reasons?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does this bullshit have to be trotted out on every single story about Vista or Win8? It's not original, it's not insightful, it's tired and we've seen it a hundred times already. GIVE IT A BREAK.

Re:Valid reasons?

[sr180]

My biggest issue, that no-one so far has mentioned? Press start, type in Putty. Hit enter or click on the search tile. Putty starts.
Connect to my machine, no problems.
Want to open another connection? Repeat the process. Nope, the start menu wont open two copies of putty, it simply takes you to the running copy. The fix is to change registry keys... WTF? why isnt there a real option to definite this behaviour?

I only noticed it recently, because the update to 8.1 killed my Classic Start menu install, and I thought I try the Windows Start menu.

Re:Valid reasons?

[locopuyo]

No, I don't use sleep, hybernate, or hybrid boot. I use plain old shutdown because it only takes 10 seconds to power on and log in. I have Windows on an SSD with 550 MB/s read speed and an i7 4770k overclocked to 4.5Ghz.

Re:Valid reasons?

[Anonymous Coward]

...

Conclusion: Windows 8.1 is essential if you hate working for someone. "Mouse no worky, I'm going to lunch."

But I know how to use a computer without a mouse. :(

Re:Valid reasons?

[Anonymous Coward]

Build a machine today and put Vista on it. After that painful experience is over, put Windows 7 on it. There is a huge difference there, mate. If there wasn't, we'd still be using Vista.

Re:Valid reasons?

[Nivag064]

Linux had usb3 drivers years before any Microsoft O/S.

Can anyone tell me: with the latest Microsoft O/S, do you still need to install drivers before you install a webcam or printer?

Over 4 years ago I installed a webcam on my Linux box, and it just worked - a few months later I found I had to install drivers before a webcam could be used on my mother's Microsoft box (XP). It must have been many years since I had to install printer driver on Linux for a new printer.

And on Linux you have a choice of several Desktop Environment Managers, each far more customisable than the one (or two?) you get with the latest Microsoft O/S's!

Why is Microsoft so far behind?

Re:Valid reasons?

[Anonymous Coward]

200% High-DPI scaling support

how is 200% fundamentally different from 150% or any % value? why can't I type in 145,56% if I so desire? for me personally 150% is too big and 125% too small. why are there only those limited options? I'd really like to know from a technical pov.

I would guess that there is no actual scaling but that there are hardcoded values for sizes of elements that just get changed to "x pixels" according to the % value you select. I really do hope they work out something actually good for the time when 4K+ devices are abundantly available. like maybe actually change to mm sizes instead of pixels..

Watermarks

[Microlith]

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.

Re:Watermarks

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently that's a bug that's been fixed now.

Re:Watermarks

[Anonymous Coward]

to microsoft, that notice is and was not a "bug" it was a feature designed to scare people into having secure boot on, insuring that only microsoft-authorized operating systems would run on that hardware.

Re:Watermarks

[Microlith]

It was only a bug when it appeared on systems with secure boot enabled, on systems without secure boot, and on Windows RT devices. It still appears on my system because I explicitly turned it off. Now I want to hide the notification.

Re:Watermarks

[mastershake82]

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2902864

Re:Watermarks

[Microlith]

THERE! Thank you. No more watermark. I wonder if this was their fix for the other systems afflicted with this message.

Re:Watermarks

[Kaenneth]

... but if you aren't using Windows, that notice won't appear anyway, right?

it's not added by the video BIOS or something, is it?

Re:Watermarks

[Jmc23]

If you want to hide the notification, umm, just turn secure boot on.

Bitching about reality does nothing to change reality and just ruins your peace of mind.

Re:Watermarks

[Jmc23]

haha, classic. Bitching does help.

Re:Watermarks

[Lisias]

Bitching about reality does nothing to change reality and just ruins your peace of mind.

If you don't bitch about what you want fixed, things simply will not be fixed.

