Windows 8.1 Update Released, With Improvements For Non-Touch Hardware

DroidJason1 (3589319) writes "Microsoft has released the highly anticipated Windows 8.1 Update, adding numerous improvements for non-touch consumers based on feedback. It is also a required update for Windows 8.1, otherwise consumers will no get any future security updates after May 2014. Most of the changes in the update are designed to appease non-touch users, with options to show apps on the desktop taskbar, the ability to see show the taskbar above apps, and a new title bar at the top of apps with options to minimize, close, or snap apps."

Comments

It's a start

[lgw]

Well, it's a start. I doubt I'm unique in that I won't be happy until I get a proper, Win 7 Start menu back, at least as an option. Live tiles on my desktop would be nice too.

Basically, give me back the Win 7 UI with the ability to put live tiles on the desktop, and run apps in a windows. Remember "windows"? Call be weird, but I'd like a version of Windows with, you know, windows.

Re:It's a start

[roc97007]

There used to be this thing called Windows Gadgets. But I guess that wasn't cool and trendy enough.

Re:It's a start

[Spad]

Wow, really can't tell if this is sarcasm or not (from the linked MSDN Blog entry)

It does NOT include the Start menu that you may have seen/heard about at the recent Build conference. That is some exciting near-future stuff, which demonstrates our on-going commitment to deliver on customer feedback.

Re:It's a start

[BLToday]

"There used to be this thing called Windows Gadgets. But I guess that wasn't cool and trendy enough."

Or useful enough. Remember there was Konfabulator (Yahoo bought them), Google Desktop (widgets, discontinued). Only one left and barely alive is Apple's Dashboard.

Re:It's a start

[maugle]

A menu that's actually usable, that doesn't throw you into the awful metro interface, is considered by Microsoft to be "exciting near-future stuff".

...That's just goddamn depressing.

Re:It's a start

[AudioEfex]

I agree. I lived with Win8 for a month or so but just got so annoyed having to slide my mouse around just to close a window and having to fight just to get to the desktop. I gave it a good try, but then I just booted the whole thing and went back to Win7.

It wasn't a lack of willingness to adapt, it was because the interface clearly was not aimed at traditional desktop use. And I have no desire whatsoever for a touch screen - one at the size I would need is not only prohibitively expensive for what I'd wish to pay, but I'm not going to reach up constantly when it's much more efficient to just use a mouse and keyboard in most cases. I can do everything more quickly (why pinch to resize when my mouse wheel does it perfectly, etc.) and I don't have to relearn how to do basic tasks.

I also gave the whole "tiles" thing a try - but again, just organizing it was a chore, I don't have the need for live widgets (and, as others point out, they could work just as easily from the desktop anyway), and because of how many apps I use regularly, the thing was unwieldy to scroll across. I also am apt to add an app to try it out, and delete it if it wasn't what I really needed (so hard to tell just from reviews these days, particularly with video manipulation software), and it always seemed to leave various junk files laying around which I then had to go in to manually remove (text readmes, etc). It was a major PITA.

If someone who has been using Windows for 20 years daily had as much issue as I did, someone who folks routinely ask me to "fix" their computers (get rid of errant toolbars, etc.) - there was no hope for the average user. Nothing was intuitive about it. Even if someone just wanted to click on simple apps or links to use them (say, my mom who goes to like 3 websites, uses like 3 or 4 apps, and that's about it) she would have never been able to set that up herself.

I still have my Win8 Upgrade copy, at some point I'm sure some afternoon in the next few months I'll be watching a TV marathon and decide to give it a whirl - but I'll be fully mirroring my current Win7 set-up so I can go back if they've just put lipstick on a pig. Hopefully they have addressed the usability issues - all that crap they added would be great options for someone who wants to use a touch-interface exclusively, but all it felt like to me was using Windows through a space suit underwater...

Re:It's a start

[YrWrstNtmr]

They killed those off because they were major security holes. Little bits of random HTML.
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/gadgets

Re:It's a start

[roc97007]

Hm. I wonder how that compares with live tiles.

