Its like the whole "turn the pages" movement. Now on a tablet sitting on your lap? Makes sense as its like turning the pages of a book, even a 5 year old understands that motion. But on a desktop the whole "Hold down mouse and drag from right to left X amount" is not in ANY way intuitive or natural. A natural way to do such a movement would be to drag from top to bottom, like scrolling down a webpage and of course supporting the scroll wheel for doing so.
For a couple of articles written by guys that have spent as much time in 8 as i have and frankly are more articulate there is this one and a second opinion but frankly I could wallpaper this page with 300 opinions ALL bad.
And its not like we came looking for stuff to slam, i was actually excited to try win 8. I love the hell out of 7 and wanted to see what good things they could add to such a solid base, I was hoping for maybe some cool networking features, like making services like "gotomypc" pointless as they could build on EasyConnect and allow you to seamlessly network your computers together and share everything, no matter if at home or office, maybe add tweaks to the UI like letting us save our favorite jumplists, there was a lot of things they could have made even better.
What we got...was a cell phone. Everyone who has tried it at the shop has said cell phone at least once talking to them, they just can't understand why anybody would want a cell phone for a desktop and I have to say I agree with them. I'll probably buy 1 or 2 copies simply because Win 8 will be $40 for pro and I hope that Start8 or Classic Shell can give me an ersatz Win 7 pro for $40, but use it on my main system? Not a chance, it'll be staying with Win 7.
Show me ONE better, not your fairy dust magic "lots of people" lies and bullshit Alex. Even the most batshit optimistic numbers are a whole 5%, which is less than both legacy Windows and even pirated Windows, so what are you gonna brag about? You give your product away FOR FREE and STILL can't get better then the stolen copies of a competitors product?
The only one's "LOLing" is guys like me, at batshit FOSSies like you that think "This year, this year will be the year of the Linux desktop" yeah and pigs fly and I'm Sammy Davis Jr.
I have a better question...why? You ALREADY have 10, count 'em, 10 slots you can use for pretty much ANYTHING, potions, fish to feed your pet, whatever, and those are controlled by..get this...the 1-0 keys on the top of the keyboard. How easy is that? Attack is left click, magic right, and you can swap magic in seconds by right clicking on the magic icon, easy peasy.
So while its fine and dandy you can remap keys, and I'm sure since TL2 allows modding you'll see some nice little community tools like allowing several bindings to switch from, i just don't want anyone to think the default keys are shit. I have played a LOT of games where the default keys are shit and this? Not one of them. Try something like Turning Point: Fall of Liberty for a hair pulling wanna pull an Elvis on the monitor bad control scheme. this? this is a simple layout which for the fun but simple gameplay of "there is bad guy, go and thumpeth him" it works VERY well.
For something that is a whole $20, allows modding, lets you play for free with your friends, lets you find the good loot instead of buying it from a market, and has countless hours of goodness? People sure do find some little nits to pick.
Actually I think the whole X86 OS world has contracted some kind of mass insanity, I mean every damned thing is either trying to ape a cell phone or like this bring cell phone crap onto X86...why? Unity, Win 8, this...why? Why would you WANT your PC to be a supergigantic smartphone when all of the design choices on smartphones is either based on screen size (not applicable) or battery life (not applicable as what works on ARM won't save power on X86) so it just makes no damned sense to me.
So I just don't get it. Maybe its me but I've never messed with a smartphone and thought "You know what would be cool? We put this on a big ass desktop monitor, so i can't haul it around! Wouldn't that be great?".
Oh really? I'll quote and highlight the relevant portion "On 17 April 2007, NVIDIA released the GeForce 8500 GT, 8600 GT, and 8600 GTS for the low-end to mid-range market".
Now please note that the midrange was NOT the 8600 vanilla, or GT, but the GTS. Its a trick nvidia has done for years, they make several cards with the same name but with different letters, so people say "I have an 8600!" while actually having the low rent card. they've done this going back to Geforce 4, where they had the 4, the 4ti, and the MX4000 which while having a larger number was actually equal to a G3 series.
So I'm sorry but you're wrong. I can see how you were confused, just look at how many flavors they made of the 7600 or 8600, I think you are looking at over a half a dozen variants of just those 2 numbers, VERY confusing to the consumer.
This is why I prefer the number schema started when AMD took over ATI, as it couldn't be simpler. the first number is the series, 3xxx, 4xxx,5xxx, the second number is whether its low mid or high, 42xx-43xx for low,45xx-47xx for mid, 48xx-49xx for high, and the next to last number further splits the group, such as 4830 for the low end of the high cards in the 4xxx series, 4850 for the middle, 4870 for the high, and if its a 9 for the third number, like 4890, then its a dual chip design.
Hell of a lot easier than trying to keep up with which is which on the Nvidia side, GS vs GT vs GTS vs GX vs Ti and so on.
Are you stoned? or just being funny? Linux has a 1.05% market share in consumer segment which means you're more likely to stub your toe walking down the stairs today than find a Linux user. Make it clear so you don't try moving the goalposts we are NOT talking about routers, cellphones, or servers, this is a CONSUMER CHIP and with a market share THAT low frankly it wouldn't be worth manufacturing if it is gonna target such a teeny tiny niche.
Oh and since you apparently don't even have a clue about APUs? Little information...AMD has made it clear they will NEVER release the code for UVD, because that code is also tied into HDCP which means they can't divulge it for risk of getting blacklisted by Windows which as you can plainly see from the chart would lock them out of over 80% of the market, over 90% if you remove the ARM chips AMD don't sell. So if you were to actually put your 1.05% niche OS on that chip? Then NO HARDWARE ACCELERATION which is one of the biggest reason to own one of these chips in the first place!
So before you start calling someone a troll and try pushing your niche OS? might want to try reading. Reading is fundamental..but not for zealots I guess.
Dude I gotta say...TORCHLIGHT 2 ROCKS!!! I pre-ordered for me and my boys, they had a cool deal where you could pay $60 (the same as a single copy of D3) and get 4 copies of Torchlight 1 AND get 4 of Torchlight II on release, what a steal! BTW you can still get 4 copies for $60 but I don't think you get TL 1 for free like if you pre-ordered.
Torchlight 1 is still a blast but to me its not the MP that was missing, it was the challenge. You could save up gems and build a "weapon of ultimate ass kickery" and just slaughter the entire game. Now not only did they fix this but LOOOT BABY LOOOT! The loot is cool but you gotta seriously hunt and fight and you WILL die even on normal level, these bad guys don't play around! There is this Manticore boss out in the desert and when we hit that place it was like walking into hell, just fire and explosions and lightning, and when you are playing MP with friends or family here is some KILLER things about MP..1.-Everyone gets their own loot, no loot snatching, 2.-Trading is simple and easy, if you get something your buddy can use or he gets a cool weapon you need for the set you're building? Swap in seconds. 3.-Bad guys ramp up a LOT when you add players, no going in with your buds and just laying waste, you better bring your A game because they sure do!
