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Experiment: Installing Windows 10 On a 7-Year-Old Acer Aspire One
jones_supa writes: Windows 10 will launch in less than a week and it is supposed to work flawlessly on devices already powered by Windows 7 and Windows 8.1, as Microsoft struggled to keep system requirements unchanged to make sure that everything runs smoothly. Device drivers all the way back to Windows Vista platform (WDDM 1.0) are supported. Softpedia performed a practical test to see how Windows 10 can run on a 7-year-old Acer Aspire One netbook powered by Intel Atom N450 processor clocked at 1.66 GHz, 1 GB of RAM, and a 320 GB mechanical hard disk. The result is surprising to say the least, as installation not only went impressively fast, but the operating system itself also works fast.
I have about the same netbook, and I've never used the Windows 7 that came with it, but want to put it back specifically so I can put Windows 10 on it to play with it. I lost the Clonezilla image I made of it years ago and am on the verge of ordering the backup media from the Acer website - I've come up empty on a WIndows 7 Starter ISO. I've loved my little Acer, I've had three bike wrecks with it, one of which my entire body weight went up and down the thing twice as I rolled over my backpack, not a scratch. I double the RAM from 1 to 2 GB the day I bought it and put an SSD in later. The SSD was incredible when it came to increasing the battery life and performance. I've told people it's the laptop Fischer-Price made, and I say it in a bragging manner, I still love my little netbook.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
You forgot to spell Microsoft with a '$' and call it a slashvertisement to get your automagic +5, you silly goose.
That's some boot time!
Now if only OS X would was allowed to work on my 3 year old system which is more than powerful enough for it based on hacked installs, and if only all the software wasn't updated so it won't work on the last OS. Thanks Apple!
Meanwhile I can install Windows 10 on a 10 year old system and play a 16 year old game just fine. Boo Microsoft for being horrible people that don't give away your amazing product for free and don't have a penguin or a fruit as a logo.
Still hate the new interface. I will never warm up to the big, ugly colored squares. You know, the ones that they needed to make it work on a tiny phone screen? I will wait to read about useful improvements in the OS before I do anything. Right now I see nothing I want.
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
I wonder how much Microsoft paid to Dice in order to get this article placed here?
Probably not much, they'll do anything for a dollar.
All I know for sure, Win10 isn't touching any system I work on until the update issue is backtracked on.
One time I installed windows on an old computer.
The PC have improved. But with Parallel processing. And most programs are not coded to take advantage of the multiple cores. So the speed of any one of your programs has more or less peaked. However you can run more at the same time.
Until we can come up with easier methods than threads hacks added to most languages, we will still be mostly programming for a single CPU and not parallel processing. It will also help for more colleges to have Parallel processing as part of its undergrad program. Most introduce it in Grad School.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The update issue doesn't exist for enterprise systems. Just the consumer and SB-oriented Home and Pro versions.
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
I guess MS still strongly feels this site gets so many eyeballs so it is worth relentless ads brazenly disguised as stories or Experiments... so inspire of Troll mods the site is worth defending...
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Threading and other means of taking advantage multiple CPUs is really very old. It's only the use of them in PCs that's relatively new and even that's not terribly new.
The Aspire One might not have the hardware to take advantage of (or rather tolerate) the level of multithreading in a more recent OS.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
It will also help for more colleges to have Parallel processing as part of its undergrad program. Most introduce it in Grad School.
Is this a recent development or was I mostly just lucky that almost 20 years ago the state school I went to (MSU Mankato) offered it as an undergrad class as an option. They also offered compiler construction as an undergrad class which I gather is another one that is fairly rare at the undergrad level.
Time to offend someone
The update issue doesn't exist for enterprise systems. Just the consumer and SB-oriented Home and Pro versions.
So you want me to pay enterprise pricing to keep the ability to have control over my own home system? No thank you.
If you install Windows from scratch on a PC it will always run faster than the previous version (especially if it's being running for 7 years, as in this case). The reason is because the way Windows works. Certain system files (user profile, registery, etc, etc) continuously get bigger and bigger, so as you use it for several years the system gets slower and slower. Installing a fresh version of Windows (regardless of which version) starts everything from scratch and makes it run a whole lot faster.
"Windows 10 will launch in less than a week"
If it won't launch in less than a day, I would say scrap the whole idea.
Trolling is a art,
After all, according to the universal laws of Star Trek movies and Windows releases, this one is guaranteed to be good.
My notebook has more CPU power and 2GB of RAM. Windows 10 Preview does about 5 minutes of hard drive thrashing after start up. After this the system works fairly well.
I may follow the same path. I use my old netbook as an emergency backup laptop. Mostly to take notes. Since it has a real keyboard, even if small, it is handy to have around. Great to know it can run a modern OS.
As long as we are testing old hardware.
I think you are talking about multithreading in your pigeon English.
Fuck sakes, he was most likely referring to threads.h , which is the std. C++ library for multithreading.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Why are you whining about something that is 100% optional?
Even 386 has multithreading. The Pentium 4 just takes it a step further with HyperThreading which lowers the context switching (push/pop) overhead. The extra fake core shown to the OS is just an abstraction to help the OS perform better with this technology.
You never had control of your home systems. Windows is not yours to control, and never was.
Unless you think being obsolete or vulnerable is being 'in control'.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
The Acer Aspire One seems to be relatively fast with an SSD and Ubuntu Mate. It boots up fast and with Mate there are no real UI delays as with many other Ubuntu flavors. You have wait a little bit longer in the browser for the page to be rendered so don't expect to just start scrolling immediately after entering the URL. The bottleneck is of course the lack of real graphics rendering capabilities, even those effects of the regular Ubuntu seemed slow (plus the fact that the Ubuntu Launcher takes big part of the screen real estate).
There is no UEFI SecureBoot requirement in Windows 8 or 10. At least I have been able to install to any kinds of machines just fine.
I'm just curious, why are live tiles so horrible? I see this reaction often but I never really get a good explanation why, though I've heard many reasons why they are good. They are like icons, except resizable and enhanced with live information. They are rectangular/square, just like the taskbar icons in Windows 7 that everyone I know loves.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
I have it on a Compaq C306US with 1 GB of RAM and a 1.73 GHz Celeron. It seemed impressive at first, but the daily Defender signature update brings the machine to its knees. Seriously, the mouse pointer will not even move, and when I was actually able to bring up Perfmon, CPU and disk were both at 100%. That's unusable. I guess the answer is to install another security package, but that's a serious WTF. In 2015, it would be nice if Microsoft had heard of I/O throttling.
The audio also doesn't work unless you disable it, then re-enable it in device manager. I reported this bug with every previous build to no avail.
I wouldn't complain, but Microsoft claimed that every Vista-capable PC could run Windows 10, and that appears to be false.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Yes, Amdahl's Law says that if 50% of a procedure's steps must be run in sequence and 50% can be dispatched among a pool of workers, then the speedup from having an infinitely large pool of workers is the reciprocal of 50% . . . or two times. Two time improvement for an infinite number of CPU cores.
After Gene Amdahl coined his law on parallel processing he immediately went back to work on developing CPUs with faster clock speeds, because this is a much easier problem than identifying which steps of a process can be run concurrently and which have dependencies. . .
. . . or until recently it was. For one, Moore's law is starting to take effect so its no longer feasible to expect an increase in throughput every 3 years. At the same time programming paradigms, such as better task abstraction, closures and functional-reactive programming make modeling and communicating concurrency an easier task.
If it acquires resources on instantiation like a duck, then its a shared_ptr<Duck>
You can still uninstall any updates, and updates can be delayed by months under the Pro license.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
I guess MS still strongly feels this site gets so many eyeballs so it is worth relentless ads brazenly disguised as stories or Experiments...
It reminds me of Microsoft grass-roots astroturfing campaigns of yore.
So put ClassicShell on it and you won't ever have to see that shit again....
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
Ah, thanks for the info. I was indeed wondering what precisely is the need to show up as two cores.
We'll leave you alone in your basements while the rest of us go to work. By the way, your mom says there are openings at Burger King.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Microsoft never achieved some sort of nirvanic perfection with Windows XP or Windows 7. The start menu was a refinement process that began in 1995, but just because it's old and familiar doesn't mean it ever became all that great. The only way to move forward is to try new things - even awful things. Any company that doesn't is dying.
'Fast' is relative.
The question is whether 10 is as responsive as 7. MS specifically tuned 7 to run on low-end hardware, such as this netbook.
Making fun of word choices and then you throw out an eggcorn like pigeon?
Yes, I feel like I'm in preschool with the big, bulky Legos when I want the cool small ones. And the big bulky Legos have all this crap in them reporting everything to Microsoft. Also, they are less versatile than small legos. All I want are executable programs that do what I want them to do and no more and don't share my personal data.
This reminds me of recent questions, can anyone build a car that can't be hacked? Well, yes, all the cars built 2 decades ago can't be hacked and contain all the features I want in a car (drives from A to B, air conditioning, heater, radio).
- Take me back to 1984. Please.
Might as well face it I'm addicted to data.
The control I have is choice. A choice if or when I want to apply updates, that is more important to me. I run vulnerable/"obsolete" systems all the time and am just fine with that, in fact I'm quite happy and would like to "downgrade" some systems.