Re:It's a start

[WheezyJoe]

I liked gadgets, too. Minor things like a desktop clock, calendar, weather, scrachpad, that kind of thing helps your workflow and save you the time and risk of looking for some random shareware solution. I was never too clear on any security problems with gadgets, thought they were sandboxed. I figured they got dropped because Microsoft just decided the desktop was history and all is Metro. Same reason I figured this or that UI bug in 7 would never get fixed.

There are unofficial ways to get them back on Windows 8, and so far it's worked reliably for me.

Re:It's a start

[Joce640k]

"Most of the changes in the update are designed to appease non-touch users"

Do they exist? Really????

How out of touch can a company be?

Re:It's a start

[gstoddart]

There used to be this thing called Windows Gadgets. But I guess that wasn't cool and trendy enough.

Well, they were memory hogs, and completely insecure.

In other words, they might have been a good idea at the time, but I stopped using them after a few days because they used up so much damned memory. Seriously guys, a clock widget doesn't take 200+ MB of RAM. Or, at least, it shouldn't in any sane world.

And, from the sounds of it, Microsoft didn't make a framework which was secure or safe.

A little single-purpose widget should be a small, lightweight thing that does one thing. But even the ones Microsoft shipped were overly bloated things which shouldn't have existed.

I don't think "cool and trendy" were what defined the failure of those. Bloated and insecure, but not cool and trendy.

Re:It's a start

[Anonymous Coward]

Hm. I wonder how that compares with live tiles.

Stupid ideas never die, they just get renamed. Push technology, PointCast, Active Desktop (IE4.0 HTML as wallpaper on Win95), Windows Sidebar (Vista), Gadgets (Win7), and now Live Tiles.

It's all just a bunch of lame attempts to get demographic data on the userbase / turn the computer into a TV so that it can be monetized.

Re:It's a start

[gstoddart]

Do they exist? Really????

How out of touch can a company be?

LOL, you can have my 23" Acer flat panel (with no touch, thank you very much) when you pry it from my cold dead hands (or it suffers failure).

We don' need no steenkin' touch screens.

For my tablet and phone, I like touch. For a desktop? I can't even understand why you would.

Re:It's a start

[TheRealMindChild]

Windows gadgets were essentially borderless IE windows that ran in the local zone. This means they could CreateObject(...) ActiveX libraries via scripting that could do, well, anything to your system. The sandbox didn't matter at that point.

Re:It's a start

[flyingfsck]

...and the granddaddy of them all: Terminate and Stay Resident (TSR) programs on DOS. I'm getting old, sorry...

Re:It's a start

[93 Escort Wagon]

You can have my TopView when you pry it out of my cold, dead fingers.

Re:It's a start

[gstoddart]

I remember doing that stuff ... it was kind of fun in its own way. I guess I'm "really old" ... :)

LOL, here I'm using "really old" in such a way as to mean "my age or older".

Was talking to someone the other day, and apparently his kid had found his cassette tapes -- he said it took 10 minutes to explain that it used to be for playing music, and another 5 minutes to convince that he wasn't joking.

I can only imagine trying to explain the function of rabbit ears, or how the youngest person in the room was the TV remote. And don't even get me started on black and white TV with 3 stations. ;-)

Re:It's a start

[sproketboy]

Live tiles have new and improved security holes.

Re:It's a start

[vux984]

For my tablet and phone, I like touch. For a desktop? I can't even understand why you would.

I posted in another thread several examples; most of them revolving around a kitchen or living room 'family computer' especially the common scenario where the keyboard and mouse stored in a drawer.

Then for various quick casual interactions, like to check the weather, check twitter/facebook, start a netflix movie, start playing some music... etc you do it all with the screen without even bothering to get out the mouse and keyboard.

When they want to do any real work they pull out the kb and mouse and don't touch the screen.

I know people who have those big desktop all in one touch screens, and that's how they use them.