I know everyone is gonna compare to Diablo 3, but I don't think that is fair or right. They built D3 to be an online only MMO style real money market thing, while Torchlight 2 takes all we loved about D1 and D2 and dungeon crawlers and just ramps it to 11, making everything better! It really makes it a community, even going so far as to say "Modders are welcome here, come on in!" so we'll be seeing cool stuff added to Torchlight for years, which is something I LOVE LOVE LOVE to see games do, it adds so much to an already great game!
So if you like RPGs? If you like dungeon crawlers? If you liked Diablo 1 and 2? if you don't like always on DRM and real money markets? then BUY TORCHLIGHT 2 NOW! The first time we played the boys kept popping up in game "You only paid $20 a copy for this? Seriously? this rocks!" and I have to agree, its the most fun I've had in an RPG dungeon crawler in years, great loot, great sets, great drops, hard bad guys and bosses,lots of secrets and easter eggs (be sure to look for a basket near where you find the lotion for a cute "Silence of the Lambs" riff) its just a fricking blast!
I gotta second that, I picked up HD4850s for me and my boys when they dropped below $70, they can now be had for just $40 and at the 1600x900 our 22 inch monitors run natively they play all the new games at high to medium high settings and never drop below 30FPS. Just Cause II, Deus Ex HR, Crysis 1&2, all look great and play great which considering you can pick these babies up for just $40 makes gaming just dirt cheap.
As for TFA the problem isn't the GPU, its the memory bandwidth that is crippling the units. I have an E350 netbook and just switching my netbook's memory from the 1066 it came with to 1333MHz gave it a kick in the pants and going to the forums they all talk about how slapping in the absolute fastest memory it will take and even OCing the memory helps, this is because both AMD and Intel just haven't figured out how to feed the IGPs enough system memory at a fast enough speed to really keep those GPUs fed.
Look at it this way...if you had the fastest GPU in the world but it only had 16Mb of memory, what good would it be? having all those cores really doesn't help when it has to fight with the CPU for memory. Maybe they should do like the old "Turbocache" Nvidia cards and have a small, say 128Mb-512Mb, of dedicated memory bolted on right next to the CPU using HyperTransport and then have the system memory feed into that. because as it is its not the GPUs that are holding these back, its the memory bandwidth that is starving the chips.
The 8800GTS and whatever the top AMD cards were at that time. If you'll look on Wikipedia you'll see the 8600 was a low end card even when it was released, strictly value segment, which again shows how well portal 2 was coded when an ancient value segment card can run it well.
I don't think so. I have a Win 8 system set up in the shop for people to play with and frankly it don't take long on a non touchscreen desktop for those that play with Win 8 to go "Eeew!" and then start looking at the Win 7 units. The movements MSFT expects you to make would be perfectly natural...if its a tablet sitting in your lap, but on a desktop with a mouse? NOT natural, it feels wonky and weird and wrong.
So I don't think a number change will do much in the way of sales, as TFA shows even those that use it go "eeew!" and want Win 7 by over half. I can tell you that here in the shop I've never seen that kind of negative reaction, even Windows Vista they liked the basic look and feel, it was when one of the numerous bugs bit them in the ass or that damned UAC slapped them in the face a couple of dozen times they hated it. With Win 8 I can see within 3 minutes they just don't like Metro, its just not a desktop UI.
If you want LEDs and breadboards might want to order the MGMicro catalog and leave it laying around with "suggestions" circled like we did in the 70s with the Sears Wishbook. I tripped over the place one day looking for some caps and LEDs for an engineer friend of mine and ever since I sent him the link he's been in builder heaven, his little workroom is just filled with breadboards and blinkenlights.
Ya know I actually WISH this was true sadly, it would show careful planning and a choice to risk sales to innovate, but I honestly think you are wrong and here is why: MSFT is pushing like crazy for WinPhone and WinTab, which you aren't gonna purposely throw a flop and have that name brand tied to a product you really want to sell. It would be like selling "The new Edsel" or how when I ask someone which OS they have if they say Vista I automatically say "I'm sorry". its tying the label of lemon around your product.
Instead, and this is the pathetic and sad part, what I think this is is Ballmer's and Sinofsky's "Hail Mary" pass. They know that with the price of Android units falling and that with Android and iOS having so much market share if they don't get something, ANYTHING out there right NOW NOW NOW that Windows is gonna be as dead as BeOS in the mobile space. Add to that the facts that the PC market is mature with machines so insanely overpowered compared to what the users actually do with them they don't replace until they break while ARM is gonna through a MHz war just like X86 did you can see why Ballmer and Sinofsky is so desperate to get their product out there.
Here is where they screwed the pooch though: Win 8 X86. Oh I get WHY they bolted on Metro, they have hopes that by forcing WinPhone UI onto the desktop users they'll "Get used to it" and when the time comes to buy a phone ot tablet they'll choose WinPhone or WinTab. The problem? Cell phone UIs do NOT work well without touch, the movements one does with a touch device that sits in your hands, like turning the pages, is natural. With a vertical screen and a mouse? This is an UN-natural movement. Its like replacing a steering wheel in a car with a pair of motorcycle handlebars in the hopes people will buy more bikes, its just not a good fit.
Finally you don't shit a billion dollars down the toilet launching a product that you know stinks on ice, not when if all MSFT wanted was beta testing they can do that just fine now just by saying "Win 8 is free! Here ya go!" or even selling it for like $25 a pop downloads. When you have Windows 7 Home at $100 and Pro at $140 having a $25 Windows would sell a LOT of copies, beta or not. No the ONLY reason to push this into mainstream is as a backdoor to try to get users to take the WinPhone UI..is it gonna work? Seriously doubt it, its "Windows Frankenstein" with the flipping back and forth between Metro and desktop just irritating.
But its not a big plan, its a Hail Mary pass, simple as that.
Uhhh..I've gotten several FPs, not because I gave a crap, but because a story popped up that I was interested in and just happened to be the first one to post.
So again the better metric is look at the poster's history, if they only have ONE post, and don't bother to follow up or post on another topic? There is your proof. if they ONLY post on articles about product Y with glowing reviews of product Y? Then again THERE is your proof.