Shocking that someone doesn't want to be a sheep, I know it's hard to understand.
They are rectangular/square, just like the taskbar icons in Windows 7 that everyone I know loves.
Take a closer look.
The taskbar icons in Windows 7 have glass effect, nice diagonal gradient and rounded corners. Try hovering the mouse cursor over icons of running applications: there is even a sleek little lamp effect which follows the cursor, and the color of that effect matches the application icon. Also the icon of the active application has brighter background than others.
These kind of small touches are missing in the Windows 10 UI.
Don't care. I'm not going to be forced into updating my system. You'll be able to uninstall, until there's one they don't want you to uninstall. You'll be able to delay, until there's one they don't want you to delay. This type of thing is really coming to a head for me, too many times I've spent money on something only to have it changed to something I would never have purchased. Patches should always be optional and always be up to the user when to apply.
The SecureBoot requirement is for Windows Logo certification - it's not an installation requirement.
Sorry but you can't co-opt the knee-jerk "anti-windows" space as being "nerds". It's a highly specific class of particularly tiresome nerds. Many nerds run Win7 (and their spouses run Win8) so we are interested in Win10 now. Some of us get invited to parties too, where we'll be asked things like "what do you think of Win10" and we want to make a better response than "yah boo sucks Linux r00lz" because, you know, maybe it's a cute girl asking.
It isn't that older CPU couldn't support multi-threading, but the fact it was a single CPU, And threading similar tasks will not offer performance increase per coding complexity. So most programs were not multi-threaded, to do parallel processing, they were multi-threaded as to not hinder the User Interface, or to handle multiple interface requests. (Such as having many users login to the same port) .
Most Desktop applications didn't even bother going that far.
Now with multi-CPU cores, you can have each CPU doing the same calls in Parallel so you can do major speed improvements in you single app.
It isn't the peaking in hardware technology, but reliance on legacy software that was designed for simpler times.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
No "at least" about it. Windows 8 and 10 support secure boot but don't require it.
Windows 8 specifically requires that secure boot be optional in the BIOS for Windows Logo Certification. The only change for Windows 10 is that this requirement is no longer there leaving it up to the vendor to decide if they want to lock your PC down. However for Windows Logo Certification on Windows 10 there is a requirement that OEMs support SecureBoot and have it enabled out of the box.
Windows does not require it.
Windows will run even if you disable it.
Indeed. The new UI just seems unrefined. If I had any experience in programming, I would start working on a windows aero shell for the new GUI, much like Classic Shell.
I though on Slashdot we hated Eye Candy?
The Glass effect blurs too much, so you are unable to see what is behind it.
The Lamp effect is marginally useful so you can pick your icons where you mouse cursor is jammed at the bottom of the screen.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
So what you're saying is there's nothing that'll make you happy with Windows 10. If you want the gearhead features, you pay for the gearhead features. I, for one, am glad that after I upgrade my parents to Windows 10 they won't have the choice to ignore updates. Same with 95% of people out there with computers.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
*pidgin.
If you're going to gripe about someone's grammar, you really should ensure that yours is impeccable.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
In my usage, I seldom access the start menu on windows 7. My most used programs are pinned to the taskbar, and if I ever need to run something that isn't pinned (usually under the hood stuff), I can just open the run box and type in "appwiz.cpl" etc.
I don't think there are many "effects" in Linux by default, at least in Ubuntu (and I don't count those 3D task switchers or wobbly windows). The windows "pop up" with some sort of animation you barely notice with a relatively new hardware. Dragging windows up the "snap to border" limits also creates some sort of orange animation for the window placeholder effect. What the Acer Aspire One can't do are those compiz compositing effects requiring 3D acceleration. Some of those regular effects probably use 3D effects as well. You can make the Linux "flat", for example in Ubuntu Mate (Marco, no compositing). But so does Windows 8/10 also look "flat" in quite the same way as Mate. The number of effects looks minimal.
The result is surprising to say the least, as installation not only went impressively fast but Windows 10 also works fast as long as you’re not launching a very demanding app such as Photoshop.
My wife's very same netbook runs GIMP, LibreOffice, Firefox and video player concurrently and well under SuSE 13.1
Oh, and under Win7 it takes ages to boot (you do have an antivirus, right?), so I will take the story with a grain of salt or two.
They're also ugly as hell having absolutely horrible color schemes that make me want to rip my eyes out every time I see them. Neon Orange on Smoke Gray transparency? WTH?? Also, there's no dimensionality. It's all flat. The quick bar isn't so bad and I can get used to it...but those damn tiles all over the place in the start menu itself? Ugly as damn sin.
I grant that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but what I behold in Win10 is ugly as shit to me. If you like it, fine. I'm happy for you. Enjoy that shit all you want. Me, I'd rather have a bit more complexity to my desktop icon design and I'd be less annoyed if MS allowed me to stick with Aero in the same way 7 could be made to look like WinXP or 98 with the classic theme. I was one of the weird ones who, while I didn't have anything outright against the plastic look of default XP and thought it looked leagues better than the 9x UIs, I saw the Aero UI in Vista and wanted to jump over that...but I didn't want the quirky shit of Vista's UAC. Thankfully in the interim there was WinXP Dark Edition that applied the Aero look to XP's core. When 7 came out and did away with several major issues I had with Vista (still had plenty of issues that I could live with that were patched out in SP1 anyway), and had the stability and usability of XP, I swapped as soon as I was able. Then they came out with windows 8 and not only did they come out with a crap interface I can't stand to look at, but also threw usability to the wind. Windows 10 as far as I've been able to discern has resolved most if not all of the usability issues, but kept the UI that makes my eyes bleed. If I can't stand to look at the OS UI to use the system, how am I going to get any real productivity going? Every time I move out of an app to a different one I'm going to be jarred out of the zone through noticing the UI "faults".
I replaced my windows 7 with an insider preview windows 10 (lenovo y560, 4GB ram, i5). Did it because the windows 7 started to be painfully slow (despite me not installing anything new on it for over a year). I used chocolatey to reinstall almost software. After all this, windows is pretty snappy (and returns from sleep without hogging my whole computer, which is something windows 7 did for some reason). I don't know about the driver compatibility. I had issues with my Atheros wireless driver for windows 7. I found another one from HP which was for windows 8.1.
"I wonder how much Microsoft paid to Dice"
Had the review been unfavorable, who would you claim is the conspirator?
I'm getting really tired of argumentum ad monsantium, the logical fallacy that any position opposing mine has to be shilling for someone.
I advised mine not to install Win10. I don't want to get the calls "X has changed how do I do Y now?", "I was working on this critical thing and something (ie: patch) happened, how do I get it back?", "We're trying to watch Netflix like you showed us but it keeps shuddering in the middle of it (due to "background" updates screwing with the framerate on their slow system)"
The fact is the current regime works perfectly well, people like yourself can schedule the download/install to automatically occur in the middle of the night and people like me can turn it off until I'm ready to take action.
In my IT business, there is an effect I see all the time. Any change to a familiar interface, even a clear improvement, brings forth a certain cohort of users who insist that their favorite product has been ruined forever.
There is no UEFI SecureBoot requirement in Windows 8 or 10. At least I have been able to install to any kinds of machines just fine.
The requirement has been for the "Designed for Windows [Version]" program, if you want to ship with the sticker, be an OEM partner and get the best pricing it's compulsory but it's not an install requirement. That would be stupid of Microsoft, since most pre-2012 machines wouldn't be able to update. Also for Win8 OEMs are required to give you a way to turn it off, for Win10 they're merely permitted. I'm sure some of them will be encouraged by Microsoft to disable it completely, to see if that'll draw anti-trust lawsuits. So not yet, but I bet it's coming soon....
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Personal opinion, the stock Metro Tiles that are there the first time you fire up your computer or Surface tablet are just too much, literally there are just too many of them there. I like the concept of the live tiles, and actually find them useful, but having to scroll through 10 horizontal pages of apps to find what you want is incredibly off-putting. After spending a significant amount of time paring them down to only the ones I find useful, it's actually a usable launch pad.
The "Apps" View, their attempt at giving us the start menu back, I have been unable to make useful. Sorted by name, where is Word? Is it under "W" for Word? Just Weather. How about under "O" for office? OneDrive and OneNote. "M" for Microsoft Word? Nope. That's Mail, Maps, Money, and Music. Oh, you have to scroll over a screen to get to "Microsoft Office", there's Office 2010. Hope you weren't looking for Word 2013, cause that's in the next section over "Microsoft Office 2013". The only time it comes close is if you sort the apps by usage. The Category or by Install Date aren't too horrible, but still not incredibly intuitive.
For the most part, I've given up on visually looking for a program to open. I've found the searching function to be far more useful. Hit the Windows key, start typing, pick the application I want to run out of the results. Which works great if you have a keyboard. On the Surface, without the keyboard, swipe from the right side of the screen, touch "search", touch in the search box (because the soft keyboard doesn't come up automatically), the type "Word"...
Granted, it is a little beefier specs-wise, but I have the Win 10 Pro 64-bit Preview installed on a Dell Inspiron 530 from mid-'07 and it is running great. It is a Core 2 Quad 6600 (2.4 GHz), has 6 GB DDR2 RAM, a 120 GB Crucial SSD (hacked BIOS re-enables AHCI that Dell removed), 1 TB WD Blue HDD and a 1 GB Radeon 6450.
