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Microsoft Donates Windows 8.1 To Nonprofit Organizations

Posted by samzenpus on from the you-get-a-copy-and-you-get-a-copy... dept.

An anonymous reader writes in with good news for Windows loving nonprofits and libraries. "Microsoft today announced the availability of Windows 8.1 for nonprofits. The move is an extension of the company's nod to the nonprofit community with the launch Windows 8. The announcement means eligible nonprofit organizations and public libraries can request Windows 8.1 through Microsoft's software donation program."

9 of 224 comments (clear)

  1. Windows 8.x is horrible! by lasermike026 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I wouldn't use it if it was free. Windows 8.x is the most horrible operating system I have ever experienced. I can't think of a worse OS. If this doesn't end the Windows OS I don't know what will. It was so frustrating I returned the laptop. The replacement system will be a Mac and not because it was my first choice. It will be a Mac because Windows 8.x is unusable.

    1. Re:Windows 8.x is horrible! by Stormwatch · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Windows 8 is an unusable operating system in the same sense as Comic Sans is an unusable font.

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      Circumcision is child abuse.
    2. Re:Windows 8.x is horrible! by I'm+New+Around+Here · · Score: 4, Interesting

      As a tech who worked on many systems from DOS, Windows 3.x, Win95, Win95 w/ FAT32, Win98, Win98SE, WinNT4.0, and WinME, I can say that indeed WinME was the biggest pain in the ass to work on when there were problems. Win98 had issues of not powering off after shutting down. WinNT had issues of hardware compatibility, and all versions tend to forget about printers from time to time.

      But when something went wrong, there were definite steps that technicians could do to resolve it. Microsoft decided that made too much sense, and with WinME they broke established procedures that worked quite well before that. It's been over a decade now, so I don't remember specifics, but it was a nightmare for a while. Then everyone moved on to Win2k or WinXP, and we all pretended WinME never existed.

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      If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
    3. Re:Windows 8.x is horrible! by TheGratefulNet · · Score: 4, Interesting

      funny, I think android is about as bad as win95 or 3.x.

      it sort of gets the job done, but its annoying and painful to try to work with.

      I would not be so annoyed if android was the product of a 10 or 50 man company. but the 'mighty google'? I would expect nothing less than perfection and vision from such self-professed geniuses.

      instead, there are stupid limitations and even cut/paste is annoying and difficult. want to grab an address from an email and locate it on a map? rarely works unless it fits an exact format of what an 'address' is supposed to be. more often than not, you can't click on addresses in email text. fuck! what a piece of shit.

      face it, its a vehicle for ad delivery. plain and simple; just enough to do that mission yet not free enough to do what YOU want unless you root and go around things. yes, apple is worse, but they don't solely exist just to delivery ads. google is ONLY about ads, these days. if you get in their way, they fuck with you and make your life harder than it should be.

      I remember old windows and how annoying it was compared to old vax/vmx, unix and other os's of the ancient era. android gives me the same 'damn, they could have made it great but they didn't' feeling.

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      "It is now safe to switch off your computer."
    4. Re:Windows 8.x is horrible! by Artifakt · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I ran Win ME for about 2 years, about the same time as I started using Linux (on seperate boxes). It did run with better uptimes/stability than Win 98 SE, so I think I'm agreeing with your "more reliable" opinion. I liked Win 98 well enough, especially SE. Storm Linux 2000 didn't seem all that impressive compared to either version of Windows around that time, but Linux gradually pulled ahead, at least in my book. I still support Windows boxes at work and for family, and liked XP (after the first Service Pack came out), and 7's not too bad, but for me, Linux has pulled ahead on several counts.