But if we don't have standards we end up with EVERY thread being filled with "Ur a shill!" such as what I'm looking at right now on the AMD thread, somebody said having integrated graphics isn't smart and got called an Intel shill for saying so. Since integrated graphics have to share system memory while dedicated graphics do not then there IS merit to his belief, but because we have ZERO standards for using that word, unlike the reg who bans posts that throw that word with zero evidence, then frankly the word gets used too much and becomes meaningless, like troll has now become "I don't like your tone mister!" instead of what it originally was, a poster that wrote posts designed to piss people off to see how many hits they could get.
Maybe its because I've always been a George Carlin fan, but he said we should value words and not let the meanings get twisted and it seems to me troll and shill are quickly becoming 'I disagree with you!" instead of what they SHOULD be, which is kinda sad.
Linux has 1.05% consumer market share so if AMD is counting on Linux to keep them afloat? they might as well lock the doors. Oh and because they don't have the right to share code that could compromise HDCP you will NEVER EVER get the UVD video decoder code under FOSS, AMD has already said they won't open it. So you have to either use Catalyst and hope AMD continues to put out drivers (which considering they stop on the Windows side at 4 years I wouldn't hold my breath) or you can give up accelerated video.
Sorry Merlin but as others here have posted a bazillion times if you want to use Linux you use Intel+Nvidia you do NOT use AMD, not the APUs/GPUs at least.
Sadly its now more than that, its a $30 card that will open a can of ye old whoope arse, because of both using the much slower system memory and having to share with the CPU while the $30 dedicated card will have GDDR 3 of its own. There really is no comparison, if all you want to do is have hardware accelerated video? the onboard is fine, but even then the fastest memory it will take should be used to minimize the bottleneck but until AMD and Intel can figure out a way to get a LOT more bandwidth out of system memory then the APUs simply won't be able to compete with what you can even get for $30 with discrete.
Because its adding heat for a part you're not using and sucking up die space?
That said if Trinity is based on Faildozer, which I believe it is, you have to ask yourself ONE question....do you like WIndows 8? If the answer to that question is no? You might want to avoid it as ONLY Windows 8 has the scheduler bugfix. For those that don't know the Bulldozer/Piledriver design uses "half cores" because.....well its a server chip, it really is. Its designed for integer heavy loads like you see in servers and to pack more cores into a die, because AMD has had problems getting the IPC per core up, they went with a "half core" where two cores which equals a "module" have to share a FP unit.
The problem is the fact that AMD "lies" for want of a better word, to Windows and tells it that its real cores instead of hyperthreading. Lets say you have an 8 core/4 module unit with two related loads, a1 and a2, along with two unrelated loads, b1 and c1. The way it SHOULD be scheduled is a1 and a2 on module 1,b1 on module 3/4 and c1 on module5/6. Instead Windows will give you something like a1 and b1 on cores 1 and 2, a2 and c1 on cores 3 and 4. Now this is NOT the fault of MSFT and Windows, because Windows has NO way based on what the chip tells it to know that all the cores aren't equal so it treats them as full cores instead of modules that share resources.
Now this seriously bums me out, as I believe in competition and have been building AMD exclusively for the past few years, ever since the OEM bribery and compiler scandals came out. But since MSFT has already said they aren't gonna backport the scheduler fix (they have only released a patch, since withdrawn I believe) and thanks to this boneheaded design you'll have a boat anchor tied on your system you really only have 4 choices, 1.-Disable half the cores, 1 per module, so you are basically only getting half of what you paid for but each core then has a full FP unit,2.- OC the living hell out of it to use speed to make up for the penalty, 3.-Stick with the AM3 Phenom II units, this has been what I've been doing as the Phenom II quads and hexacores are dirt cheap now and still have decent speed, or 4.-Don't buy AMD.
AMD recently hired one of the head chip designers away from Apple, so lets hope he can put together a rock solid replacement to BD/PD or at least get AMD to see that selling a server chip in the consumer market is NOT the way to go. As you can see from the speeds they are hitting they are following #2 on my list and OCing the hell out of them to make up for the penalty which if you don't mind the extra heat and the louder cooling you'll need to deal with it? Then please buy AMD, we don't want to see Intel become a monopoly again, those were REALLY not good times. This is why I'm still selling AM3 units, for the average person a Phenom II quad or hexacore really will do anything they want to do with cycles left over.
But I think its only right to let those that don't know you WILL take a speed hit when using Win 7 on a BD chip thanks to the scheduler bug. Its a real shame AMD didn't simply have the chip tell Windows it was hyperthreaded, while it wouldn't have been a perfect solution it would have been better than lying and saying all core are equal when they are not. In any case I hope they sell plenty of these and I'm personally looking forward to Bobcat II as I loved their Bobcat netbooks. Having a quad core in a 12 inch netbook that gets 6 hours+ on battery? Sweet.
What I think is funny is how every hack is writing about "The death of the PC" when in reality these monsters chips have just gotten so damned powerful that they obliterate any job Joe average can come up with so they don't replace until they die. Hell I have a customer whose running the latest Solidworks on Phenom I X3s, just slapped in some HD5450 GPUs to keep the graphics up with the CPU and they are quite happy. You have Tiger selling quad kits for $300 fully loaded, the amount of power we get for practically peanuts is just insane.
Hell my GF is the type that only goes to FB and plays her little flash games and I replaced her old P4 with an Athlon X3 with HD5450, simply because it was the cheapest unit kit had. Needless to say its like greased lightning, even my E350 netbook which is the "wimpy chip" from AMD multitasks like crazy and plays 1080p over HDMI, just nuts.
So I can see why they are switching to shipping crates of monsters, a couple of crates dropped anywhere gives you a datacenter that is insanely overpowered and can run as many VMs as you want, just crazy how much power you get today.
Dude then you need to fire up taskmanager and see what is causing the hang, because my E350 is like a joke compared to your i7 and it does flip just fine. Maybe your GPU drivers are sucking? I'd look and see if there is an updated drivers somewhere. that really helped my E350 when it came to hardware acceleration, it sucked before for acceleration and after ran great.
Hell I'm typing this on my E350 right now and while playing "Wake Up" by RATM and downloading the latest updates I was able to spin through Aero to the beat of Wake Up, which again if an E350 can do this? Your i7 should be flying low, because wake Up isn't a slow song and I can spin to the beat.
Did you turn off desktop composition? Because that can override a lot of the settings. Desktop composition is nice in theory but just tends to suck resources so I just kill it, I'm sure you know where it is under the advanced tab of system. Kill that and you should be able to make the active window any color you want, just to test I made mine puke pink, yep it works.