It works fine, plays 1080p video with no issues but is loud and puts out a lot of heat (105 watt processor). I am looking forward to replacing it with an Intel NUC later this year when the Skylake models are released. About an 80% reduction in power consumption with better performance.
Those nice interface special effects also demand too much of the crappy little Lower Slobbovian PCs that so many people try to shoehorn Windows into. To get their treasured student copy of Word 2007 to come up before Tuesday, they have to rummage through Control Panel for ways of turning the special effects off.
Wouldn't it imply that it tried hard and (at least partially) failed?
"Microsoft struggled to keep system requirements unchanged to make sure that everything runs smoothly"
vs
"Microsoft fought hard to keep system requirements unchanged to make sure that everything runs smoothly"
You'll be able to uninstall, until there's one they don't want you to uninstall. You'll be able to delay, until there's one they don't want you to delay.
It doesn't surprise me that this would turn into FUD. When you can't find a good argument, make one up.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
Most of those effects are for highlighting open tasks (which is why they call it the task bar). No version of the Start menu has ever used such glassy highlight effects for open tasks.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
Unfortunately, I agree with you. For technically minded people.
Unfortunately now that the vast majority of PC's are in the hands of people who are only semi-technical and will happily disable the update service, firewall and anti-virus cause their buddy Steve said it made his PC run faster. Steve also recommends plugging the network cable directly into the cable modem as that router thing just causes parity errors.
It's almost like the should sell a "Home" version for the vast majority of people, then have some sort of "Enterprise" or "Professional" version for technical people.
There really isn't any noticeable performance penalty of having all effects turned on in Windows. If your GPU driver supports DWM compositing in the first place, you're golden. Even GMA950 is just fine.
"Acer Aspire One can't do ... compositing".
Um, yes it can.. It can also do 3D -- most of the Aspire Ones, anyway... The line started with the Intel 945GSE Express. Later, some used ATI Radeon 4225.
The AAO D270 has an Atom N2600 (or N2800)- with Intel GMA 3600/3650 (PowerVR SGX 545), and that one doesn't do Linux 3D.
So, for use with Linux, avoid the D270 (use a D257), and 3d and compositing will work just fine.
(owner of 5 of these, running Linux).
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
I think that tiles wouldn't be bad, and the emphasis on typography doesn't have to be bad either.
But the execution, as with pretty much anything Microsoft, is botched. All the colors are overly bright and flashy, and when everything competes for your attention through dense, opaque colors, and large, fairly uniform tile sizes, then your attention isn't properly directed. Also, with the emphasis on bold background colors and typography, the rest of the presentation, i.e. icons, pictorials, graphs, take a backseat, so it looks half-baked and prototypey.
Sometimes I think they should hire some UX expert, but to be fair, Google's web application interfaces are also horrible, and even Apple has lots of faults, starting with keychords that would make an emacs user choke (e.g. the four-key chords for a screen snapshot), or the fact that in certain basic views in the Folder, it's impossible to create a new directory, you have to switch to another view for the 'New folder' button to appear.
Neon Orange on Smoke Gray transparency? WTH??
I can't say I've come across this. The "smoke gray transparency" sounds like the background color and can be changed in settings.
You can get rid of tiles if you want. You can even shrink the menu down to remove the extra space they once took up.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
But you are a sheep. Just not Microsoft's sheep.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Is it just me that feels that this isn't a win for Windows 10, but actually a degradation of Windows Vista/7 and - to some extent - 8 in terms of performance losses at those points?
I know that XP -> Vista and XP->7 felt like backward steps at times in terms of performance, and were accompanied by a similar ramp-up in terms of realistic minimum specs. It just seems that in 8 (which is as fast as 7, if not faster, as far as I can tell) and 10 are actually coming back to what they should always have been?
Just junk like Superfetch services and Windows Search - I feel if you were to optimise those more efficiently that they'd easily show a performance improvement. I know that disabling them certainly does (fun fact: Disabling Windows Search on Windows 8 stops you installing new keyboard languages!).
Windows 8 has been my last two mass deployments and, with a few third-party-cured interface problems, is just as good to the users as 7 was, but actually boots, resumes, etc. much faster. And the amount of sheer built-in hardware drivers is phenomenal. I no longer need several images to image dozens of types and models of computer, laptop, all-in-one, etc. just one image will do with maybe a tweak if something requires the very latest graphics drivers.
Windows 10 appears to be continuing this trend of a RETURN to performance, rather than performing miracles. Hardware hasn't got much faster since the Windows 7 days - maybe a core or two more, maybe a graphics card upgrade, but the base CPU/RAM/disk are pretty much in the same area.
I mean, it's good either way. But it shouldn't be shocking. Optimised versions of 7 were sold with netbooks for years, and their hardware was severely limited for a long time. It was just a matter of turning junk off.
My min spec of "Dual or-more-core anything with 4Gb RAM" has held for several years in a row now for business systems, and can be satisfied for a virtual pittance. Only very recently have I contemplated enhancing that to 8Gb of RAM and maybe an SSD as a luxury, but the rest is pretty static.
It sounds like you are using Windows 8 or 8.1. Windows 10 has a different interface, you don't need to "scroll over a screen".
The menu structure for applications has not changed. Word 2013 is in the same folder that it would have been in for Windows 7.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
Just don't want or need it. I don't run apps, I only use programs for the work I do (Creative Suite 5.5, ChemBioDraw, Sigmaplot 12, Reference Manager, etc.). Also play games. Windows 7 Ultimate does everything I want, and so far I haven't seen anything in Windows 10 that would make me switch. That may change over time as they work on 10, but after Windows 8 it's going to be a tough sell.
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
large, fairly uniform tile sizes
Tiles have 4 sizes, the smallest being 1/16th the size of the largest.
the rest of the presentation, i.e. icons, pictorials, graphs, take a backseat
Agreed with some stock apps, their icons could use work. But for the most part I find the opposite to be true... many tiles rotate pictures related to current news, social media, and so on, while some create graphics like the local weather forecast.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
I am sorry to be the baron of bad news, but you seem buttered, so allow me to play doubles advocate here for a moment. For all intensive purposes I think you are wrong. In an age where false morals are a diamond dozen, true virtues are a blessing in the skies, and are more than just ice king on the cake. We often put our false morality on a petal stool like a bunch of pre-Madonnas, but you all seem to be taking something very valuable for granite.
So I ask of you to mustard up all the strength you can because it is a doggy dog world out there. Although there is some merit to what you are saying it seems like you have a huge ship on your shoulder. In your argument you seem to throw everything in but the kids Nsync, and even though you are having a feel day with this I am here to bring you back into reality.
I have a sick sense when it comes to these types of things. It is almost spooky, because I cannot turn a blonde eye to these glaring flaws in your rhetoric. I have zero taller ants when it comes to people spouting out hate in the name of moral righteousness. You just need to remember what comes around is all around, and when supply and command fails you will be the first to go.
Make my words, when you get down to brass stacks it doesn't take rocket appliances to get two birds stoned at once. It's clear who makes the pants in this relationship, and sometimes you just have to swallow your prize and accept the fax, instead of making a half-harded effort. You might have to come to this conclusion through denial and error but I swear on my mother's mating name that when you put the petal to the medal you will pass with flying carpets like it's a peach of cake.
Why are you whining about something that is 100% optional?
Duh, it's Microsoft
If Windows came with a free cancer-curing app people would be complaining here that you couldn't turn it off.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Odd that you say that. I'm running Mint on my 1st gen MSI Wind (Atom N270, GMA950, 2GB RAM, 120GB spinny disk) with Cinnamon, and it works just fine without turning any graphical bits off. It's even older than the Aspire One from the article, too!
Ha, yeah, should have pointed that out. 8.1 on my home PC and Surface. My comment was directed toward the Metro/Tile interface in general. The original intent was to point out the quantity of "stock" tiles being the problem, and it devolved into bitching about their replacement for the start menu. My bad. Actually looking forward to trying 10, just don't have a spare machine at the moment and wasn't brave enough to just dive in sight unseen.
1984 was not 2 decades ago
If they created a "Windows ready" desktop that is modular (looking at you Mac Pro)
The Mac Pro is plenty modular. Just plug in Thunderbolt modules.
If the Mac Pro didn't have it's flaw, was equipped with "Windows Ready" driver and costed 20%-30% less than the same PC with equivalent specs I would have took one hands down.
Then take one. A December 2013 story breaks down what it'd cost to build an equivalent Windows PC. Add the price of labor and support, and it might actually be 30 percent more than a comparable Mac Pro.
Was Windows Vista really that bad after Service Pack 1 "Mojave"?
daily Defender signature update brings the machine to its knees [...] Microsoft claimed that every Vista-capable PC could run Windows 10, and that appears to be false.
Does the daily Microsoft Security Essentials signature update on Windows Vista likewise monopolize I/O?
The desktop exists in all its glory in Windows 10. It will still do everything you mentioned. Tiles are not part of the desktop.
The Start menu, however, has tiles. And they can be resized; you can make them smaller than desktop icons if you want. And they can be removed completely if that's not your thing.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
I don't see how big, ugly, flat colored boxes look good to anyone who is using a large monitor.