I got my peace of mind using things that does not annoys me.

Re:Watermarks

[Opportunist]

In other words, Secure Boot will be enabled and configured (with "default values", of course) for you, whether you want it or not?

Re:Watermarks

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah - like with the Acer W3 tablet - nice little bit of kit, but I cannot disable the secure boot to try Linux on it. Annoying, but I knew going in that likely would stay that way, and I just use it "casually" for a cheap full-function tablet. Beats the heck out of my 12 y/o Fujitsu Sylistic C500 (although that could do Linux, just not very well without screen calibration...). BTW, the mouse works fine on the W3 with 8.1, whether a cheap small optical USB or hockey puck or rollerball built into a wireless or BT keyboard - I guess not being gen-yoo-wine MS is an advantage?

I will still hope for a Linux-tolerant tablet in this size some day...

Re:Watermarks

[Anonymous Coward]

microsoft-authorized operating systems would run on that hardware.

Thats a good thing, considering other competing options are junk.

Windows 8.1 Update May Bork Your Mouse

[The Grim Reefer]

I guess that's one way to get people to use the Metro touch interface.

Re:Windows 8.1 Update May Bork Your Mouse

[Opportunist]

But what do those people do who don't have a touch screen? Ya know, the 99% of users suffering from the trainwreck.

Re:Windows 8.1 Update May Bork Your Mouse

[Anonymous Coward]

Headline: "Microsoft resorts to the Swedish Chef -strategy to increase touch interface adoption."

Re:Windows 8.1 Update May Bork Your Mouse

[Luckyo]

You means like most people with windows that don't downgrade to windows 8?

Funnies aside, MS threw pretty much everyone with a desktop under the bus with w8 to get their failing phone OS more familiar with people.

Re:Windows 8.1 Update May Bork Your Mouse

[Anonymous Coward]

Urgh....99% of users are not suffering. Yes, you can find countless assholes on the internet bitching about it (I call this the "Ron Paul" effect), but the rest of us adapt rather quickly. That Start Screen is nice because after installing a program you get what you really need: just 1 icon to start the program. All the stupid fucking bullshit like URL, documentation, and uninstall shortcuts are moved aside to the "All Apps" area. Why? Because the 99% of people you refer to were ignorant motherfuckers who never realized they could customize the Start Menu by deleting unnecessary icons and creating custom folders to organize the shortcuts they do need. If you don't have a touchscreen you just use your mouse to click. It's easy enough for a child to use. Maybe if you stop crying and grow up. Then you could learn to use it to.

Re:Windows 8.1 Update May Bork Your Mouse

[Anonymous Coward]

They broke touch screen too. Pinch to zoom now zooms at the OS level and is no longer supported in IE at all.

Windows 8.1 is a PITA

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

It's a secret plot.

[MouseTheLuckyDog]

To get people to use the touch interface.

Re:It's a secret plot.

[Anonymous Coward]

Next thing you know they'll release the results of some usability test showing how much people prefer touch instead of mousing, which they'll later cite when dropping mouse support in a future OS.

Re:It's a secret plot.

[rtb61]

I am imaging the new range of after market rests, You know, keyboard rest, mouse rest and now touch screen rest, I thinking some sort of suspension system hanging from the ceiling, you know something you would see in a hospital for people with mangled arms.

Touchpad bug also

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

It isn't just MS Mice

[laffer1]

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.

Re:It isn't just MS Mice

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft really screwed something up with the Windows 8.1 mouse drivers. They really need to get this fixed.

Really?

Re:It isn't just MS Mice

[sabbede]

No problems with Logitech though.

There is a simple fix

[richardw01]

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.

Re:There is a simple fix

[FuegoFuerte]

Interesting... that feature actually makes sense, in most contexts outside of gaming. I can't count the number of times I've called my laptop bad names because the cursor jumped while I was typing, due to me accidentally brushing against the touch pad. It's unfortunate it doesn't distinguish between a built-in touch pad and an external mouse though.