Is it a critical must have feature? I don't think so, but its convenient, and its not like they paid a lot extra for it vs a non-touchscreen version.

Re:It's a start

[jones_supa]

It's a shame they don't work properly though. Some weeks ago I played with those widgets and neither of the two weather applets ever displayed any data.

And here we are again. Linux and no proper quality assurance. If this was for example Microsoft, the QA team would have carefully tested each of those widgets before shipping a product.

A patch closer to usability, few more to go

[sinij]

You can pry Start Button from my cold blue-screen hands.

Re:A patch closer to usability, few more to go

[MightyYar]

The amazing thing (to me, anyway) is that I always hated the start menu. Never liked having such redundancy... rather than giving me some flexibility in how applications are organized you make this ghetto of delicate "shortcuts", requiring installers for even the most simple binaries.

And yet, what they replaced it with is so much worse that I find myself wishing for it back.

I would not have thought this was possible.

Re:A patch closer to usability, few more to go

[lgw]

I like the start menu for what it is: a comprehensive tree of everything I have installed, including all the rarely used stuff. But it wasn't great for what I'd use often.

I really like where Win 7 ended up. The stuff I use every day is on my task bar, and once I launch it all, the order of the task bar is fixed, much to the delight of my muscle memory.

The stuff I use once a week or so, I can put in the short list in my start menu. The rest is still browseable (and easy to organize if I care to), and searchable, whichever makes it easier to find that one program I installed a year ago and suddenly I need.

Re:A patch closer to usability, few more to go

[MightyYar]

I like the start menu for what it is: a comprehensive tree of everything I have installed

But that's not quite what it is - it's a tree of everything that decided to put stuff there. If you manually dragged an exe to Program Files, no show. If some uninstaller didn't remember the shortcut, you have a dead link. Worse, it's an idea decidedly rooted in a single-user machine, so exterminating an entry means looking in a few different places that they added to accommodate multiple users.

I really do like Windows 7 as well. Still not sold on the Start Menu :) At least in 7 it rarely bothers me. Frequent programs I have pinned to the task bar so that I can use the "pinned" feature in the right-click menu. Less-frequently accessed stuff can be accessed with a quick tap of the Windows button and a few letters from the name. I was quite shocked when I moved to Windows 8. I gave it a year and still hated it. When the hard drive died and I found out how horrid Windows 8 backup is, I moved back to 7.

Re:A patch closer to usability, few more to go

[Mashiki]

Yep. I'll skip Win8 altogether, I think, and wait for 9.

Don't worry, I'm sure you'll enjoy the bitching and moaning when Win9 is released since it's supposed to be x64 only. Just imagine the whining and crying... "Y U NO SUPPORT x32!!!1111ELEVENTYONE1111!!!" Oh I can see it now...good times, it's just going to be like the nuts who couldn't be bothered to build/buy a new $250 PC and move to Win7 away from XP, you know the ones who only use their PC's for email and browsing. And then cry about the EoL for XP...and the 4 year extension date they got. It *might* almost be as good as when we dumped the old 16-bit legacy code...maybe...might even be better.

Re:A patch closer to usability, few more to go

[Dutch Gun]

No I'm not misunderstanding. You're simply not paying attention to what's going on. There's a difference between an emulation layer, and native support. Currently we have multiple flavors of OS's with native support in either flavor, in a few years we're going to have a single flavor of OS support with an extreme drop off in support for x32. We're already seeing this in gaming with x32 binaries being thrown into the trashbin, and the entire codebase thrown and ditched. The most recent example in gaming of zero x32 support is Watch Dogs for the PC.

Your post seemed to imply that 32-bit apps would fail to run in Windows 9, which is simply not the case. Also, I fail to see the problem with the world moving to 64-bit native OSes with a 32-bit compatibility mode. And what do you mean "an extreme dropoff" of support? 32-bit applications run flawlessly under 64-bit Windows. It's not some soft of half-assed software emulation. 64-bit processors still support the original x86 instruction sets all the way back to the original 8086 and executes those natively. The emulation layer (Windows on Windows) is for the Windows API, not for the binary's instruction set, so it's fairly minimal in terms of overhead.