Then why did Microsoft add them to the Xbox 360 dashboard in the Metro update (December 2011)? Xbox 360 monitors are usually even bigger than PC monitors.
Were 1995 cars hackable?
since the Starter Edition OA ISO is hard to find.
The confirmation email they sent me when I setup my account emailed my password back to me in plain text. Acer good-feelings: Gone.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
Same with Windows 8.1 - I installed it, chose the "classic" UI to show by default, I actually forgot there is a "new UI" somewhere. I press Start and type in the first few characters of whatever it is that I need ("Disabl" for example). My most used applications are pinned to taskbar, all my software is dumped into a desktop folder which is doubled as a toolbar, all my games shortcuts are in another Desktop folder which is doubled as a toolbar - everything I need is two clicks away in terms of shortcuts.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Had the review been unfavorable, who would you claim is the conspirator?
Silly goose, Microsoft would not pay to have a bad review published.
Get your driver models straight, WDM (win98/2000+) is the driver model for generic devices, U/K WDF sits on top of this. WDDM is only for display devices (new in Vista) and you also have NDIS for network and various other storport/miniport layers. A laptop that supports WDDM 1.0 only conveys information about the graphics hardware...
Strange, I've deployed two entire Windows 8 networks and not once had an UEFI boot option enabled.
In fact, in one case, I had to get the BIOS manufacturer to issue a new BIOS for two models of laptop that - when using non-UEFI boot on Windows 8 on encrypted disks refused to boot at all. It wasn't Windows 8 related, the boot process hung if a certain disk offset (corresponding to an empty flag on a whole-disk NTFS partition) wasn't zero. Kinda cocked up all encrypted disks, and any non-Windows install but was a BIOS problem (not even UEFI!) and was quickly patched when the prospect of returning an awful lot of hardware as "not fit for purpose" came up in discussions.
In fact, every machine I have that has UEFI - server or client - gets it disabled or, at absolutely minimum, pushed to the bottom of the boot options underneath "Legacy BIOS" or however they want to refer to it.
I can't see Windows 10 being any different but I could be wrong but... actually... that's not even OUT yet, so it's kind of a moot question at this point.
I, for one, am glad that after I upgrade my parents to Windows 10 they won't have the choice to ignore updates.
And how does Windows 10 run on your parents? Did you update them with an USB stick? Where did you put it?
(moderate +1 funny, that was the intent!)
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
I though on Slashdot we hated Eye Candy?
No, we just hate anything new and/or from Microsoft.
Perhaps before commenting on something, you should actually look at what you are commenting on?
Windows 10 doesn't have " the big, ugly colored squares", it has the start menu, with the addition of optional live tiles. It only turns on the tile interface on phones and tablets, so you got your wish, now fire up VMware Player, load Windows 10 and take a look, you might be pleasantly surprised.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
> Try hovering the mouse cursor over icons of running applications: there is even a sleek little lamp effect which follows the cursor
These incredibly shallow, self-serving afterthoughts, which don't show coherency with anything else, make me disappointed. It's not even that the 'sleek' little lamp effect looks bad (which it does) or that it's useless (which it is).
The little lamp effect is not diegetic, that's the problem. It is the shallowest possible thing to do on a UI. It is an after-effect, implemented poorly. After decades of UX research, the population gets a stupid, incoherent glow, that's it. When I was a kid, using 8 bit computers, I didn't expect the rapid pace of hardware development, but I didn't expect how broken, bankrupt, degraded and degenerate some of mainstream software 'advances' would become.
The whole desktop thing started as a set of metaphors, with the desktop (duh), documents (for some reason called 'windows'), icons, pointer, etc. Then it got a bit more skeuomorphic with ever more realistic looking Folders cabinets, trashcans and whatnot. There was also an era of pseudo-3D, with drop shadows, bevels and color gradient effects. Then Apple came out with the Lycoris translucent glassy things, which removed a bit from the metaphor (blurs etc. made things a bit more abstract) but also added skeuomorphisms, mimicking - in incredibly shallow ways - the effect of translucency, matte and glossy semitransparent materials, Z-index etc.
Try this: hover the mouse over a taskbar button. The weird little lamp effect will NOT actually follow the mouse up and down, only sideways. The reflections etc. even have a shape, alluding to some optically more complex environment, but it's just an after-effects mask. It adds information where none exists. IOW it adds puzzling noise.
Now move it from one taskbar button to the next. At the boundary, it will not transition as you'd expect. It only casts light on the button over which the tip of the mouse pointer lies. Then you move a couple of pixels away, and suddenly, only the other button gets the light. So obviously both have some Lambertian reflectance, and they apparently lie on the same plane, right next to one another, underneath the magically radiating cursor, and the metaphor breaks. It breaks all reasonable expectations, it surprises the user who looks, in a negative way. It's annoying. The light doesn't appear over anything else, not even built-in window bars or IE browser buttons. It's just a 'visual touch'.
Probably it's meant to be beneficial, for example, disambiguating for the user as to which button he is hovering over. But then why the weird lamp effect, rather than some straightforward effect on the entire button, e.g. a slightly more impactful visual styling? The little lamp is there for some stuff, but it's haphazard and doesn't relate to either the buttons or the mouse cursor, or anything else. It's just someone's brainfart which a management committee just didn't veto.
And more importantly, why is it that we as users get so many inferior features, when there are actually smart people in the industry? Maybe the Windows gravy train is still a near-monopoly on the desktop.
The internal world and visuals of a single computer game show more consistency and cohesion than the series of Windows (and KDE and Gnome) abominations, though a game developer's task is arguably more difficult. There aren't a million things going on on a desktop, unlike in a game, and also, there is no expectation to follow constraints of the game world itself.
So I suggest we set up a museum for Windows versions, or people who are interested in awkwardness, or idiosyncratic icons of an era post the 'peak desktop monopoly', can download such skins with after-effects, but please hire UX experts for the design of an operating system's UI, and what wouldn't pass in other software meant for 'experience' (game, video player etc.) or 'productivity' shouldn't be included in the mother of all UIs, the uncircumventable OS desktop.
Is it even on the Pro version? Also, it doesn't appear on WSUS hooked systems, which is Pro and Enterprise as well.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
What you write is a dead giveaway that what you work on has actual users. It's the only type of scenario where I saw the above phenomenon at play.
And is that so wrong? I liken it to your favorite grocery store changing up where all the products are located every few months. They may have all the studies in the world that say it's a better flow of people to have Product A and Product C right next to each other, but if nobody is looking there, because that's never where it's been before, it's a poor design.
"But you can change all the options..." if you can find them. Changing the finer points of the visuals such as Icon Spacing and Title Bar font used to be behind Desktop / Properties / Appearance. Now it's Desktop / Personalize / Window Color. That's...less intuitive.
Every new version of Windows since 2000->XP has suffered from the unnecessary moving of options and screens. They've all been focused on the dwindling number of people who have never used a computer at the expense of the other 99%. Maybe the new layout makes more logical sense if you have no muscle memory or expectations. Then as soon as everybody gets used to the new layout, they go and fuck it all up again.
Fingers crossed, I'm not on Windows, just set up a machine for someone recently, so I only saw what's included. I guess the 1/16 scale refers to area, i.e. 1/4 edge length? Either way it's still a fairly tight distribution.
Was it wrong that I read this in Ricky's voice from Trailer Park Boys?
I've disabled my update service, firewall, and anti-virus for years without issue, so I am to be made to pay for an enterprise version for my home system to keep the status quo? That's bullshit and you know it. If users want to be stupid, let them be stupid. What business is it of Microsoft's? The only reason they need to do this is because they can't create a secure OS and are having to go to extreme measures to make it seem like their systems are secure. As the recent Hacking Team revelations make clear, even with a fully updated system you are not secure. Accept that and reject the fear of "not patching your system somehow equates imminent destruction" and you'll see that Any company, Microsoft/Google/Mozilla/etc making changes without giving you the opportunity to accept/reject them is a bad thing.
I have read lots about Windows 10, which is a facelift on Windows 8. They had to do the facelift because their vast existing user base didn't like the childish colored squares. I have looked at dozens of screens shots. Yes, I can customize Windows 10 to look like Windows 7, but that means I have to spend time to get back to where I already am right now. Can I un-install 10 if I try it and don't like it? That I have not seen mention of anywhere.
So, can I un-install it and go back to Windows 7 if I don't like it?
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
Windows 10 minimum requirements are basically a 1GHz processor and 1GB of RAM.
I'm not techie enough to know for sure, but I don't think there was anything worth hacking in most cars built in 1995, although a few top of the line Buicks and Cadillacs had electronic data recording. List of cars with EDR
Might as well face it I'm addicted to data.
now fire up VMware Player, load Windows 10 and take a look, you might be pleasantly surprised.
VMware Player allows you to create a Virtual Machine (VM), which is not the machine you are sitting at. Therefore the installation has no effect on your existing Windows 7 Machine. VMware Player is also free to use software.
Having read about it and actually using it are TOTALLY different things. Try it, you will be pleasantly surprised.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
I just went to MS to see what they had to say about why I should upgrade to 10. They said it was because it has the best of Windows 8 and Window 7 combined, and has live tiles. So since I don't want anything from Windows 8, and I hate the live tiles, they haven't convinced me at all.