Re:There is a simple fix

[casab1anca]

I'm assuming this is only for touchpads. I have a desktop with a regular mouse and I don't see any delay setting.

Re:There is a simple fix

[drinkypoo]

The Synaptics driver has this feature. Depending on how much your OEM spent on driver licensing, it might be turned off in your driver. If your laptop has anything but a Synaptics touchpad, it's a festering piece of shit.

Re:There is a simple fix

[Anonymous Coward]

All laptops have a function key or a special button to turn off the touchpad so that doesn't happen. It's just annoying to keep pressing the button if you dont have an external mouse.

Re:There is a simple fix

[Anonymous Coward]

I just disabled the tap-to-click gestures and I haven't had any problems with the touchpad since

Re:There is a simple fix

[Anonymous Coward]

That is a goddamn hardware and or user problem. If I touch the mousepad it better move. If I touch it by accident i'm clumsy, or the damn thing is positioned wrong. Please don't fix things that work as intended.

Re:There is a simple fix

[DiEx-15]

I found a faster way:

1) NEVER install Windows 8.
2) ???
3) PROFIT

Re:There is a simple fix

[FuegoFuerte]

By your wonderful logic, de-bounce capacitors should be removed from everything with a pushbutton too... obviously, bounce is a hardware and/or user problem. The user should press the damn button quickly and firmly enough, and it should be designed with good enough contacts, that there's no bounce. So let's just remove all the de-bounce caps and call everything else a user problem.

And then we'll call our hardware company "Apple."

the most astonishing thing from TFS...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait....

There are still people gaming on Windows??

Re:the most astonishing thing from TFS...

[smash]

Yes. My steam library has 84 games in it. 4 of them are available for Linux.

Re:the most astonishing thing from TFS...

[Anonymous Coward]

Who said anything about Linux?

Gaming is on consoles. That's where the market is and what games are written for these days. PCs get ports if theyre lucky.

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...

Re:the most astonishing thing from TFS...

[0123456]

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.

Re:the most astonishing thing from TFS...

[Anonymous Coward]

i have 29 games in steam, 28 of them are available under Linux.

Re:the most astonishing thing from TFS...

[smash]

I'm guessing you just buy indie bundles and don't have any AAA titles other than Portal or Half-life 2.

Re:the most astonishing thing from TFS...

[smash]

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.

Re:the most astonishing thing from TFS...

[smash]

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.

Re:the most astonishing thing from TFS...

[Opportunist]

2 words: "Mouse" and "keyboard".

Re:the most astonishing thing from TFS...

[jtownatpunk.net]

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.

Re:the most astonishing thing from TFS...

[epyT-R]

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.

Re:the most astonishing thing from TFS...

[twocows]

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.

Re:the most astonishing thing from TFS...

[smash]

Lol. moderation as troll. No, genuine curiosity as the only AAA games in my Steam library on Linux are Portal and Half Life 2.

Re:the most astonishing thing from TFS...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

windows?

[Anonymous Coward]

never heard of it

Re:windows?

[Opportunist]

I think it's some kinda frontend for Linux. Ya know, like Gnome. Just with fewer features.

Re:windows?

[Anonymous Coward]

Gnome 3 plus Unity - not "real" Gnome (2)

I told them to fix it

[Anonymous Coward]

MS employee here, posting as AC for obvious reasons...

The problem comes from Windows 8.1 detecting high DPI displays and automatically making the menus and text larger, since things looked very tiny in computers with small displays that had very high resolution. The problem is that a given application that is not DPI-aware requests a window of WxH to draw on, and then the window gets enlarged by the OS; the result is a blurry, unusable mess. But the bad news don't end there! Because of the OS messing with the window given to the app, the mouse coordinates get all messed up and produce the problem described in TFA. Unfortunately, there was no easy solution to this problem and I don't know what this "promised fix" might do since a change in each of the affected applications might be necessary. The good news is that the solution for the user is pretty simple, go into the resolution settings and set everything back to "small".

