Thread: windows 8 vs 7

Originally Posted by RhysJD3

For businesses, there were a number of reasons to move off of WIndows XP/Vista to Windows 7. What's the compelling reason for businesses to move from Windows 7 to Windows 8/8.1? From what I can tell, not many.

Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 New Group Policy Settings - ConfigMgrDogs - Site Home - TechNet Blogs

For your cashier/customer service positions, you can completely disable the desktop portion and enable the system as a complete point of sale terminal at a much lower price than the other available devices.

For your end to end business users aka, accounting types, purchasing, your executive users... Windows 8 streamlines their process by eliminating/hiding 95% of the shit they don't use.

For your power users and administrators.. Server manager and the new HyperV are far superior to anything windows 7 offered.

For your mobile users with win8 tablets(Pro) it's easy for them to connect right up to your web apps that use RDS.

For your mobile dispatch units aka, Police and Fire, using a tile based touchscreen is much easier than using a menu driven touchscreen.

Microsoft May Bring Full Start Menu Back in Windows 8.2

Windows 8.2 likely will bring back the start menu as an option. This is likely at the pressuring of mainly their corporate customers. Windows 8.1 brought back the option to boot directly to the desktop instead of the Metro interface... but even that wasn't enough. I know my employer isn't planning on adopting Windows 8, at least in the short term. The biggest obstacle? The UI. Converting some 24,000 users over to a new interface is going to be a support nightmare. Thanks but no thanks. I can appreciate that it probably works well on a touch screen device, but we aren't using touch screens.

Meh , I finally got a device with Windows 8 (8.1 to be precise) on it (laptop)....


Bleah , It's clearly a os made for tablets. You can argue with me and we'll go back and forth and ill win... Main problem: clear type is gone... Programs are trying to render at some crappy smart auto scaling dpi, that fails horribly, leaving many apps poorly scaled.

I am someone who enjoys trying new things, especially when it comes to UI... But there are so many poorly designed features in Windows 8.... For a laptop this blows. There are two things I always want visible: battery, and time. Neither are, I have to open the silly charms.


Some of you might like the new stuff, cool, Im over joy'ed for you. But personally, even as a highly advanced vi user (key shortcuts through the roof) I find many of the shortcuts hard to remember and despise many of the gestures what not in Windows 8. For example the touch screen gesture to close a app, is extreme annoying to do on a large screen.. its one thing on a 7" tablet, or a phone, but on a 15" screen, jesus...

Dont get me started how all my apps are now running in the background, grrr that shit drives me nuts (i hate that android does it too). Futhermore the integration between desktop and metro ui is crap... For example, download a file in chrome metro ui thing, open it, switch to desktop, find the notificaiton to open it, then open it and click ok, THEN the file opens... Anyone else remember the days when you just had to open the damn thing? Now theres 4 more steps involved?


UI improvements should be defined as ones that simplify the UI (reduce clutter to enable focus on important foci) and or ease the steps the user needs to take to do something. I find metro does neither... I find the animated tiles to be terribly annoying (much like a video ad playing in the background of the forums, while I am typing a post, constantly catching my eye). Futhermore this wrapper around all my apps just needlessly complicates them.

Cascaded windows, or tiled windows was easy as shit in windows 7, use the windows key + arrows to auto move the windows around so tiling windows side by side was litterally two key combos. Now I gotta go to the app I want on the left, drag over, find the app I want to multitask with, move that in. Again more complicated.


Its very touch orientated guys, I've looked at a lot of the techincal changes and oh-so-many are centered around touch (e.g the loss of clear type). BUt what they've done here is created disparity between what was once managable by keyboard is now split between keyboard + touch + gestures. Grrrrrr, very annoying when i have to move my hand to the screen...

I do relalize I am nit picking, but there actually isnt anything I found that I like yet... I am missing something?

Bah class is about to start, Ill finish this later.




Btw anyone have any solid recommendations for a screen protector for a TOUCH SCREEN laptop?




Tablet-

Performance for Windows 8 is great. They have optimized the OS so that it boots in a flash. DirectX 11.1 (and 11.2 in 8.1) make games like BF4 more playable on lesser hardware. Don't get me wrong... Windows 8 does a lot of things right, but ramming Metro down our throats was not what I expected or wanted. If people want it... let them have it... but if we don't want it... we shouldn't have to use it.

Originally Posted by WileECyte

Performance for Windows 8 is great. They have optimized the OS so that it boots in a flash. DirectX 11.1 (and 11.2 in 8.1) make games like BF4 more playable on lesser hardware. Don't get me wrong... Windows 8 does a lot of things right, but ramming Metro down our throats was not what I expected or wanted. If people want it... let them have it... but if we don't want it... we shouldn't have to use it.

Ill agree with you there, booting is faster. Maybe its just that I am forced to watch apps load full screen... quite annoying. Maybe, I"ve looked at the memory footprint already...desktop is still there, now theres also a metro footprint, and the apps left running in the background due to metro...

Oh and thats something else... Is there anyway to get metro apps to display in the desktop (i.e. so if i launch skype through metro, it also displays on the desktop, or chrome for that matter...)

Tablet-

Windows 8 boots faster, 8.1 now has start button, apps are irrelevant - I haven't found a single one that I find useful.

Originally Posted by Warprosper

For your cashier/customer service positions, you can completely disable the desktop portion and enable the system as a complete point of sale terminal at a much lower price than the other available devices.

You could do this very simply on windows 7 too... or windows 95 for that matter. You simply replace the startup shell with whatever you wanted to run exclusively.

For your end to end business users aka, accounting types, purchasing, your executive users... Windows 8 streamlines their process by eliminating/hiding 95% of the shit they don't use.

See above.

For your power users and administrators.. Server manager and the new HyperV are far superior to anything windows 7 offered.

You're talking windows server 2012 stuff here, not windows 8. And that is annoying too.

For your mobile users with win8 tablets(Pro) it's easy for them to connect right up to your web apps that use RDS.

Tablets are not desktops. Win8 metro works well on a tablet.

For your mobile dispatch units aka, Police and Fire, using a tile based touchscreen is much easier than using a menu driven touchscreen.

Debatable. If they are used to the menu driven touchscreen and are not techno-centric then change is a bad thing and they will struggle.

Originally Posted by Bunni

Oh and thats something else... Is there anyway to get metro apps to display in the desktop (i.e. so if i launch skype through metro, it also displays on the desktop, or chrome for that matter...)

SUPPOSEDLY that will be a feature in 8.2

Originally Posted by Bunni

Ill agree with you there, booting is faster. Maybe its just that I am forced to watch apps load full screen... quite annoying. Maybe, I"ve looked at the memory footprint already...desktop is still there, now theres also a metro footprint, and the apps left running in the background due to metro...

Oh and thats something else... Is there anyway to get metro apps to display in the desktop (i.e. so if i launch skype through metro, it also displays on the desktop, or chrome for that matter...)

Tablet-

Yeah thats a HUGE annoyance too. Hell even something as simple as viewing a picture. Click.... wait for the picture viewer app to load... wait for the picture to render... OK done looking at the picture.... Now what? The app takes up the entire screen and even when I managed to close it, Im still stuck on metro. I managed to re-route most of the filetypes to programs on the desktop but I HATE that these apps are running in the background. I uninstalled most of them but the stock ones are still there and most of the time I install a new program, an app gets installed as well. I would love to just disable them completely.