So I am wondering, does anyone know if you can uninstall 10 and go back to Windows 7 once you have done the "upgrade"? I have a feeling it is a one way street.
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
I really don't want to set up a dual boot system on my main computer. It is too important for my work to play around with it like that. I may try on one of my gaming computers here that is not used for anything serious.
But again, since most people won't be setting up virtual machines and instead will upgrade from 7 or 8 to 10, I am wondering if the process is reversible? Can people revert back to 7 if they decide they don't like 10?
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
....and this is why some people don't get laid. IJS.
Really, the knee-jerk reactions have gotten tired. Yeah, everybody makes jokes about other systems - Linux guys tell jokes about Windows and Mac, etc. But y'know what? They all have their place, and sometimes the cute girl actually, you know, is using Windows to run spreadsheets or databases to do legitimate, difficult work. Yeah, sometimes it'd be easier on Linux - or easier, anyhow, for anyone who's been doing LAMP for years and has some background - but if she can do her work on Windows (or Mac, or whatever), don't deride her choices, be glad that she's using computing resources to do something complex....we need every brain we can get working at full capacity these days. :-)
"Truth is what works" -- William James "It works!!" -- o-dark-AM comment
So it sounds like VMware Player is exactly what you want. Virtual Machines live as a file on your system, not a drive, they are VIRTUAL machines running under your machine. It is like running Windows 10 in a Chrome session rather than directly on your system. There is no dual booting happening, no partitioning. It is as safe as safe can get to uninstall, you just delete the files.
The upgrade process is reversible just as any installation is reversible. You can just reinstall Windows 7 from the original installation disks. There very likely will be no uninstallation process or downgrade process, it will be a reinstall of everything. The general public is very unlikely to upgrade though, they are more likely just to buy a new computer with Windows 10 on it as they can't be bothered.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
So do like I did and delete them and reduce the menu down to the size it was on Windows 7. Problem solved. Ten more years of bug fixes for free.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
This is not true. There is a performance impact on many Windows 7 machines. But if so, you can just go to Advanced settings and click "Display for Best Performance" and you're done. Windows 10 makes this the default, more or less (although the RTM added a lot of Glass effects which does look nicer than the previous betas).
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Yep. I removed them completely and shrank the menu and it's great that way. Get rid of that ugly Fisher Price baby crap.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
> After Gene Amdahl coined his law on parallel processing he immediately went back to work on developing CPUs with faster clock speeds, because this is a much easier problem than identifying which steps of a process can be run concurrently and which have dependencies. . .
He didn't have to choose - he could have taken a parallel approach.
This isn't exactly true. Even on Enterprise, they are allowing me to "schedule" the update, but there is still a timer by which it must be done.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
In practice I haven't noticed any performance degradation even if I have all of the checkboxes ticked in that dialog.
Wow, you really got worked up over the lamp effect. :D
Sorry about your bridge being the one in Desert Center, CA. I've heard that a new span will be opening soon near the Chicago Loop, at Gangland Station. Put in for it now.
Starting in Windows 7, apps are much more likely to be scheduled on separate threads. Try a batch file. On XP, it will run the entire thing on a single thread. On Windows 7, every program run in the batch file will be on a separate thread/CPU and the entire batch file will be multi-threaded. Also on Windows 7+, .NET applications automatically put certain parts (UI for Windows Forms, garbage collector, etc.) on separate threads. So these things are happening regardless of being rewritten for it to a small extent.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
I totally agree. Piss off with your Windows10 stories.
But even "locked down" is a misnomer, since several Linux flavors have their own codes for UEFI.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
work flawlessly on devices already powered by Windows 7 and Windows 8.1, as Microsoft struggled to keep system requirements unchanged to make sure that everything runs smoothly.
It amazes me that Windows 10 installs perfectly fine on older inexpensive PC's and laptops; however, it will not install "flawlessly" on 2 to 3 year old Alienware machines. To install, the user has to babysit the machine and perform hard restarts of the computer before Windows can soft boot during install.
To say the least, I am extremely disappointed in MS and Dell/Alienware. From what I have read, Dell/Alienware could release a simple BIOS update to combat the issue, but they refuse to do so.
I am running Windows 10, but I wonder how much better it would run if Microsoft and Dell would fix these boot issues.
Somehow I don't think that putting my Windows 7 disk in and running the installation would get me back to my current setup from Windows 10. I currently have a very complicated setup with over 150 programs installed. I use my computer for writing science manuscripts, preparing the figures, video editing, Flash animation, preparing scientific graphs, and playing games. It more than likely that running the Windows 7 installation disk on an upgraded Windows 10 machine would wipe the OS and start from scratch. Setting up a virtual machine is not an option that I am interested in on my main computer. As I mentioned, I may try upgrading on one computer here that is dedicated to playing games since it won't be a disaster even if it causes problems.
Still, it looks like the selling points are "it's more like Windows 7" and "it runs universal apps". I don't use any apps, and I really like Windows 7. So they will need to add some new desktop functionality that does not exist in Windows 7 before I would make the change.
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
All major applications we use here are making full use of said features. Clearly CALC.EXE doesn't need it but CAD and other design software make great use of it.
Some of the application developed internally have multithreading to allow live data without the need to wait or get GUI interruptions.
I think "several Linux flavors " boils down to just Ubuntu and it's derivatives. That really constrains your boot options.
Pidgin English you moron.
Right, it is area, but if you think about it that is quite a difference. Here's an example of the different sizes:
http://www.winbeta.org/sites/d...
That picture is very zoomed in, for context the Twitter tile is slightly larger than a standard desktop icon.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
It was taken off as that looks very dated. Clean, low color, minimal is all the rage and more modern looking. OSX too toned these down with a flatter look with Yosemite. Android lollipop and M too are going low color aND flat with a modern look.
I was at McDonald's the other day and they too had a flat borderless Burger icon printed on the bag.
http://saveie6.com/
Live tiles are great on a phone (and a Windows Phone actually has a surprisingly good UI). They're not so useful on a computer though. They keep trying to push this sort of idea in Windows, with gadgets or active desktop, but it's never caught on. Live tiles are great for a tool that you look at only briefly just to see what's new, it's not so useful on a device that you sit in front of for hours. Besides the tiles do nothing that the web can't do.
I actually like the look of Windows 8 desktop (not the tiles though), once you use the registry to shrink the godawful fat border width. I always felt Windows 7 had too much eye candy. Get rid of the fluff and present only the important stuff. Even OSX has gone this way with Yosemite (though maybe it went a bit too far).
The name of that setting is outdated. It doesn't necessarily improve performance, it makes a tradeoff that was more optimal for really old computer architectures but actually less optimal for modern architectures. What it does is change the rendering from GPU-based and using GPU memory to CPU-based and preferring software recalculation.
You might want to read this: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnew...
Regardless of that, an Atom N450 at 1.66 GHz is a pretty low-end machine, even for 2005.
www.wavefront-av.com
They have improved. Power management, efi, and people tend to now buy more laptops and now tablets. People run apps on their phones.
Windows 10 is a hybrid which takes advantage of fast uefi booting, can run apps and applications, touch friendly, and more power efficient.
The 10 sdk has tools and support for dalvik and objective-c and can use 80% of the code for your android and is apps.
You may not be changing but I am seeing more and more surfaces and workplaces shifting to ultrabooks. So MS has decided it needed to change if it didn't want to follow the lead of IBM when focusing on legacy like mainframes
http://saveie6.com/
Sometimes, yes. The world is a worse place in the long-term if nobody tries a change. Or else we'd still all be on command-line interfaces. Or graphical interfaces that don't include a mouse. Or, or, or.
But yes, it's also true that change to something familiar is, in some sense, always negative.
There is a balance to be made and some people will be unhappy no matter what.
It's a valid concern when Windows automagically deploys cancer as part of the cancer-curing workflow. What if the app hangs or blue-screens when you didn't even mean to launch it? Congratulations, now you have cancer.
Hey be careful. He's the "baron" of bad news after all!
TBH, I would've liked Yosemite better if it had Snow Leopard's UI with the more disruptive skeuomorphisms taken out. I'm not a fan of completely flat UIs and the subtle shading Snow Leopard had was just right in my opinion. Plus, Yosemite is too bright in some places.
As for Win 10: That's what a hacked uxtheme.dll is for. I found every version of Windows kinda ugly (with Win 7 being the sole exception) but it's not like you can't fix that... once you've convinced your system that all themes are genuine Microsoft themes.
(Honesly, I'd love it if the uxtheme unlock could be something that's in there by default, hidden behind a policy or something. Something easy to lock down in a corporate setting but accessible to advanced home users without having to patch a system file.)
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
It's not "more modern looking", it's simply a modern designer trend. There's a really big difference.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Yes you can. You put your installation disk of Windows 7/8, click next, next, next, done. Then hit the win-R key, type in restore. Click your backup file, next, next, done. Whoala!
I'm sure you have a backup file somewhere because you wouldn't want to lose your system with 150 apps installed on it, so there shouldn't be a problem.
I remember when Windows XP was doomed. DOOMED! Because there was 0.01% of the applications that apparently 90% of slashdot ran that wasn't compatible. They seemed to disappear somehow.