Re:I told them to fix it

[MrEricSir]

Previous versions of Windows have had DPI settings. Why is this problem new in Windows 8.1?

Re:I told them to fix it

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm, a somewhat credible and technically-literate comment totally relevant to the conversation. If at least 5% of posts in any given discussion were like this one, I might just stop trolling and go back to reading. Eh, who am I kidding - the best comment in the discussion, yours, is pitifully low-scoring and already buried under a ton of slop.

Fight-on, mister dog-food eater. You can rest easy under the notion that I read your comment, and liked it so much I didn't bother to respond with the word "nigger."

-- Ethanol-fueled

Re:I told them to fix it

[the_Bionic_lemming]

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.

Re:I told them to fix it

[Hamsterdan]

I'm amazed something like this even passed Quality Control.

Re:I told them to fix it

[Anonymous Coward]

Previous versions of Windows have slowly introduced this astounding concept that people run different size displays, but they have ALL been fucked, horribly.

Re:I told them to fix it

[bondsbw]

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.

Re:I told them to fix it

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:I told them to fix it

[DigitAl56K]

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.

Re:I told them to fix it

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:I told them to fix it

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:I told them to fix it

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want an XP interface, you don't want Ubuntu.

Re:I told them to fix it

[Lisias]

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.

Re:I told them to fix it

[Opportunist]

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.

Re:I told them to fix it

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:I told them to fix it

[Opportunist]

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.

Re:I told them to fix it

[Luckyo]

I'd grab a bean bag one :D

Re:I told them to fix it

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:I told them to fix it

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:I told them to fix it

[dbIII]

Easy, they were "downsized" in 2000 and everything has been best effort of whoever happens to be around since then.

Re:I told them to fix it

[epyT-R]

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.

Re:I told them to fix it

[dbIII]

The manufacturing test "database" was just one goddamn Excel spreadsheet written to by VB over Labview

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.

Re:I told them to fix it

[epyT-R]

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.

Re:I told them to fix it

[sabbede]

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!

Re:I told them to fix it

[sabbede]

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.

Re:I told them to fix it

[Anonymous Coward]

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".

Re:I told them to fix it

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you could use the technique in `IsProcessDPIAware` API. It returns the DPI awareness of the CURRENT process.

Re:I told them to fix it

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:I told them to fix it

[Anonymous Coward]

I would grab something with some real weight behind it... ;)

Re:I told them to fix it

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

The solution to all Windows 8 problems...

[Cyfun]

...is to install Windows 7.

Assuming there's driver support.

Re:The solution to all Windows 8 problems...

[couchslug]

Pretty much.

I wait a few years for each MSFT OS to mature before using it on my own machines. "New" Windows releases aren't exciting, they are an annoyance because they demand much change for little benefit.

Re:The solution to all Windows 8 problems...

[smash]

Doesn't work with the Windows 2012 / Windows 2012R2 RSAT, sorry thanks for playing...

Re:The solution to all Windows 8 problems...

[sabbede]

Classic Shell eradicated all of my Win8/8.1 complaints. And the 'under the hood' and management improvements are totally worth it.

app compatibility is big for Enterprise the store

[Joe_Dragon]

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.

Mouse works fine, Sandy Bridge HDMI not so much

[QQBoss]

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.

Re:Mouse works fine, Sandy Bridge HDMI not so much

[drinkypoo]

You know, VGA has a massive shitload of bandwidth. If you own a decent cable, it's fine.

Re:Mouse works fine, Sandy Bridge HDMI not so much

[Anonymous Coward]

if you think VGA is comparable to anything newer you have never used a very high resolution display or cannot see very well...