Also, you seem to be under the impression that you need to completely rewrite your game engine for 64-bits, which isn't true. My current game engine is both 64-bit and 32-bit compatible with zero differences in the codebase itself. Simply throw a switch in the configuration and it's done. There's some types of code you do have to actually port, such as inline assembly, which is not allowed in 64-bit, or any tricks using pointers that rely on a 32-bit size, but for most C/C++ code, there's no difference at all if written correctly. If a game company decides to abandon 32-bit platforms, it's because they've determined that the market can now move ahead with 64-bit platform. This allows them to push beyond the 2GB memory limit of 32-bit applications, which is becoming a serious bottleneck for modern PC games (we had to work pretty hard on my last commercial title to fit in this limit).

Anyhow, I'm not quite sure of your overall point. Do you feel that MS should continue releasing 32-bit operating systems even though there are no 32-bit-only processors being manufactured for desktop or laptop computers, and haven't been for years?

Re:What version are they changing?

[WilliamGeorge]

Windows 8.1 Update 1 - then next they will do Windows 8.1 Update 1 Service Pack 1 ;)

hoping that Windows 8 is like Vista,....

[Selur]

Windows 3.1 -> worked
Windows 98 -> crashed but worked sometimes
Windows ME -> just crashed
Windows XP -> worked, but has it's drawbacks (64bit version was better, but never really useful due to missing drivers)
Windows Vista -> too much trouble to use
Windows 7 -> useful, but not as customizable as XP
Windows 8.x -> not so useful if you don't have a touch screen, less and less accessible customizations possible
Windows 9 -> hoping that Windows 8 is like Vista and Windows 9 will be useful like Windows 7

Re:hoping that Windows 8 is like Vista,....

[ThatAblaze]

Windows 3.1: good
Windows 95: bad
Windows 98: good
Windows ME: bad
Windows XP: good
Windows Vista: bad
Windows 7:good
Windows 8.x: bad
Windows 9: ???

I always figured it was a marketing strategy on a good day. On a bad day I figure it's a cycle of Lazy -> Oh shit! -> motivated -> relief -> lazy

Re:hoping that Windows 8 is like Vista,....

[ArhcAngel]

Windows 1.0;2.0;2.1: forgettable
Windows 3.0: not bad but definitely not good
Windows 3.1: good
Windows NT 3.1: really bad but has potential
Windows3.11 Windows For Workgroups (WFW): very good
Windows NT 3.5;3.51: really good
Windows 95: meh
Windows NT 4.0: bad
Windows 98;98SE: good
Windows 2000: good
Windows ME: evil
Windows XP: good
Windows Vista: bad
Windows 7:good
Windows 8.x: bad
Windows 9: ???

I always figured it was a marketing strategy on a good day. On a bad day I figure it's a cycle of Lazy -> Oh shit! -> motivated -> relief -> lazy

Re:hoping that Windows 8 is like Vista,....

[keith_nt4]

For the record NT4 with SP 6 and Internet Explorer...I want to say 4 or 5 I don't remember...was incredibly stable and tough (IE added a few new features for making getting on the internet easier). Could not crash that thing no matter what. It really blew my mind having only ever otherwise used 3.1 and 95 at the time. I used it on my home PC for years. Had the latest directx included until well into windows 2000's life actually. I only switched because I had immediate access to XP (I want to say january 2002). Did a lot of gaming on NT4. I really hated to lose that OS. Little things like...USB support and no free defragmenter utility made it difficult to continue to use. It's kind of a nostalgia thing for me at this point...

Anyway NT4 SP1 and NT4 SP6 may as well be two different operating systems. So be specific when you go labeling different Windows this and that, will ya?