But don't you see that THAT is also evidence of shilling and would thus constitute the basic proof which I dared to get modded down for asking for?
Lets be honest, show me ONE person, just one mind you, that went to all the trouble to make an account at some forum and made only ONE post? You can't because other than shills that doesn't happen. I remember why I quit lurking and made an account, there was an argument about file systems of all things and I must have put in 5 posts on that thread within 30 minutes, just going back and forth arguing the merits of various systems for various roles. Now THAT is how someone normally makes an account, because there is a subject they feel passion for being discussed or some topic on which they believe their view has some merit and they will be placing more than one post arguing it.
So while you deserve your informative mod for pointing out their MO I would argue that if someone wanted to scream "shill!" they should have at least linked to his UID because that very MO makes a true shill easy to spot. On the other hand I've seen far too many times someone try to be shut down by the peanut gallery screaming "U R teh Shill!" when a simple click on their UID would see their history of posting various comments on various topics so all that is proven is the person has a view going against groupthink. As I said I've met people that liked Vista and WinME, doesn't make them good OSes, just means there is always somebody that will like a product if you put enough people together.
That is why I think like The Reg that/. should ban posts that just scream "shill!" without a shred of proof. Link to their UID, if its only the one post? there is your evidence, if they only post buzzword bingo on posts about one company? there is your evidence. hell its not like actual shills are hard to spot even without the screams, their posts read like buzzword bingo of marketing drones, not how ordinary people talk.
Did anyone figure out WTF was going on with the HDD thrashing on Vista? I tried every trick I could find on the net, disable indexing, tweak here and regedit there, never could get the damned thing to quit thrashing the hard drive. I finally gave up when SP1 came out and rather than fixing it the thrashing was so bad it killed a nice Seagate a few days after applying SP1.
Between that and what I would call "senior moments" where the whole thing would just stop responding, not enough to make you pull the plug, just long enough to notice and irritate, and the damned thing having a brain fart and refusing to see my share drives after losing them until reboot I just had to get away from the thing.
Before anybody says it it wasn't the hardware as I went back to XP X64 until 7 beta came out and it ran just fine, is still probably purring away but I can't say for sure as i sold it.
Insightful? For a post that just says "Ur a shill!" with ZERO proof? Really? If one shows evidence of shilling, such as linking to that person's UID showing a pattern of posts all putting the same buzzword bingo posts for company X or against company Y? then YES, pointing out that they could be a shill or a troll is warranted and insightful. But I have to agree with The Reg which has banned posts that say shill without proof, as it always ends up "You don't like the things I like so u must be teh shill!" which is just pointless.
Hell maybe the guy really LIKES Windows 8, ever think of that? I knew a guy that liked WinME, met a nice little old lady that just loves her WinVista laptop, hell I've met people who actually enjoy sitting through "The Room" and don't see why "The Phantom Menace" is all that awful. Doesn't mean those are good products, just means in a large enough group you'll find somebody that will like it, no matter whether everyone else thinks it sucked. I personally like a nice thin layer of mashed potatoes on a meat lovers pizza, it gives a nice creamy texture while absorbing the flavor of the sauce, it just means we all have differing tastes.
One shouldn't raise the shill card unless they have something other than "U like what I no like!" as "proof" of shilling.
I have used it on several, I'll be happy to list specs and give a review of each.
First up is a EEE E350 netbook, here? It is actually okay. Not great, but its okay, as with the bobcat dual core and a 12 inch screen you're not gonna run more than one app at a time and their hack boot (hybrid sleep) actually shaves about 20% off the boot time. Can't tell any difference on battery life, still around 5 hours watching videos or a little over 6 surfing, not bad but not really any different than what I was seeing on 7 as far as battery life.
Next up my test for older systems, a Pentium 4 3.6GHz with HT box I had sitting in the corner KVM'd into my shop monitor which is a 1600x900 20 inch...yuck. Oh the performance was okay, it again booted a little faster than Win 7 but the constant switching between metro and desktop sucked and the metro UI just doesn't work well on a large screen, especially once you go past around 12 programs installed. The whole thing quickly fills up to become this large multi-page mess.
Finally we have my personal system, an AMD 6 core on a 22 inch 1600x900 monitor...again with the yuck, I like to game on this as it has 8Gb of RAM and an HD4850 GPU and once i started loading up my games again metro became seriously messy, I'm the kind that don't allow more than a couple of icons on my desktop and having this huge shotgun blast of a start screen was irritating. Again the hybrid boot was a little faster but seeing as I only turn this system off when its storming doesn't really sway my opinion and the Metro apps just suck, no way to easily multitask and there was some I even had to use Task Manager to kill because they just didn't want to stop, really beta quality crap which considering this was RP didn't make me feel good about it.
Final verdict? the only one where it felt like the equal of Win 7 was on the netbook, which considering its roughly the same size as a large tablet shouldn't be surprising. I said it before and I'll say it again, Win 8 is a tablet and cell phone OS that has been shoehorned by MSFT onto the desktop to try to get people "used" to their tablet UI in the hopes people will buy it over Android and iPad. Will it work? I seriously doubt it, but thankfully Win 7 is supported until 2020 so we have plenty of time to kick back and see how Win 9 comes out. Hopefully MSFT will do as reviewers have suggested and just split metro off for tablets and leave Win 9 with a functional desktop UI instead of this mish mash.
Not a problem, go to personalization/color and appearance/ advanced appearance settings and you'll find the old XP desktop color tweaker (I guess they forgot to update it) and you can set the active window to be a different border color if you need it to "pop" out at you, maybe a nice silver or classic grey would make it stand out more. HTH.
That's funny, as I've been working with Windows since 3.11 and you know which look I liked best? Everyone will probably make fun of me but Vista Black was probably my favorite. I just wish i could find an easy way to get the straight Vista Black them on Win 7 without Aero as i have an older system I'm getting ready to switch over and hate 7 Basic and as far as i know nobody ever released a working basic straight black theme for Basic. Everyone I've seen you have to patch theme.dll and even after doing that frankly they just don't work, damned shame as straight Vista Black was frankly the ONLY thing I liked about that OS and being able to keep the look would have been nice.
That said Win 8? reminds me of Win 3.11 actually. Its way too primary colors, way too "one app at a time" centric, just feels like I'm going back in time. if this is the future of computing can I say no thanks? Are the tablets they are planning to put 8 on sucking THAT much balls when it comes to graphics they gotta go back to Win 3.1? Hell isn't Nvidia up to like 5 cores now on ARM? The whole thing makes me feel like I'm dealing with a Zune flavored cell phone and I didn't care for the Zune UI either, no thanks MSFT.