Re:Mouse works fine, Sandy Bridge HDMI not so much

[Retron]

Hmm, odd - I use a desktop PC with a Sandy Bridge i5 at work and the Intel HD graphics drivers (from here: http://downloadmirror.intel.com/22627/a08/Win64_152815.zip) work just fine under Windows 8.1. Admittedly that's via DVI rather than HDMI, as my monitor doesn't have an HDMI input.

Re:Mouse works fine, Sandy Bridge HDMI not so much

[QQBoss]

Yes, you are right, it is specific to the HDMI output, and yes, I have the same driver installed. As I said, I could use the DVI output from the motherboard for my 'small' monitor, but that causes some bizarre window relocation issues when waking up out of sleep (windows that were on one monitor will appear on another monitor when coming out of sleep, where the monitor they will wind up on 90%+ of the time is the one that is usually off (my TV, across the room). I have that problem with my current config, as well, but it happens only ~25% of the time. It appears to be related to my big DisplayPort monitor logically disconnecting (or being disconnected) when entering sleep and so Windows shifts the windows that were on it to the next monitor in line (which if my TV is plugged into the HDMI port on my video card would be it, but the fact that even when my TV is plugged into the motherboard and thus is 3rd in line it happens is what I find completely baffling), though whether it is actually at entering sleep or exiting sleep that the shift is occurring, I am not certain. 3 or more monitors does seem to be a corner condition, as the window movements never happens with only two monitors plugged in, no matter the configuration I tested.

If anyone has a better reason why this might be happening or how to prevent it, I would love to hear it, because it is really annoying. I have tried various "Power Window" type programs, but none of them have resolved the problem.

Was my original posting really a Troll (as currently moderated)? Strange how an honest statement of how Windows 8.1 affected me (though I believe it is Intel's issue more than Microsoft's) in a thread about how the upgrade might affect people would be considered a Troll.

Re:Mouse works fine, Sandy Bridge HDMI not so much

[Anonymous Coward]

VGA handled 2048×1536 at 85 Hz. That's well over double the bandwidth a "modern" Full HD @60Hz display requires, and 20% more than 2560x1440@60 (from the relevant post) needs.

Re:Mouse works fine, Sandy Bridge HDMI not so much

[epyT-R]

It 'handles' it alright.. It just looks like shit, even with a short high quality cable.

Re:Mouse works fine, Sandy Bridge HDMI not so much

[Anonymous Coward]

Just download the Intel video drivers.

that's weird...

[Anonymous Coward]

When I upgraded from Mountain Lion to Mavericks my mouse still worked along with everything else! But I guess having a usable computer is what I get for being an iFag who just buys shiny stuff, right?

Re:that's weird...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want my come back you can scrape it off your mother's teeth - Jimmy Carr

not just the mouse

[jjbarrows]

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

Good lord

[Anonymous Coward]

How the hell does a company that made their billions off the mouse go and screw that up.

Re:Good lord

[Lisias]

+1 Insightful please.

Re:Good lord

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear Moderator(s),

Could you, please, also use your modpoints positively? I'm ok with the "redundant" on me, but you could, perfectly, modded up the excellent GP also, no? The refined sense of irony stated there deserves better.

"Prefer to mod up than mod down", remember?

mdoD down

[Anonymous Coward]

Of business 4nd

One of a kind

[PopeRatzo]

An OS update that breaks something that was working before?

Only Microsoft....

Re:One of a kind

[Anonymous Coward]

Guess you have never tried "updating" Linux distro's where drivers get borked every so often. I have. it goes with the complex hardware mix all OS's face now, so we all have to roll with those punches.

Touchpads, on the other hand....

[Anonymous Coward]

...were already broken in 8.0 with all that swipe and hot corner crap.

Win8.1 borked a lot of things

[BLToday]

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.

Re:Win8.1 borked a lot of things

[Microlith]

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

I hated that. At least you could easily skip it in the original Windows 8 setup. The other solution is to disable network connectivity, it then will let you skip creation of a Microsoft account.