I suppose you also recommend people stopped buying CDs because you were afraid of getting calls on how to flip it over to play the other half, or how do they rewind it when they are done?
I suggest people don't upgrade to Windows 10, because it's gotten all fat and bloated with those double digit numbers. Just think of how many places all the new applications will be when they have to update their stuff and they have to add an extra digit! Not to mention all the wasted disk space. I have a friend who can't fit another 2000 bytes on his system, so it's a non-starter for him. Single digit version OS's for life!
Got over yourself Jimmy. Name one single "secure" OS. Either you are blind, ignorant, or both.
The original 8086 had multithreading. It could only run one at a time though. Been writing multithreaded code since well... 1992. We just need better programmers.
Now you're starting to sound like my grandma that refused to use the microwave oven given to her one Christmas. When she died 12 years later, it was found in the basement still sealed in the box. To scared of change.
I wasn't crazy about Win8 at first but when I got my new laptop that came with it, it's not anywhere near as bad as what you read about online. I almost never see the tile screen because I set my windows to also default to the desktop. A quick glance at my computer and you would think it's Win7.
Stop nitpicking.
No, 1984 was reference to a certain novel with a level of surveillance I feel comfortable accepting, as opposed to what's happening now.
Might as well face it I'm addicted to data.
Modern windows kernels and their driver infrastructure are quite technically advanced. At least all default filesystems on Windows support asynchronous I/O. On Linux, no filesystems support it IIRC, so the best you can do is spin a couple of worker threads to sleep on file I/O if you want a responsive application. Sigh...
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
You know what? I agree. I fully do. You've nailed it. Thanks. I thought I was the only one who thought that way. As soon as OS X on Intel became usable, I dumped my KDE desktop and wouldn't look back. GDK, with its clunkiness and lack of performance of Windows is the downfall of popular open source like Inkscape and GIMP... Ehh...
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Obstinate reading comprehension fail. "Use VMWare player" "I don't want to set up dual boot". Seriously? Nobody asks you to dual boot anything. You really need to try things out. Download the damn player, set it up, install Windows 10, go. When you're done, delete the VM image files, uninstall the player, and nobody will even know that Win 10 was on your system. Sheesh.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Then there's argumentum ad pomum, by which your opponent has to be a zombified fan of a company so charismatic that it doesn't have to pay him anything.
If the PSU fails, you have Apple replace it. If the logic board fails, you have Apple replace it.
I think Eloking's point is that Apple would charge substantially more for this replacement after the warranty expires than a retailer would charge for a PC motherboard or PSU that the end user installs.
Parent is right. Windows 8 was broken, it was fixed by the complaints from the evil "nitpickers". The options grandparent mentions that make his system usable were intruduced to pacify the critics that had complained about the usability of using Windows 8.0 RTM on a System without a touchscreen.
The first improvements were intruduced in Windows 8.0 after the release because people complained louder than usual. It wasn't the typical bitching about every new Windows version. That was to be expected. But even people open to new OS or friendly towards Microsoft were complaining and backed up their claims with screenshots and really bad user experiences. People were fired.
Try it: Install Windows 8.0 in a VM on a desktop machine with keyboard and mouse and no touchscreen and do not install upgrades. Try it out. It really is a bad user experience.
Windows Vista was not the mess the nitpickers suggested. But Windows 8.0 RTM was a usability desaster, especially without a touchscreen.
Windows 8.1 was a response to the critics of Windows 8.0 and focused further on the desktop experience. Windows 10 brought back the start menue and tried to address the inconsistencies still present in Windows 8.1. Eg. there are some settings available only on the touch ui and some settings only available on the control panel for the desktop ui.
Windows 10 focused even more on the consistency of the user experience for touchscreen, desktop and hybrid devices. And they made it free for Windows 7, 8 and 10. While I agree that MS wants to reduce the zoo of Windows versions out there and lure people in their Windows store, I am still convinvced that this step was also neccessary to win back still annoyed Windows 8.x users and lure Windows 7 users to the newest OS.
Windows 10 is no longer as bad as the critics of Windows 8.x told the Windows 7 users. Another reason I assume for the free upgrade might be to reduce the transitional costs for companies that switch from Windows 7 to 10. If people use Windows 10 at home the transitional costs to upgrade from Windows 7 to 10 are reduced significantly.
Companies may have upgraded from vista to seven, but most skipped 8.x alltogether because the usability was nearly as bad as the nitpickers said. In my company, every new Windows since Windows XP was rolled out in two years time, because the transitional costs are less from (Windows version) +1 compared to bigger steps. And it is already clear that Windows 10 will be rolled out.
MS implemented a direct upgrade path from version 7 to 10 for a reason, even if companies opt for a fresh install.
So where can I buy these mythical Thunderbolt RAM modules then?
It'd be possible to make a Thunderbolt enclosure for DIMMs. For example, you could put a PCI-e RAM drive in a Thunderbolt card cage or a SATA RAM drive in a Thunderbolt SATA cage and then swap to it. In practice, no, I don't know who still makes these.
Sure, but does anyone actually sit with their start menu open for hours? Or can they open a web browser and browse to their website faster than clicking the Start button? Let alone open several sites and have them all available at a glance.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
Would have modded you up if I had mod points...
If Windows came with a free cancer-curing app people would be complaining here that you couldn't turn it off.
You're damn right we'd be complaining. We all know what Microsoft's favorite cure is: reboot. So the cancer cure is to kill yourself and reincarnate.
Naturally we're complaining about being unable to turn off Microsoft's homicidal app.
I am sorry to be the baron of bad news, but you seem buttered, so allow me to play doubles advocate here for a moment. For all intensive purposes I think you are wrong. In an age where false morals are a diamond dozen, true virtues are a blessing in the skies, and are more than just ice king on the cake. We often put our false morality on a petal stool like a bunch of pre-Madonnas, but you all seem to be taking something very valuable for granite.
Siri, is that you?
Well no.
The terrible reception for Windows 8 was almost entirely caused by fools howling "Aaaagh, tiles".
I took advantage of MS's introductory offer to upgrade XP to 8 for £20 and quickly found, "Oh look there's a tile which takes you back to the old style desktop" & apart from the start menu and search, didn't really need to use the tiled interface, although it made me wish my laptop had a touch screen. I also noticed that a lot of the Windows dialogues hadn't changed since NT.
Windows 8 has been running happily on my 8 year old Vaio FE31 since then. Furthermore, I don't think Windows has crashed once since 8.1 came out.
I may install an SSD for Windows 10.
It's a 1-way street; you're basically trading your Windows 7 license for a Windows 10 one, so after you've installed 10, you're no longer licensed for 7.
Windows 8 changed more than the UI; there are some under the hood improvements that don't have anything to do with the tiles crap. Personally, I'm not sure if it's worth it to switch because I imagine it'll kill my dual-boot and I'll have to spend a few hours wrestling with OSes (not to mention reconfiguring 10 into a UI mode that I like). You may be of a similar opinion, for that reason or a different one. What I've seen seems like an improvement over Windows 8, at least.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Ditto. Most people don't care about controlling their system, and 99% of the time, updates will fix some security flaw. The other 1%, I'll get a call from my parents saying that something changed that they don't like, and they'll accept the answer that Microsoft pushed the change to their machine, and there's nothing I can do. Maybe they'll grouse a bit, but they'll shrug and adapt.
For my own part, I install the 99% that address security issues and put the 1% of crap I don't want into the "ignored updates" list. I like having the option of making a choice like that. I don't really want to see Windows going down the road of the Xbox 360 (which has mandatory updates). Mandatory UI updates turned the system into a product that I never would have bought by choice.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
None of this make much sense. For starters,
On Windows 7, every program run in the batch file will be on a separate thread/CPU and the entire batch file will be multi-threaded.
The semantics of batch files is that every statement runs sequentially. This cannot be changed because all existing batch files assume that the previous line has completed processing, and the next one can use its results. Consequently, it doesn't make any sense to "multi-thread" a batch file, since it's entirely sequential.
Additionally, batch files spawn processes, not threads, so "multithreaded" is a misnomer here in any case.
Also on Windows 7+, .NET applications automatically put certain parts (UI for Windows Forms, garbage collector, etc.) on separate threads.
Okay, now you really don't know what you're talking about. First of all, .NET is not really tied to Windows, and it has the same behavior regardless of which version it runs on. Second, GC always runs on a separate thread, and this has been the case since 1.0. Third, WinForms is a Win32 wrapper, and as such it has to run on the main thread, which is trivially observable in debugger - and nothing has changed here in Win7 or any recent .NET version.
The standard C++ library for multithreading is <thread> - <threads.h> is a C thing (which is still available in C++, but not preferred).
It would be mandatory that it be removed entirely from OS releases in Europe.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Your use-case is such that you probably should not upgrade. You may want to grab your free copy, however. You can burn that to disk in .iso format and save it for later. If you build your own PC next time you can use that as your OS. Win7 will not have a long life like XP probably. You are safe for now and can look up the EOL for 7 at Microsoft's site if you want.