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Its like the whole "turn the pages" movement. Now on a tablet sitting on your lap? Makes sense as its like turning the pages of a book, even a 5 year old understands that motion. But on a desktop the whole "Hold down mouse and drag from right to left X amount" is not in ANY way intuitive or natural. A natural way to do such a movement would be to drag from top to bottom, like scrolling down a webpage and of course supporting the scroll wheel for doing so.
For a couple of articles written by guys that have spent as much time in 8 as i have and frankly are more articulate there is this one and a second opinion but frankly I could wallpaper this page with 300 opinions ALL bad.
And its not like we came looking for stuff to slam, i was actually excited to try win 8. I love the hell out of 7 and wanted to see what good things they could add to such a solid base, I was hoping for maybe some cool networking features, like making services like "gotomypc" pointless as they could build on EasyConnect and allow you to seamlessly network your computers together and share everything, no matter if at home or office, maybe add tweaks to the UI like letting us save our favorite jumplists, there was a lot of things they could have made even better.
What we got...was a cell phone. Everyone who has tried it at the shop has said cell phone at least once talking to them, they just can't understand why anybody would want a cell phone for a desktop and I have to say I agree with them. I'll probably buy 1 or 2 copies simply because Win 8 will be $40 for pro and I hope that Start8 or Classic Shell can give me an ersatz Win 7 pro for $40, but use it on my main system? Not a chance, it'll be staying with Win 7.
Show me ONE better, not your fairy dust magic "lots of people" lies and bullshit Alex. Even the most batshit optimistic numbers are a whole 5%, which is less than both legacy Windows and even pirated Windows, so what are you gonna brag about? You give your product away FOR FREE and STILL can't get better then the stolen copies of a competitors product?
The only one's "LOLing" is guys like me, at batshit FOSSies like you that think "This year, this year will be the year of the Linux desktop" yeah and pigs fly and I'm Sammy Davis Jr.
I have a better question...why? You ALREADY have 10, count 'em, 10 slots you can use for pretty much ANYTHING, potions, fish to feed your pet, whatever, and those are controlled by..get this...the 1-0 keys on the top of the keyboard. How easy is that? Attack is left click, magic right, and you can swap magic in seconds by right clicking on the magic icon, easy peasy.
So while its fine and dandy you can remap keys, and I'm sure since TL2 allows modding you'll see some nice little community tools like allowing several bindings to switch from, i just don't want anyone to think the default keys are shit. I have played a LOT of games where the default keys are shit and this? Not one of them. Try something like Turning Point: Fall of Liberty for a hair pulling wanna pull an Elvis on the monitor bad control scheme. this? this is a simple layout which for the fun but simple gameplay of "there is bad guy, go and thumpeth him" it works VERY well.
For something that is a whole $20, allows modding, lets you play for free with your friends, lets you find the good loot instead of buying it from a market, and has countless hours of goodness? People sure do find some little nits to pick.
Actually I think the whole X86 OS world has contracted some kind of mass insanity, I mean every damned thing is either trying to ape a cell phone or like this bring cell phone crap onto X86...why? Unity, Win 8, this...why? Why would you WANT your PC to be a supergigantic smartphone when all of the design choices on smartphones is either based on screen size (not applicable) or battery life (not applicable as what works on ARM won't save power on X86) so it just makes no damned sense to me.
So I just don't get it. Maybe its me but I've never messed with a smartphone and thought "You know what would be cool? We put this on a big ass desktop monitor, so i can't haul it around! Wouldn't that be great?".
Oh really? I'll quote and highlight the relevant portion "On 17 April 2007, NVIDIA released the GeForce 8500 GT, 8600 GT, and 8600 GTS for the low-end to mid-range market".
Now please note that the midrange was NOT the 8600 vanilla, or GT, but the GTS. Its a trick nvidia has done for years, they make several cards with the same name but with different letters, so people say "I have an 8600!" while actually having the low rent card. they've done this going back to Geforce 4, where they had the 4, the 4ti, and the MX4000 which while having a larger number was actually equal to a G3 series.
So I'm sorry but you're wrong. I can see how you were confused, just look at how many flavors they made of the 7600 or 8600, I think you are looking at over a half a dozen variants of just those 2 numbers, VERY confusing to the consumer.
This is why I prefer the number schema started when AMD took over ATI, as it couldn't be simpler. the first number is the series, 3xxx, 4xxx,5xxx, the second number is whether its low mid or high, 42xx-43xx for low,45xx-47xx for mid, 48xx-49xx for high, and the next to last number further splits the group, such as 4830 for the low end of the high cards in the 4xxx series, 4850 for the middle, 4870 for the high, and if its a 9 for the third number, like 4890, then its a dual chip design.
Hell of a lot easier than trying to keep up with which is which on the Nvidia side, GS vs GT vs GTS vs GX vs Ti and so on.
Are you stoned? or just being funny? Linux has a 1.05% market share in consumer segment which means you're more likely to stub your toe walking down the stairs today than find a Linux user. Make it clear so you don't try moving the goalposts we are NOT talking about routers, cellphones, or servers, this is a CONSUMER CHIP and with a market share THAT low frankly it wouldn't be worth manufacturing if it is gonna target such a teeny tiny niche.
Oh and since you apparently don't even have a clue about APUs? Little information...AMD has made it clear they will NEVER release the code for UVD, because that code is also tied into HDCP which means they can't divulge it for risk of getting blacklisted by Windows which as you can plainly see from the chart would lock them out of over 80% of the market, over 90% if you remove the ARM chips AMD don't sell. So if you were to actually put your 1.05% niche OS on that chip? Then NO HARDWARE ACCELERATION which is one of the biggest reason to own one of these chips in the first place!
So before you start calling someone a troll and try pushing your niche OS? might want to try reading. Reading is fundamental..but not for zealots I guess.
Dude I gotta say...TORCHLIGHT 2 ROCKS!!! I pre-ordered for me and my boys, they had a cool deal where you could pay $60 (the same as a single copy of D3) and get 4 copies of Torchlight 1 AND get 4 of Torchlight II on release, what a steal! BTW you can still get 4 copies for $60 but I don't think you get TL 1 for free like if you pre-ordered.
Torchlight 1 is still a blast but to me its not the MP that was missing, it was the challenge. You could save up gems and build a "weapon of ultimate ass kickery" and just slaughter the entire game. Now not only did they fix this but LOOOT BABY LOOOT! The loot is cool but you gotta seriously hunt and fight and you WILL die even on normal level, these bad guys don't play around! There is this Manticore boss out in the desert and when we hit that place it was like walking into hell, just fire and explosions and lightning, and when you are playing MP with friends or family here is some KILLER things about MP..1.-Everyone gets their own loot, no loot snatching, 2.-Trading is simple and easy, if you get something your buddy can use or he gets a cool weapon you need for the set you're building? Swap in seconds. 3.-Bad guys ramp up a LOT when you add players, no going in with your buds and just laying waste, you better bring your A game because they sure do!