Re:Fascinating release date timing

[MightyMartian]

A long long time ago,
I can still remember how that NT kernel made me smile.
And I knew that if I had my chance,
I'd write a helluva lot cool VB 6 apps.
And maybe my manager would be happy for a while.

But April made me shiver,
With each Win 8 PC I'd deliver.
Bad news in the staffroom steps.
And I couldn't take one more step.

I can't remember if I cried,
When I read about some XP user heaved a sigh.
But something touched me deep inside.
The day Windows XP died.

So bye bye Windows XP has died.
Rode my Segway to the to the levy,
But the levy was dry.
And good ol' sysadmins were drinking coffee and Sprite,
Singing "This is the day Windows XP has died,
This is the day Windows XP has died."

Happy that costumer pressure has an effect

[iampiti]

It's probably the refusal of many corporations to upgrade to Windows 8 that got Microsoft to make these changes but it's still a win for everyone.
When designing Windows 8 the new Start screen looked a perfect plan to get the masses to buy apps through their store and thus getting more revenue from Windows. It'd also get them used to the UI shared by Windows Phone which would surely get the fledging smartphone platform many more users.
So when so many people refused to use Win 8 they must've thought "If we backtrack a bit we'll get many people to change to Windows 8, if we don't, we'll get fewer". It's also good to see that Microsoft no longer has near infinite power on the PC world. I'm currently starting to fear Google much more (they know so much about us...) but that's another topic

Re:Happy that costumer pressure has an effect

[MightyMartian]

Pretty much. I know our suppliers simply ask "And you will want Windows 7 on that laptop/workstation, right?" There is an automatic assumption that Windows 8 is not wanted in the enterprise.

Re:Happy that costumer pressure has an effect

[MightyMartian]

Worse, it means retraining, it means loss of productivity, at least in the short term and it brings absolutely no advantage at all to the business workstation. Windows 7 was still part of an evolution from Windows 95. Much smoother and better done, but still, someone coming from XP could, after a few minutes, work in full swing.

Whether the Metro UI is better or not by some subjective, or heck, even objective standard is irrelevant. What is relevant is familiarity. QWERTY may not be the best keyboard layout, VHS may not have been better than Beta, and English spelling rules are a nightmare, but all three were familiar and dominant, and even some technical superiority of alternatives couldn't overcome the level of penetration that they enjoyed.

To my mind, it looks as if Metro will simply become another iteration of the old Active Desktop/Gadgets paradigm, and will likely be ignored by the bulk of PC users.

Re:Happy that costumer pressure has an effect

[MachineShedFred]

We get our machines stickered with Win8 licenses, and then immediately blast that shit off the drive and lay down our Win7 image. Our enterprise agreement allows us N-1 versioning, so we buy the Win8 licenses just in case Windows 8 turns into something that is actually useable someday, or worst case, take advantage of cheap license upgrades for N+1.

Re:Happy that costumer pressure has an effect

[MachineShedFred]

There is one use case that is actually a little bit compelling - touchscreen kiosks.

But that's about it.

The Post-PC era

[TomClowers]

So, we're just gonna start calling it "non-touch" hardware now?

Re:Microsoft the Old Dinosaur

[Anonymous Coward]

BOOOO Micro$oft Windoze!!!!!!!!!!!

HOOOOORRRAAYYY open source and slashdot type stuff!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

BOOOO GUIs. HOOOORRRAAAYY command line interface.

BOOOOOOO blackslash path seperator. HOOOOOORRRRAAAAYYY forward slash path seperators!!!!!!!

Re:What version are they changing?

[MachineShedFred]

This is Windows 8.11 for Workgroups.

Re:Win 8.1 is just fine

[Lendrick]

I like Win 8.1. It's fast and reliable. I don't think it has ever crashed.

I can do everything I want pretty easily: edit videos, produce music, play games, run Steam, run overclocked hardware.

Yes, I'm sure you can do all that stuff that the cool kids are doing. I don't see anyone here questioning Windows 8's capabilities; people are complaining about the fact that it's a tablet interface that's been shoehorned into a desktop, and everything about it is designed to push you back to the tablet interface (which, conveniently for Microsoft, is a walled garden that they control).