Again, do not upgrade. It is not something someone in your position should do unless they must. If you want to play with 10 then a VM (there are a few solutions, I pay for VMware Workstation) is the way to go. Your PC can easily handle running a separate OS at the same time. Just do not have a bunch of apps open in the host OS and the guest OS will be quite pleased.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
My understanding is that some of the beta builds had an 'Uninstall Windows 10' if you used the upgrade path. Having read your other post(s) it is not worth it for you to risk it - even if it has a high probability of success. The risks simply outweigh the benefits and the interruption of your work-flow will only hinder you. If you insist on doing so then simply make a bare-metal restore image of your current configuration and do the upgrade. If this fails you simply write back the original data and go about your day. Restoration in that manner is complete, quick, and effective. I prefer Acronis TrueImage. There are a variety of other solutions available.
I am afraid I can not help you with the specifics. I went a bit crazy and now have nothing but various flavors of Linux and BSD scattered across my house on desktops and laptops. I stopped my insanity with just one last box to go. It is actually running Vista - a pretty decent OS when you get it updated. I do not plan on going to Windows 10 though I will probably keep it in a VM and keep my MSDN subscription.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Look into LinuxMint - Cinnamon. Mint has a Mate version as well. Cinnamon pretty much eliminated any hang-ups like the one seen when opening the start menu. It is actually well done and makes a great userland environment.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
That was beautiful. Saved for future reference.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
I was under the impression that if you upgrade from 7 to 10, your 7 key will no longer be valid. So grabbing your free copy and saving won't work. At any rate, grabbing a free copy wouldn't work anyway because it's the activation key that you need, and burning a free copy to load later on won't mean you'll have an activation key you can use later on.
Nah, they grab a copy now. When they get a new system they install 7 and then use the upgrade path to 10. It should work like a champ. There is some chance they will need to call to activate 7 but that is an automated process and takes two minutes.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
The CPU is similar to a fast Pentium III but with two logical cores ; 1GB RAM is considered a good amount on smartphones/tablets in 2015 (but it's silly not to bump it to 2GB, and using browser tabs will fill it up) ; and the HDD is not very slow - a 320GB one is at least a 5400 rpm with mildly high density, not your father's laptop HDD.
This thing would have perhaps been a $5000 desktop back in about the year 2000 or 2001, with an SCSI HDD and all the latest hardware.
So, it's a good thing that a PC powerful enough to run some Photoshop, Quake 3, 3D graphics software or even some video editing can now run a damn OS and its GUI.
It's worse if you don't install the fixes and end up running malware.
It is complaining like this that most likely caused Microsoft to dial back the Metro/Modern UI presence, and give us the start menu back.
Actually, what is amazing is that MS actually listened, at least somewhat.
The bad old MS (not to say they still aren't still quite a bit "bad") would have just shoved this down everyone's throats come Hell or highwater. Seen them do it time and time again.
Those nice interface special effects also demand too much of the crappy little Lower Slobbovian PCs that so many people try to shoehorn Windows into. To get their treasured student copy of Word 2007 to come up before Tuesday, they have to rummage through Control Panel for ways of turning the special effects off.
As I have said before, I believe it is to spare some battery life on mobile devices.
I though on Slashdot we hated Eye Candy?
No, we just hate anything new and/or from Microsoft.
But not as much as "we" hate anything from Apple.
Even OSX has gone this way with Yosemite (though maybe it went a bit too far).
Jeezus! How can you even compare The-UI-Formerly-Known-As-Metro with the "flattening" in Yosemite.
Don't get me wrong; I don't like it much either; but at least they didn't do anything CLOSE to the "let's just throw away then ENTIRE GUI and replace it with a bad mashup of Playschool Tiles and Windows 3.1's GUI.
It's not "more modern looking", it's simply a modern designer trend. There's a really big difference.
This. Exactly. This. This. A Thousand-Times THIS!!!
even Apple has lots of faults, starting with keychords that would make an emacs user choke (e.g. the four-key chords for a screen snapshot), or the fact that in certain basic views in the Folder, it's impossible to create a new directory, you have to switch to another view for the 'New folder' button to appear.
But how many times do you actually do a Screenshot without then later editing it? Easier to launch Preview (or Grab), and do your ScreenCap from there. That way (at least with Preview) you can do annotation/manipulation of the image without having to save/paste your screenshot into another Application.
And if you know the most-excellent GROUP of Keyboard Shortcut(s) for Screen Capture (and, by the way, it's a THREE-key, not FOUR-key Shortcut), you should CERTAINLY know the Keyboard Shortcut for "New Folder" in Finder (Command-Shift-N).
I never thought I'd see the day when a Slashdotter complained about HAVING Keyboard Shortcuts. Is that the Four Horsemen I hear???
I was talking about the Windows 8 *desktop*, not the metro stuff.
or at the least, download firefox using ftp.exe
I thought Mozilla removed releases from ftp.mozilla.org and disabled the FTP protocol on releases.mozilla.org. From messages that I get while logging in to ftp.mozilla.org anonymously:
Microsoft never achieved some sort of nirvanic perfection with Windows XP or Windows 7. The start menu was a refinement process that began in 1995, but just because it's old and familiar doesn't mean it ever became all that great. The only way to move forward is to try new things - even awful things. Any company that doesn't is dying.
I agree that trying new things is good. HOWEVER, companies the size of Microsoft usually try them out internally on FOCUS GROUPS, not the ENTIRE USERBASE.
And PLEASE don't try to tell me that MS Focus-Grouped "Metro". That, or they systematically IGNORED the members of said group.
There are no other plausible explanations for that abomination of a UI to actually make it to market. None.
I mean, FFS, it was SO bad that they even omitted the name "Windows" (or was it "Microsoft"?) from all their advertising during that time, and BURIED the name "Metro" Fast, Fast, Fast! Remember?
I don't want this to transition into an 'I am right' contest, but you're making strawman arguments. First, it makes sense to take a snapshot and put it in a message (email, IM...) directly. Don't project your usage patterns onto others as exclusive or 'right'. Also, there are four-key shortcuts for screen capture, should my response be, you should CERTAINLY know about them? You emphasized the word GROUP as if it was something novel, but if you take a look, I also referred to the chords in plural.
I've been using emacs, and have also used Linux, so I'm OK with key chords, mkdir and similar, but having a shortcut isn't an excuse for inconsistent design. Haven't used OS X that long, so while the command-shift-N doesn't shock me, I haven't known about it, so ultimately your message was informative.
An operating system is not just for techies, but also for people who just want to do something, and in the process, create a folder, and maybe they don't even know what a keyboard shortcut is. I believe that it's puzzling that the 'as List' and 'as Coverflow' views in the folder don't even have a context menu item for making a folder, while the 'as Icons' and 'as Columns' do; and these four options are interleaved, so the logic of why it works eludes me, tho I haven't analysed it. There might be some good reason but as someone who has programmed since the 8 bit era, and used old Macs, and iOS devices, and bought into the hype about how Apple design is great, I definitely expected OS X to be more intuitive than my experience turned out to be.
Another example: if you minimize a window, then select the application with the alt-tab, it won't actually switch to the previously minimized window of the application. It takes extra steps to get it back. Someone who was an expert OS X user, and a developer, told be this when I asked, how he handles this: 'I never minimize windows'. Interesting. Ah, and don't accidentally touch the mouse while doing the command-tab - it'll hijack the application selection.
Yet another example: you can't maximize a window. Yes, there is what used to be the green button (now just the rightmost of the three identical, unmarked circles), but it doesn't stretch the window edge to edge: it puts the desktop into some other 'presentation' mode, and the previous navigation modes will be all weird, especially with multiple monitors, multiple desk spaces and/or multiple documents within the same 'app'. Command-tabs will make windows zoom around, and it's all pretty haphazard and definitely not intuitive, but let's stick to screen maximization. I can manually adjust the edges to the side of the window. Also, if I previously double-click on the top bar of the window, it'll maximize it at least vertically.
So okay, I manually move the window edges to the sides of the desktop. By grabbing the window edge. This, of course, implies that when I want to use the scroll bar (yes, sometimes useful), I can't just flick the mouse all the way to the right side with a quick move, click and expect that it moves the scrollbar. Because, if I flick it to the right, it'll actually still be the window border. So I have to flick to the right, then MOVE BACK A LITTLE. The Mac is intuitive and efficient like that.
There is Fitt's law, explained here, for example: http://blog.codinghorror.com/f...
The above usability problem implies that the designers of OS X haven't considered it important, and that's OK, but there isn't a real alternative. You either have a dumb full-screen window - even if you have a 32 inch monitor - or you must resort to tweaking and adjusting window borders manually. In Windows, there is snap to the side, snap to top, etc, not to mention the split screen and other attempts.
I took a quick glampse, and there seem to be a bunch of workarounds to solve what Apple hasn't solved: https://news.ycombinator.com/i...
Clicking on a promising link (ca
Oh I bet they focus-grouped Metro. On a touch-screen handheld. They somehow forgot to reconcile that with traditional desktop users that still exist even after the launch of Windows 8.
I'd be interested in seeing some evidence of that. Microsoft has no business reason to allow people to roll back, and all the reasons in the world to force their users forward. It makes sense to support that during the "technical previews" (since users will have to go back and forth for testing purposes), but not when the final version of the OS is released.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Sure they do. Just because you can't understand it doesn't mean they don't. I suppose you think they have no business reason to offer ISO downloads of various older versions of Windows, but they do.