I know everyone is gonna compare to Diablo 3, but I don't think that is fair or right. They built D3 to be an online only MMO style real money market thing, while Torchlight 2 takes all we loved about D1 and D2 and dungeon crawlers and just ramps it to 11, making everything better! It really makes it a community, even going so far as to say "Modders are welcome here, come on in!" so we'll be seeing cool stuff added to Torchlight for years, which is something I LOVE LOVE LOVE to see games do, it adds so much to an already great game!
So if you like RPGs? If you like dungeon crawlers? If you liked Diablo 1 and 2? if you don't like always on DRM and real money markets? then BUY TORCHLIGHT 2 NOW! The first time we played the boys kept popping up in game "You only paid $20 a copy for this? Seriously? this rocks!" and I have to agree, its the most fun I've had in an RPG dungeon crawler in years, great loot, great sets, great drops, hard bad guys and bosses,lots of secrets and easter eggs (be sure to look for a basket near where you find the lotion for a cute "Silence of the Lambs" riff) its just a fricking blast!
I gotta second that, I picked up HD4850s for me and my boys when they dropped below $70, they can now be had for just $40 and at the 1600x900 our 22 inch monitors run natively they play all the new games at high to medium high settings and never drop below 30FPS. Just Cause II, Deus Ex HR, Crysis 1&2, all look great and play great which considering you can pick these babies up for just $40 makes gaming just dirt cheap.
As for TFA the problem isn't the GPU, its the memory bandwidth that is crippling the units. I have an E350 netbook and just switching my netbook's memory from the 1066 it came with to 1333MHz gave it a kick in the pants and going to the forums they all talk about how slapping in the absolute fastest memory it will take and even OCing the memory helps, this is because both AMD and Intel just haven't figured out how to feed the IGPs enough system memory at a fast enough speed to really keep those GPUs fed.
Look at it this way...if you had the fastest GPU in the world but it only had 16Mb of memory, what good would it be? having all those cores really doesn't help when it has to fight with the CPU for memory. Maybe they should do like the old "Turbocache" Nvidia cards and have a small, say 128Mb-512Mb, of dedicated memory bolted on right next to the CPU using HyperTransport and then have the system memory feed into that. because as it is its not the GPUs that are holding these back, its the memory bandwidth that is starving the chips.
The 8800GTS and whatever the top AMD cards were at that time. If you'll look on Wikipedia you'll see the 8600 was a low end card even when it was released, strictly value segment, which again shows how well portal 2 was coded when an ancient value segment card can run it well.
I don't think so. I have a Win 8 system set up in the shop for people to play with and frankly it don't take long on a non touchscreen desktop for those that play with Win 8 to go "Eeew!" and then start looking at the Win 7 units. The movements MSFT expects you to make would be perfectly natural...if its a tablet sitting in your lap, but on a desktop with a mouse? NOT natural, it feels wonky and weird and wrong.
So I don't think a number change will do much in the way of sales, as TFA shows even those that use it go "eeew!" and want Win 7 by over half. I can tell you that here in the shop I've never seen that kind of negative reaction, even Windows Vista they liked the basic look and feel, it was when one of the numerous bugs bit them in the ass or that damned UAC slapped them in the face a couple of dozen times they hated it. With Win 8 I can see within 3 minutes they just don't like Metro, its just not a desktop UI.
If you want LEDs and breadboards might want to order the MGMicro catalog and leave it laying around with "suggestions" circled like we did in the 70s with the Sears Wishbook. I tripped over the place one day looking for some caps and LEDs for an engineer friend of mine and ever since I sent him the link he's been in builder heaven, his little workroom is just filled with breadboards and blinkenlights.
Ya know I actually WISH this was true sadly, it would show careful planning and a choice to risk sales to innovate, but I honestly think you are wrong and here is why: MSFT is pushing like crazy for WinPhone and WinTab, which you aren't gonna purposely throw a flop and have that name brand tied to a product you really want to sell. It would be like selling "The new Edsel" or how when I ask someone which OS they have if they say Vista I automatically say "I'm sorry". its tying the label of lemon around your product.
Instead, and this is the pathetic and sad part, what I think this is is Ballmer's and Sinofsky's "Hail Mary" pass. They know that with the price of Android units falling and that with Android and iOS having so much market share if they don't get something, ANYTHING out there right NOW NOW NOW that Windows is gonna be as dead as BeOS in the mobile space. Add to that the facts that the PC market is mature with machines so insanely overpowered compared to what the users actually do with them they don't replace until they break while ARM is gonna through a MHz war just like X86 did you can see why Ballmer and Sinofsky is so desperate to get their product out there.
Here is where they screwed the pooch though: Win 8 X86. Oh I get WHY they bolted on Metro, they have hopes that by forcing WinPhone UI onto the desktop users they'll "Get used to it" and when the time comes to buy a phone ot tablet they'll choose WinPhone or WinTab. The problem? Cell phone UIs do NOT work well without touch, the movements one does with a touch device that sits in your hands, like turning the pages, is natural. With a vertical screen and a mouse? This is an UN-natural movement. Its like replacing a steering wheel in a car with a pair of motorcycle handlebars in the hopes people will buy more bikes, its just not a good fit.
Finally you don't shit a billion dollars down the toilet launching a product that you know stinks on ice, not when if all MSFT wanted was beta testing they can do that just fine now just by saying "Win 8 is free! Here ya go!" or even selling it for like $25 a pop downloads. When you have Windows 7 Home at $100 and Pro at $140 having a $25 Windows would sell a LOT of copies, beta or not. No the ONLY reason to push this into mainstream is as a backdoor to try to get users to take the WinPhone UI..is it gonna work? Seriously doubt it, its "Windows Frankenstein" with the flipping back and forth between Metro and desktop just irritating.
But its not a big plan, its a Hail Mary pass, simple as that.
Uhhh..I've gotten several FPs, not because I gave a crap, but because a story popped up that I was interested in and just happened to be the first one to post.
So again the better metric is look at the poster's history, if they only have ONE post, and don't bother to follow up or post on another topic? There is your proof. if they ONLY post on articles about product Y with glowing reviews of product Y? Then again THERE is your proof.