It's probably the most underhanded way I've ever seen to try and herd people into your services.

Re:Win8.1 borked a lot of things

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty sure there was an option to skip it.

I did during win8.1 install. And it never complained since.

Re:Win8.1 borked a lot of things

[Anonymous Coward]

Or, you could use Google, which seems to be rather difficult for you. How To Install Windows 8.1 Without Microsoft Account

Re:Win8.1 borked a lot of things

[unique_parrot]

Just looked at your link and wow: This isn't very customer friendly. Why can't i get the fucking update WITHOUT the market? Just windows-update. (Point)

spyware

[najay]

somebody must have screwed up the mandated NSA mouse logger daemon

Great euphemism!

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft's been borking my mouse for over 15 years now!

This happened because

[Ralph Spoilsport]

no one in QA uses a mouse? WTF?

Re:This happened because

[Opportunist]

No, they all got touchscreens because that's the new thing. Didn't you get the memo?

Re:This happened because

[VortexCortex]

Tested fine on minesweeper and solitaire.

A Deeper Problem With Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:A Deeper Problem With Microsoft

[epyT-R]

I don't mind having my own desktop actually.. In this day and age, I don't want to compute on some remote machine. IBMs wet dream is still a nightmare for the user.

It gets worse.

[Anonymous Coward]

Try a mighty mouse and firefox and let me know what you think.
Just use it for awhile it will hit.

MS knew the Win8.1 DPI scaling was messed, yet

[Gordo_1]

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.

Re:MS knew the Win8.1 DPI scaling was messed, yet

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing is they are a multi-billion dollar corporation, they can make horrible unilateral decisions and customers will take it or leave it. Until it gets really bad the customer will keep taking it in any O(ri)ffice microsoft chooses. Business is starting to see the light as business and governments worldwide are seeking out alternatives to windows pending XP's demise.

Re:MS knew the Win8.1 DPI scaling was messed, yet

[Retron]

Wow, setting it to 150% actually works with SIMS...

Good on MS for deciding to fix the crummy programs which ignore Windows' DPI settings (such as the aforementioned SIMS). The method for doing it does generate fuzziness, but that's because it's resizing everything (effectively lying about the resolution Windows is running in). That's actually *way* better than the way it was before, which means programs like SIMS would enlarge fonts in some areas and not in others, leading to a right old mess.

A toggle switch for XP-8 or 8.1 behaviour would have been a good idea though for those who find the fuzziness of non-DPI aware applications annoying.

8.1 is an Improvement

[Goody]

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.

Re:8.1 is an Improvement

[hey!]

I was OK with 8.0. I've reached the point where I hate the new versions of everything (except maybe XFCE, which is pretty much pitched toward people who hate the new versions of everything). The reason is all this struggle to revolutionize the user experience seems to have left the goals of making common tasks convenient for the user behind. Impressive but pointless seems to be à la mode these days, and designers appear increasingly incapable of distinguishing creativity from novelty.

But given that virtually everybody has caught this disease, I pretty much have given up on insisting that things making sense. I only ask for a few things, that a user interface be stable and respond consistently (consistency was a huge problem with Vista), and that I can figure out how to do what I need done after a few days with the system. Windows 8.0 fit the bill. It didn't make much *sense*, but it didn't crash and responded in a stable way so I simply adjusted to its quirks.

Windows 8.1 doesn't fit the bill, because it doesn't respond consistently; it brings back some of the Vista experience of having the OS throw unpredictable little delays into your work. The file manager windows are especially bad (e.g. when you're ejecting a drive). How in Hades' name could someone screw up something like that in 2013?

And the 8.0 to 8.1 upgrade process was terrible. It was so poorly designed from an HCI standpoint that I was actually tempted to believe it was an abusive prank by a disgruntled MS employee.