Sure; ISO downloads are useful for developers supporting software on older versions of their OS, and some of them are available with an appropriate level of MSDN subscription. That doesn't mean that MS would have a reason to let Joe Blow User roll back 2 months after installing Win10. Reducing use of legacy software means less back-version stuff for them to support, fewer users crapping things up for everyone else by using unsupported software with unpatched vulnerabilities, a less fragmented userbase, and so on.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Kinda how Apple does all the time? (See: iOS 7+, OS X 10.10+, Photos, iTunes / Apple Music, etc)
I've had enough DECADES of experience with both MS and Apple to know that, MOST of the time, Apple tends to temper their questionable decisions due to "feedback", and, as a developer of Windows Application Software, I ALSO know that, MOST of the time, MS blithely IGNORES "feedback".
Oh I bet they focus-grouped Metro. On a touch-screen handheld. They somehow forgot to reconcile that with traditional desktop users that still exist even after the launch of Windows 8.
No, that isn't it at all.
The truth is, they were so TERRIFIED of Apple and the overwhelming success if the iPad, and in an industry (tablets) where MS had a DECADES-long "lead", that they just threw together anything that would COMPILE, and didn't even BOTHER to run it by ANYONE but "Yes Men" at Microsoft.
You can consider The-Interface-Formerly-Known-As-Metro as nothing more, and nothing less, than Ballmer's last "gift" to Microsoft. The last desperate act of a desperate man heading a desperate company.
Not a corporate climate conducive to level-headed decision-making. Too bad that every single MS customer for the next "N" Windows versions has to suffer the consequences of that absolute turd of a UI.
Or they could just get a Mac. [ducks]
And what is SO weird is that, while they were busy trying to figure out how to at least be competitive in what they realized had become Apple's game, they COMPLETELY ignored the fact that one of the best decisions at Apple was the decision to develop iOS as a SEPARATE UI and a (mostly) SEPARATE OS. Think about it. If the Metro UI had been confined to traditional "touch" devices, with NO hint of it on the Desktop (where they had, and still somehow have, clear market dominance), there would have been nothing but praise for the boys of Redmond. And it wasn't like MS was incapable of understanding the need for having completely separate OSes for different devices: See WinMo, WinCE, etc.
But they didn't think that through, and so now, MS is CLEARLY trying to backtrack, lest they circle the drain any faster than they already are.
And BTW, before some MS shill starts crowing about how "Apple has turned OS X into iOS", let me tell you the truth: Apple has carefully and thoughtfully migrated about 10% of iOS UI paradigms to OS X, rather than simply bolting iOS' UI onto OS X, as MS has done with The-Interface-Formerly-Known-As-Metro. BIG Difference!
"Attempts to download high traffic release files from this server will get a '550 Permission denied.' response." Yet you managed to download the ESR.
You hid a lot of the log with "(...)", including the part where you navigated within the pub directory. Did this "(...)" contain any "550 Permission denied." responses?
Perhaps downloading the ESR worked because apparently Mozilla doesn't consider ESRs to be "high traffic release files". So I guess you have to download the ESR (47 megs) and then use that to download the current version (another 47 megs or so).
Windows 8 honestly isn't that bad. The start screen is good for more than just tablets. It's definitely aimed at children and old people who may not have the clicking dexterity to navigate smaller icons, much like how OS X's dock with magnification does. The big problem with Windows 8 was not making the UI discoverable (unless you are using touch) such as the badly named charms bar or the menu options in full-screen apps. Power users get by just fine by pressing the start key or clicking start and then typing right away - exactly how it worked in Windows 7, but with a bit of a context loss due to it being full screen.
Windows 8's tablet convergence was only a clone of what OS X had already started (but abandoned more quickly). OS X's "start screen", Launchpad, is a direct clone of their iOS home screen and they launched their own Mac app store around the same time. OS X was definitely headed there.
Windows 8 honestly isn't that bad.
Yes it is. I have to work with Windows Server2012, which has that Gawdawful UI; somI know you're lying; or at least rationalizing.
And BTW, when you say something "...isn't that bad", that's known as "Damning with faint praise".
The start screen is good for more than just tablets. It's definitely aimed at children and old people who may not have the clicking dexterity to navigate smaller icons, much like how OS X's dock with magnification does.
I'm old (59), and I'm here to tell you that NO ONE with a visual acuity (corrected) of under 20:200 needs icons the size of the standard Tile size on "Metro". And if you are aiming for a UI for poor visual acuity, then why REDUCE visual cues? Hell, on the Screen that show all the Apps in an endless, flat, horizontal list, I was almost in tears before I figured out that the little, almost ignorable, grey bar wa supposed to be a horizontal scroll bar.Afterall, nothing else about the UI seemed to be designed to " scroll"!!!
And as far as OS X's Dock Magnification goes, it is in NO way comparable. It is a "focus-finding" technique (much like El Capitan's "Shake the mouse makes cursor get big for a second" feature), is temporary, adjustable, and optional. "Metro" is BARELY any of those things.
The big problem with Windows 8 was not making the UI discoverable (unless you are using touch) such as the badly named charms bar or the menu options in full-screen apps.
No, you're dead wrong. The problem with Windows 8 is that Microsoft ignored a lesson that Apple was trying to teach them: That there are fundamental differences between a touch UI and a Keyboard/Mouse UI, and you Ignore that at your own peril.
If they would have simply ASKED or DETECTED on install which type of device, they could have made Windows 8 the best of all worlds they wished it was. Desktops would boot to Desktop UI, Tablets to "Metro" UI, and "convertibles" would offer both. But instead, they were actually TRYING to KILL-OFF the Desktop UI by burying it to death.
And, if not, what else explains defaulting to "Metro" on SERVER installs!?! Nothing, that's what!
Power users get by just fine by pressing the start key or clicking start and then typing right away - exactly how it worked in Windows 7, but with a bit of a context loss due to it being full screen.
Again, damning with faint praise, LOL!
I am a Mac guy at heart. That means, in a GUI OS, I tend to use GUI features to navigate and control the OS. I am also a Power User of both OS X and Windows for several DECADES. And let me tell you, I almost EXECUTED my monitor the first time I accidently launched the "Metro" version of IE, and found myself TRAPPED with NO visible means of escape!!! Honestly, if I hadn't jammed my mouse cursor into the upper left corner by mistake, out of sheer frustration, thus causing some sort of "menu" to appear, I likely would have committed Hare Kiri on the spot!!! You admitted that Windows 8 was "undiscoverable" But that, my friend, is a whole new level of "undiscoverable", bordering on downright "user-hostile"!!!
Windows 8's tablet convergence was only a clone of what OS X had already started (but abandoned more quickly). OS X's "start screen", Launchpad, is a direct clone of their iOS home screen and they launched their own Mac app store around the same time. OS X was definitely headed there.
Wrong!
Apple has, for DECADES, clear back to "Classic" MacOS had a feature called "Simple Finder". It was designed for schools and for kids (and sometimes computer-challenged adults), to provide a "push the button, launch the program" "Tiled" UI, rather than letting them loose on the entire Filesystem and OS. And like its Springboard-like descendent, LaunchPad, it is an out-of-your-face OPTION (most people never even knew "Simple Finder" was there
I actually use a hackintosh on OS X (still stuck at 10.9 because I'm lazy) as my primary OS, thanks to my older version of Final Cut Pro that I still love. But I've never understood the foaming mouth outrage at Windows 8. And other than some (admittedly, user-hostile) discoverability problems, it functions alright with a mouse and keyboard. Windows 10 makes the apps capable of being windowed, which is the biggest complaint anyone had over Metro other than the start screen itself.
I'm old (59), and I'm here to tell you that NO ONE with a visual acuity (corrected) of under 20:200 needs icons the size of the standard Tile size on "Metro".
Not visual acuity. Motor skills. If you've ever watched an aging person (80+ or Parkinson's) click and drag an icon because their double-click is so slow and they can't hold their hand still enough, you'd know what I'm talking about.
OS X's full-screen mode has a similar discoverability problem to Windows 8. The first time I accidentally put an app in full-screen on OS X, I couldn't figure out how to bring it back down to a window. Mousing to the top of the screen brought no response. You have to actually hold the mouse there for several seconds to get any response. When the same happened in Windows 8, it was no more and no less frustrating. At least on Windows 8, you have a hardware key to leave a full-screen app (Windows logo key) - sure beats CTRL+CMD+F.
The Metro interface hitting desktops is a lazy way to allow library/binary compatibility of apps without any thoughts. It swear it hit Windows Server as almost an experiment. On the other hand, Windows hasn't had a decent full-screen terminal or command line since Windows ME. OS X finally has one. I think Powershell users might actually be OK with using a terminal in the new UI...eventually. And no - I'm not a Powershell user, but I know in at least the command line, you can use tab completion and the quotes come for free. And OS X's bash requires quotes for spaces, too.
Just stop being a Mac apologist if you're not willing to admit Apple has made nearly as many user-hostile moves. I want to upgrade to Final Cut Studio 3 but I can't (without paying big money on eBay). It was replaced with Final Cut Pro X without warning and completely dumped the UI. And the new UI was so bad, that Conan featured a segment on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...