But if we don't have standards we end up with EVERY thread being filled with "Ur a shill!" such as what I'm looking at right now on the AMD thread, somebody said having integrated graphics isn't smart and got called an Intel shill for saying so. Since integrated graphics have to share system memory while dedicated graphics do not then there IS merit to his belief, but because we have ZERO standards for using that word, unlike the reg who bans posts that throw that word with zero evidence, then frankly the word gets used too much and becomes meaningless, like troll has now become "I don't like your tone mister!" instead of what it originally was, a poster that wrote posts designed to piss people off to see how many hits they could get.
Maybe its because I've always been a George Carlin fan, but he said we should value words and not let the meanings get twisted and it seems to me troll and shill are quickly becoming 'I disagree with you!" instead of what they SHOULD be, which is kinda sad.
Linux has 1.05% consumer market share so if AMD is counting on Linux to keep them afloat? they might as well lock the doors. Oh and because they don't have the right to share code that could compromise HDCP you will NEVER EVER get the UVD video decoder code under FOSS, AMD has already said they won't open it. So you have to either use Catalyst and hope AMD continues to put out drivers (which considering they stop on the Windows side at 4 years I wouldn't hold my breath) or you can give up accelerated video.
Sorry Merlin but as others here have posted a bazillion times if you want to use Linux you use Intel+Nvidia you do NOT use AMD, not the APUs/GPUs at least.
Sadly its now more than that, its a $30 card that will open a can of ye old whoope arse, because of both using the much slower system memory and having to share with the CPU while the $30 dedicated card will have GDDR 3 of its own. There really is no comparison, if all you want to do is have hardware accelerated video? the onboard is fine, but even then the fastest memory it will take should be used to minimize the bottleneck but until AMD and Intel can figure out a way to get a LOT more bandwidth out of system memory then the APUs simply won't be able to compete with what you can even get for $30 with discrete.
Because its adding heat for a part you're not using and sucking up die space?
That said if Trinity is based on Faildozer, which I believe it is, you have to ask yourself ONE question....do you like WIndows 8? If the answer to that question is no? You might want to avoid it as ONLY Windows 8 has the scheduler bugfix. For those that don't know the Bulldozer/Piledriver design uses "half cores" because.....well its a server chip, it really is. Its designed for integer heavy loads like you see in servers and to pack more cores into a die, because AMD has had problems getting the IPC per core up, they went with a "half core" where two cores which equals a "module" have to share a FP unit.
The problem is the fact that AMD "lies" for want of a better word, to Windows and tells it that its real cores instead of hyperthreading. Lets say you have an 8 core/4 module unit with two related loads, a1 and a2, along with two unrelated loads, b1 and c1. The way it SHOULD be scheduled is a1 and a2 on module 1,b1 on module 3/4 and c1 on module5/6. Instead Windows will give you something like a1 and b1 on cores 1 and 2, a2 and c1 on cores 3 and 4. Now this is NOT the fault of MSFT and Windows, because Windows has NO way based on what the chip tells it to know that all the cores aren't equal so it treats them as full cores instead of modules that share resources.
Now this seriously bums me out, as I believe in competition and have been building AMD exclusively for the past few years, ever since the OEM bribery and compiler scandals came out. But since MSFT has already said they aren't gonna backport the scheduler fix (they have only released a patch, since withdrawn I believe) and thanks to this boneheaded design you'll have a boat anchor tied on your system you really only have 4 choices, 1.-Disable half the cores, 1 per module, so you are basically only getting half of what you paid for but each core then has a full FP unit,2.- OC the living hell out of it to use speed to make up for the penalty, 3.-Stick with the AM3 Phenom II units, this has been what I've been doing as the Phenom II quads and hexacores are dirt cheap now and still have decent speed, or 4.-Don't buy AMD.
AMD recently hired one of the head chip designers away from Apple, so lets hope he can put together a rock solid replacement to BD/PD or at least get AMD to see that selling a server chip in the consumer market is NOT the way to go. As you can see from the speeds they are hitting they are following #2 on my list and OCing the hell out of them to make up for the penalty which if you don't mind the extra heat and the louder cooling you'll need to deal with it? Then please buy AMD, we don't want to see Intel become a monopoly again, those were REALLY not good times. This is why I'm still selling AM3 units, for the average person a Phenom II quad or hexacore really will do anything they want to do with cycles left over.
But I think its only right to let those that don't know you WILL take a speed hit when using Win 7 on a BD chip thanks to the scheduler bug. Its a real shame AMD didn't simply have the chip tell Windows it was hyperthreaded, while it wouldn't have been a perfect solution it would have been better than lying and saying all core are equal when they are not. In any case I hope they sell plenty of these and I'm personally looking forward to Bobcat II as I loved their Bobcat netbooks. Having a quad core in a 12 inch netbook that gets 6 hours+ on battery? Sweet.
What I think is funny is how every hack is writing about "The death of the PC" when in reality these monsters chips have just gotten so damned powerful that they obliterate any job Joe average can come up with so they don't replace until they die. Hell I have a customer whose running the latest Solidworks on Phenom I X3s, just slapped in some HD5450 GPUs to keep the graphics up with the CPU and they are quite happy. You have Tiger selling quad kits for $300 fully loaded, the amount of power we get for practically peanuts is just insane.
Hell my GF is the type that only goes to FB and plays her little flash games and I replaced her old P4 with an Athlon X3 with HD5450, simply because it was the cheapest unit kit had. Needless to say its like greased lightning, even my E350 netbook which is the "wimpy chip" from AMD multitasks like crazy and plays 1080p over HDMI, just nuts.
So I can see why they are switching to shipping crates of monsters, a couple of crates dropped anywhere gives you a datacenter that is insanely overpowered and can run as many VMs as you want, just crazy how much power you get today.
Dude then you need to fire up taskmanager and see what is causing the hang, because my E350 is like a joke compared to your i7 and it does flip just fine. Maybe your GPU drivers are sucking? I'd look and see if there is an updated drivers somewhere. that really helped my E350 when it came to hardware acceleration, it sucked before for acceleration and after ran great.
Hell I'm typing this on my E350 right now and while playing "Wake Up" by RATM and downloading the latest updates I was able to spin through Aero to the beat of Wake Up, which again if an E350 can do this? Your i7 should be flying low, because wake Up isn't a slow song and I can spin to the beat.
Did you turn off desktop composition? Because that can override a lot of the settings. Desktop composition is nice in theory but just tends to suck resources so I just kill it, I'm sure you know where it is under the advanced tab of system. Kill that and you should be able to make the active window any color you want, just to test I made mine puke pink, yep it works.