                  There were a few real things wrong with Win ME, even for its time. I like fancy desktops and skinnable programs, so I started running and designing skins for various freeware programs that could 'fake' "Alpha channel" transparency in 98, produce non-rectangular windows, and generally enhance Windows visuals - XXCalc, Sonique, Kjofol, early versions of Winamp, Beatnik Internet clock, several translucent notepad variants, little programs such as that. I learned to hack the Windows 98 registry to make the background behind icon text transparent, change the start menu clock fonts, and many other little tricks, mostly for the same reason, When ME came along, It broke a great many things along these lines in the freeware customization scene, even though it supposedly didn't have any significant advances in transparency rendering, by its own admission. Microsoft did so many strange things in the registry (changing an enormous number of variable types from numeric to Boolean, or vice versa, where it just plain wasn't sensible, or, even more often, telling developers that a variable was now of some type, but experimenting with it proved it wasn't.), I swiftly got the feeling they were trying to obfuscate the registry, (and for that matter DLLs and video support) just to make it impossible for third parties to work with them unless they had the financial status to become what Microsoft was starting to call Microsoft Trusted Partners. To me, it came off as petty, as though Microsoft felt insulted anyone was trying to change the desktop appearance that much.
                  After a few months, there were more serious freeware programs that started running into the same thing, I.e. there were early replacements for Windows Explorer that added some real functionality, such as multi-pane versions, or search tools that let the user do searches with the full range of regular expressions, or adaptations of most of the Berkeley UNIX command line tools, or drive defragmenting programs that ran about 800% faster than the stock Defrag. It seemed like every time Microsoft announced a patch for something, it broke some other functionality, far removed from what they said the patch was supposed to do, and adversely impacted these freeware programs. I don't know if Microsoft did any of that deliberately - but I do know that several of those programmers who stopped updating their freeware creations damned sure thought it was deliberate.

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      Who is John Cabal?
    5. Re:Windows 8.x is horrible! by SenseiLeNoir · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I have both 7 Ultimate and 8.1 on my computer (dual boot on seperate SSDs). Her is my positives and negatives of Windows 8 over win 7.

      Positives:
      - Really fast and smooth compared to Win 7. The difference is noticeable, even in boot up.
      - I am not too bothered with metro itself, nor do I care much for the loss of the start menu. Rarely used it on seven other than to open frequently used app, or search for other apps. I rarely even know whats on my start menu aall programs list, as its hardly used)
      - Lightweight. It appears that Microsoft have finally got rid of some in built junk
      - Metro apps have their uses. I can think of many types of apps that I would rather not have to install into my windows system normally (as an admin no less) complete with the potential to add further junk to my system folders complete with system wide spyware, and being unable to guarentee a clean uninstall. Metro apps seem to be a bit better isolated.

      Negatives:
      - Metro apps are still tooo touch focused, and certain things are less intuitiuve with KB and mouse only.
      - MEtro apps and dual monitors. Despite the improvements in Windows 8.1, there are still huge usability problems still existing for dual screen users. For example, when running a metro app on the left hand screen, its more involved to bring up the charms panel with just the mouse. Whereas with a single screen, you can blindly flick the mouse up and to the right until it gets to the upper right corner to bring up the charms panel, with a dual monitor, the mouse will simply go to the next screen, making the user have to concentrate more in actually positioning the pointer in the exact region to show the panel.
      - I still feel the desktop UI is very poor. I enjoyed aero on Win vista, and more so on 7. The transparency effects give me a lot of cues to order, and overlap. The new UI is frankly ugly, and personally a lot worse than win 7.

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      Have a nice day!
    6. Re:Windows 8.x is horrible! by jones_supa · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I used to rant a lot about the Start Screen and the Modern UI in general, but now I have to admit that the 8.1 upgrade has fixed enough things that I can swallow the new UI. After that, there's quite a lot of performance and usability improvements which make me prefer the OS over Windows 7.

  2. There is always a catch by andrew3 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Microsoft also gives free Windows licenses to students through various programs. But there is always a catch. In this case, Microsoft wants its users to adopt its own formats and use its network services, essentially pushing users into an endless cycle of relying on Microsoft software and services, allowing Microsoft to push for unreasonable terms, include more privacy-invasive features to gain more information about their users, increased OS reliance on Microsoft's network/cloud computing, and, of course, to make more money. Making money on its own, of course, is not usually a bad thing, but when a company like Microsoft controls a significant portion of the market it is certainly bad. I hear non-profits and governments are also often more likely to adopt free (-as in freedom) software such as LibreOffice and occasionally GNU/Linux, which could explain why they are a target of this campaign.

    Remember people: this isn't being done to benefit you, it's done to benefit Microsoft.

  3. Re:FTFY by Sir_Sri · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Yep.

    I'm at a university and we do this all the time. IBM gave us 'millions' in software, that was a burned CD with some stuff on it (not my research group so I'm not really sure what exactly, but something related to distributed computing).

    My group got a '4 million dollar' donation which was all of the source code for a project a small company had worked on for 10 years with 5 major versions.

    Whatever that MSRP headline number was is what they could claim as a tax break. Didn't matter if it was absurdly unrelated to the actual value or not.