At any rate, Windows 7 does all that cool kid stuff too, and the interface is sensible for desktop users.

Windows 8... no more

[Camel Pilot]

Last week after my disk totally crashed I had to decide to re-install Window 8 and re-install a long list of apps - several which are updates and require the original disk (ah where are they)....hmmmm I thought here goes the day.

I decided to install CentOS Desktop instead. I am familiar with CentOS in the server mode as I use it on my dedicated server. Within an hour I was back up and running and being productive in my consulting business. My QHD / Nvidia graphic card were recognized and drivers installed, HP printer setup was simple, digital camera is recognized, scanner, etc. I really prefer the Gnome 2 interface to Windows 8 (and even Gnome 3) it stays out of my way and lets me get my work done efficiently.

I really haven't missed Windows at this point... well maybe Notepad++ just a little and haven't figured out what to do about Quickbooks yet. Maybe I can install enough plugins to get Gedit to be a reasonable editor and I may have to setup a windows virtual machine to run Quickbooks or find an alternative.

This morning on the radio I overheard an advertisement offering a Windows "speed-up service" with the main pitch being that over time your Windows machine become slower and slower being encumbered with cruft, malware, "help functions", virus, etc .. I couldn't keep from smiling.

Re:Windows 8... no more

[nashv]

Pretty much agree with what you said. If you're looking for a Notepad++ replacement, you might be pleased by Sublime Text or any of the other alternatives.

Re:What version are they changing?

[lgw]

I maintain my stance that Windows 9.5 will be the version that changes everything, with Windows 9.8 mostly getting it right.

Re:huh

[Anonymous Coward]

I love it when idiots try to define this turd of a GUI using keyboard shorts and the search bar.

Mandatory

[Guest316]

From the article summary:
>It is also a required update for Windows 8.1

From the article:
>Failure to install this Update will prevent Windows Update from patching your system with any future updates starting with Updates released in May 2014 (get busy!)

Summary should have read that it's mandatory for all Win8 installs, not just 8.1. Bit misleading. Still, a UI update is mandatory for future security updates?

Re:The new start screen is great

[EvanED]

My take is that the start menu required a "lot" of work to maintain if you actually wanted it to be a useful hierarchy. If you just let stuff install by default and never changed things, then I think it turned into more of an almost-not-hierarchical view of a bunch of crap, personally. It'd be one thing if programs installed an icon or two (or even a submenu) under categories like Games/Productivity/Development/etc. like you get with Linux distros, but that would require cross-vendor cooperation (perhaps enforced by MS); instead you just got programs would install to Start Menu/Programs/My Crappy Company/My Crappy Software/* or, even worse, Start Menu/Programs/My Crappy Software and Start Menu/Programs/Help For My Crappy Software and Start Menu/Programs/Visit My Crappy Website etc.

I hesitate to call that "useful" personally, and it's the main reason that once Vista introduced the search functionality I very rarely actually navigated the start menu itself. On Vista/7 navigating it was actually a lot worse than it was in previous versions IMO because everything got squashed into a very small space as opposed to getting expanded out a bit more; but I was one of those weirdos who used Vista by choice and a lot of that was due to the search feature, because that made up for everything else I saw wrong with it. (I discovered Launchy a bit too late.)

I don't know what to think of 8. Vista/7 got me spoiled with the search feature so that's what I use on 8 (I also use that by choice...), and as a result my day-to-day use is basically identical between 7 and 8, and I basically never use the start screen except via search. I feel like the default program launcher on 8 (what you get when you hit the Windows key/button) requires the same sort of manual maintenance as the start menu "needed", and I haven't bothered to do that. The all programs menu I think works better than the start menu if you left the latter alone. People complain about how the start screen takes over your whole display, but I view that as a virtue -- it means a lot more can be displayed at once and, I think, it's easier to scan. I've also never wanted to see something I had open when I was figuring out what to launch. The down side is that it basically collapses the heirarchy -- but I think that unless you groom the start menu yourself, there's usually very little meaningful hierarchy for it to collapse.