But don't you see that THAT is also evidence of shilling and would thus constitute the basic proof which I dared to get modded down for asking for?
Lets be honest, show me ONE person, just one mind you, that went to all the trouble to make an account at some forum and made only ONE post? You can't because other than shills that doesn't happen. I remember why I quit lurking and made an account, there was an argument about file systems of all things and I must have put in 5 posts on that thread within 30 minutes, just going back and forth arguing the merits of various systems for various roles. Now THAT is how someone normally makes an account, because there is a subject they feel passion for being discussed or some topic on which they believe their view has some merit and they will be placing more than one post arguing it.
So while you deserve your informative mod for pointing out their MO I would argue that if someone wanted to scream "shill!" they should have at least linked to his UID because that very MO makes a true shill easy to spot. On the other hand I've seen far too many times someone try to be shut down by the peanut gallery screaming "U R teh Shill!" when a simple click on their UID would see their history of posting various comments on various topics so all that is proven is the person has a view going against groupthink. As I said I've met people that liked Vista and WinME, doesn't make them good OSes, just means there is always somebody that will like a product if you put enough people together.
That is why I think like The Reg that /. should ban posts that just scream "shill!" without a shred of proof. Link to their UID, if its only the one post? there is your evidence, if they only post buzzword bingo on posts about one company? there is your evidence. hell its not like actual shills are hard to spot even without the screams, their posts read like buzzword bingo of marketing drones, not how ordinary people talk.
Did anyone figure out WTF was going on with the HDD thrashing on Vista? I tried every trick I could find on the net, disable indexing, tweak here and regedit there, never could get the damned thing to quit thrashing the hard drive. I finally gave up when SP1 came out and rather than fixing it the thrashing was so bad it killed a nice Seagate a few days after applying SP1.
Between that and what I would call "senior moments" where the whole thing would just stop responding, not enough to make you pull the plug, just long enough to notice and irritate, and the damned thing having a brain fart and refusing to see my share drives after losing them until reboot I just had to get away from the thing.
Before anybody says it it wasn't the hardware as I went back to XP X64 until 7 beta came out and it ran just fine, is still probably purring away but I can't say for sure as i sold it.
Insightful? For a post that just says "Ur a shill!" with ZERO proof? Really? If one shows evidence of shilling, such as linking to that person's UID showing a pattern of posts all putting the same buzzword bingo posts for company X or against company Y? then YES, pointing out that they could be a shill or a troll is warranted and insightful. But I have to agree with The Reg which has banned posts that say shill without proof, as it always ends up "You don't like the things I like so u must be teh shill!" which is just pointless.
Hell maybe the guy really LIKES Windows 8, ever think of that? I knew a guy that liked WinME, met a nice little old lady that just loves her WinVista laptop, hell I've met people who actually enjoy sitting through "The Room" and don't see why "The Phantom Menace" is all that awful. Doesn't mean those are good products, just means in a large enough group you'll find somebody that will like it, no matter whether everyone else thinks it sucked. I personally like a nice thin layer of mashed potatoes on a meat lovers pizza, it gives a nice creamy texture while absorbing the flavor of the sauce, it just means we all have differing tastes.
One shouldn't raise the shill card unless they have something other than "U like what I no like!" as "proof" of shilling.
I have used it on several, I'll be happy to list specs and give a review of each.
First up is a EEE E350 netbook, here? It is actually okay. Not great, but its okay, as with the bobcat dual core and a 12 inch screen you're not gonna run more than one app at a time and their hack boot (hybrid sleep) actually shaves about 20% off the boot time. Can't tell any difference on battery life, still around 5 hours watching videos or a little over 6 surfing, not bad but not really any different than what I was seeing on 7 as far as battery life.
Next up my test for older systems, a Pentium 4 3.6GHz with HT box I had sitting in the corner KVM'd into my shop monitor which is a 1600x900 20 inch...yuck. Oh the performance was okay, it again booted a little faster than Win 7 but the constant switching between metro and desktop sucked and the metro UI just doesn't work well on a large screen, especially once you go past around 12 programs installed. The whole thing quickly fills up to become this large multi-page mess.
Finally we have my personal system, an AMD 6 core on a 22 inch 1600x900 monitor...again with the yuck, I like to game on this as it has 8Gb of RAM and an HD4850 GPU and once i started loading up my games again metro became seriously messy, I'm the kind that don't allow more than a couple of icons on my desktop and having this huge shotgun blast of a start screen was irritating. Again the hybrid boot was a little faster but seeing as I only turn this system off when its storming doesn't really sway my opinion and the Metro apps just suck, no way to easily multitask and there was some I even had to use Task Manager to kill because they just didn't want to stop, really beta quality crap which considering this was RP didn't make me feel good about it.
Final verdict? the only one where it felt like the equal of Win 7 was on the netbook, which considering its roughly the same size as a large tablet shouldn't be surprising. I said it before and I'll say it again, Win 8 is a tablet and cell phone OS that has been shoehorned by MSFT onto the desktop to try to get people "used" to their tablet UI in the hopes people will buy it over Android and iPad. Will it work? I seriously doubt it, but thankfully Win 7 is supported until 2020 so we have plenty of time to kick back and see how Win 9 comes out. Hopefully MSFT will do as reviewers have suggested and just split metro off for tablets and leave Win 9 with a functional desktop UI instead of this mish mash.
Not a problem, go to personalization/color and appearance/ advanced appearance settings and you'll find the old XP desktop color tweaker (I guess they forgot to update it) and you can set the active window to be a different border color if you need it to "pop" out at you, maybe a nice silver or classic grey would make it stand out more. HTH.
That's funny, as I've been working with Windows since 3.11 and you know which look I liked best? Everyone will probably make fun of me but Vista Black was probably my favorite. I just wish i could find an easy way to get the straight Vista Black them on Win 7 without Aero as i have an older system I'm getting ready to switch over and hate 7 Basic and as far as i know nobody ever released a working basic straight black theme for Basic. Everyone I've seen you have to patch theme.dll and even after doing that frankly they just don't work, damned shame as straight Vista Black was frankly the ONLY thing I liked about that OS and being able to keep the look would have been nice.
That said Win 8? reminds me of Win 3.11 actually. Its way too primary colors, way too "one app at a time" centric, just feels like I'm going back in time. if this is the future of computing can I say no thanks? Are the tablets they are planning to put 8 on sucking THAT much balls when it comes to graphics they gotta go back to Win 3.1? Hell isn't Nvidia up to like 5 cores now on ARM? The whole thing makes me feel like I'm dealing with a Zune flavored cell phone and I didn't care for the Zune UI either, no thanks MSFT.