MS these days is looking to ever more like Lotus Software in its declining days. Despite being located in city crowded with world class universities, Lotus seemed utterly incapable of addressing even basic user interface problems except by pasting cheery looking wallpaper over them. I used to reflect when I passed their headquarters on Land Boulevard that if they put up a billboard say "We'll pay $100,000 to anyone who can fix our stupid UI problems," probably twenty or thirty people a day would see it who could probably take them up on the offer.

phantom double clicks

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re: misrepresent much?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

New video game excuse: You lost again?

[Provocateur]

"I'm waiting for 8.1, dammit! Seriously!!!"

keyboard still needed for typing / coding

[Joe_Dragon]

keyboard still needed for typing / coding.

I don't see any big typing work being done on a keyboard.

Re:keyboard still needed for typing / coding

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh?

universities with there theory loaded coders &

[Joe_Dragon]

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.

Last Chance!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

I Love Microsoft!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Beta Software

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Beta Software

[bmo]

and philosophy has driven me straight into the arms of Debian stable

You do realize that Ubuntu LTS versions and Debian Stable are nearly identical, yes?

--
BMO

Re:This happened because of arrogance in mgmt

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

This is what gets me

[dbIII]

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?

Only a small part of the problem

[TractorBarry]

Windows 8.1 breaks the whole computer. Having a non functioning mouse is the least of your worries.

Fixed my issues

[th3rmite]

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.

My mouse is fine...

[sabbede]

I spend a lot of time gaming, and I haven't noticed any problems. Could be that the Logitech software prevents it (I have a G5). Especially if its a polling interval issue. As it stands, my only problem with 8.1 is that SweetFX doesn't support it yet.

Downside - SetPoint is a boot-time killer.

Re:My mouse is fine...

[Chadrach000]

Same here Logitech G500 Gaming mouse(my G5 replacement), mouse and puter did not get the fud memo, using 8.1 Drivers instead of set point but no issues

Re:My mouse is fine...

[sabbede]

I'd love to not have to use SetPoint (slow, resource hungry jerk that it is), but there is too much functionality I'd lose for my mouse and super-awesome K800 keyboard.

Re:My mouse is fine...

[Chadrach000]

Logitech claims your keyboard and mouse are supported {http://logitech-en-amr.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/32427#Keyboards} {http://logitech-en-amr.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/32425} under Windows 8 but limited functionality with RT Perhaps if you delve deeper into Setpoint (should be ver.8.5) and pc settings you can find a happy medium

Re:My mouse is fine...

[sabbede]

There are a lot of features that you need khalmnpr to provide an interface for. But according to 8's startup monitoring, it has the same impact on my boot time that AVG does. I don't mind it from my antivirus, but I have no clue why SetPoint insists on it too.

Maybe a user-mode .exe is a bad way to implement a HAL. But I've never even tried to write a driver, so what do I know.

a free service pack? no kidding?

[geptrizor]

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).

Re:a free service pack? no kidding?

[unique_parrot]

Not complety free... You have to register, give away your soul and download 2.5GB from the market (unless you have a technet subscription or whatnot).
Why can't I get this with normal windows update? Just to force people to the shit-full-screen market?? I do have to download it everytime, can't put it on a usb stick...
It's a punch into customers faces (imho).

Re:a free service pack? no kidding?

[unique_parrot]

Sorry, the above information is incorrect. I just found out (after same googling) that it is possible to install the 8.1 update without a registration if you switch the user account to "local user".
Although it would be better to just get a downloadable service pack without the market to put it on a usb stick...

8.1 video crap

[Anonymous Coward]

8.1 also borked by Intel HD 4000 video controller :(

Same driver downgrade problem here

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Never had a problem with an update until 8.1

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Follow-up to the previous message

[bmo]

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

Microsoft is the competition's new best friend!

[ThomasMcA]

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

Re:universities with there theory loaded coders &a

[hey!]

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).

facepalm

[DarthVain]

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*

Win 8.1 Gripes

[Anonymous Coward]

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.