That's my opinion anyway. (And no, I do not and never have had a relationship with MS.)

Re:The new start screen is great

[mmell]

No, not a shill. He opened with "I". Not "Users" or "Real Users" or any such generalization, "I".

He's relaying his personal experience. Feel free to report your differing experience (mine differs greatly from his), but he's not a shill as far as I can tell.

Re:Microsoft the Old Dinosaur

[bad-badtz-maru]

..."thousands of bugs" he says, on the heels of a fairly large remotely-exploitable openssl security hole. Go OSS!

Re:Why are you using the touch interface with a mo

[Dynedain]

How do you shut down Windows 8 with a mouse?

Let me walk you through the steps as I do them on my test VM (default Win 8.1 install, no added software)

Get the the top level of the Metro UI (I still have not figured out how to do this without hitting the windows key on my keyboard. If you're buried multiple levels deep in something, or running something in desktop mode, there's no intuitive way to do this without a touchscreen)

Move your mouse to the bottom right corner of the screen. A tiny transparent icon will appear in the very bottom corner that only displays while the mouse is in motion. This icon is the traditional "minimize" icon. Pretty intuitive that I should go interact with it to do something not present on the home screen.

Hover over this icon, but don't click or right-click! Even though every other interactive icon that appears in Metro requires clicking to engage. If you click it, it minimizes. If you right-click, some other weird bar pops up from the bottom of the screen. Hover, but don't click.

A row of icons will slide in. Most seem relatively intuitive. Other than the convoluted way to get them onscreen, I have little complaint about their appearance or overall functions (other than the one with the Windows logo which does ABSOLUTELY NOTHING because I'm already in the Metro home screen). Click on the one for settings. Really.... settings?

A new menu comes in, with some pretty useless options for Start, Tiles and Help a ton of empty space, and a row of buttons at the bottom. Oh, and another option under that, which looks like a label but is actually where all the "real" settings are hidden. Ignore that for now and click on the button labeled power.

A popup menu appears, select "shut down". I've gone through 5 distinctly different interface methods just to do a shutdown.

Meanwhile, Metro is trying to give me helpful hints to swipe in from the edge of the screen. These "hints" overlay the actual menus I'm trying to use, and have no way to dismiss. Metro really wants me to try swiping and won't dismiss these unless I follow the instructions, even though I have no touchscreen.

Why is it so difficult to just shutdown? Everyone has been taught for years that you must do safe shutdowns on Windows, so let's undo that all in swoop by making a safe shutdown exceedingly difficult to get to?

Here's another example. On my default install, I have news, stocks, etc on the main screen of Metro. OK, I don't care for it, but I can live with it. But the only application (outside of IE) that gets a tile for launching is Silverlight? Why in the world would Silverlight ever need a launcher? And why would that launcher ever need to be on the default start screen?

Re:Why are you using the touch interface with a mo

[H0p313ss]

I was pointing out the obtuseness of the basic, introductory way of performing a task. You know, the thing that should be the most intuitive, straightforward, process.

I agree completely.

As far as I'm concerned the Window 8 UI is a total clusterfuck for power users and novices alike, it's the worst of both worlds.

Re:Why are you using the touch interface with a mo

[gonnagetya]

Because despite it being 2014, I STILL encounter the odd program or process that affects system stability or performance on a long enough timeline sufficient that a reboot will fix the issue. Or a badly coded device driver that will behave oddly/slowly after resuming from a suspend/hibernation compared to a clean reboot. It has happened before, and will continue to happen so long as people develop code with memory leaks. Performing a shutdown instead of continually suspending/hibernating ensures that none of this shut can happen or accumulate.

Besides, once you obtain an SSD you realize that you no longer have to worry about slow startups, so you might as well shut down completely since you guarantee a clean slate and won't have to wait particularly long anyway.