A friend of mine works in a call center that will be supporting win8 from Friday so they have been working with it for weeks at work and everybody has had to have an mandatory upgrade of their home computers to allow them to learn it fast.

He says at work it is great, simple icons for all the tabs and windows he needs, it is nice and simple.

At home he is fuming, there is major problem with the drivers for a huge commercial laser printer he owns which he uses to produce club newsletters and other bulk mailings. The win7 drivers don't seem to work correctly.

He listens to a lot of streamed radio on the internet while he is working, he goes onto the webpage to start the stream, he then goes onto something else and the stream stops until you click back onto the streaming window and it starts again.

Coupled with the fact that most of his software doesn't work with metro, it just drops hiim back to the desktop anyways it is a bit of a mess and he can't wait to drop the whole thing.

The main problem is that win7 was both a great success as well as causing major problems.

Success as it showed that they could still make a decent OS and the problem is that win7 breathed a new lease of life into a lot of PC's that meant their owners didn't really need to upgrade.

Coupled with the fact that the tablet market is booming due to the fact they are just easier to use for a bit of causual browsing and occasional email which an awful lot of PC's were being used for and they paniced.

I cannot see win8 though taking off, Nokia is their mobile partner and a lot of under 30's see that brand as so 90's and MS still wants their $50 per phone which will always outprice the android phones a Google gives their OS away.

Given that MS have already gotten cold feet with win8 with the announcement that win8 will also carry android functionality and you are looking at an OS that doesn't really appeal to most users as win7 is perfectly servicable for PC's and why get it on a phone when you have the mass markets of Android and IOs to choose from.

I wouldn't be surprised if win9 will be here in under 18 months and come in a desktop flavour with the metro gui running in a window when wanted and a full phone flavour.

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

when I start a computer I want it to start in the place where I am going to work, I am not going to work on the start screen, i will be working on a desktop.

Actually, in most cases you probably want to open an application, you do not just stare at the desktop to do your work, therefore the start screen is more appropriate.

Example: you want to browse the web, in Windows 8, you click your web browser on the start screen. In Windows 7, you would have to click on Start then launch internet explorer, unless you had pinned it to the taskbar. Either way, the steps are no longer in Windows 8.

The only possible reason you would want to go to the desktop just on it's own is if you had files on the desktop (which is very bad practice anyway), or icons (which is in principle similar to the start screen).

And indeed for power users their steps have too been shortened as they only need to login and then type "mmc" or "devmgmt.msc" for example and then they are there, in Windows 7 once again you would have had to press Windows Key + R or click on the start button before you could type that.

What people are doing is making the mistake of treating the start screen as something alien - it is not, it is actually the gateway to launch both Modern UI and desktop apps.

Edited by Pipexer (Tue 23-Oct-12 16:12:11)

In reply to a post by AEP:

It not what it looks like that matters, Adrian. Apple are control freaks and are moving more and more to lock down your computer so that you can only do what they want you to. Very soon now I can see OS X following the iOS model where you can only install software from the App Store. They are already half-way there.

MS is no better, how long will it before Ms goes that way?

i can't see it happening on Apple or windows for a while, too much software out there.

Can you imagine how long it would take to download something like final cut or office on a slow broadband connection?

There are also privacy concerns with Apple, IMO, every bit as bad as Google. Moving from Microsoft to Apple would be out of the frying pan into the fire. A move to open-source software would fit far better with your concerns.

If i could get the software I want open source, I would go that way believe me.
i have said for a while now that I would love to move over to linux, but the lack of software stops that happening.

that is the other problem with moving to Apple, new software, it is not just buying the computer, but I will have to buy new software.
i must admit, I do like the new final cut, even if my friend don't

have you used the start screen version of IE? not only don't it support flash, but it is awful, worse than the desktop version of IE if that is possible.

when I am browsing the net, I got other things working in the back ground, like at the moment my computer is rendering some Hd video as i am typing this and wondering on the net.

i tried that on windows 8 and as soon as I went back tot he start menu, i think my video editor stopped rendering, because when i had a look after 10 mins, the rendering had not moved.

Well, how else do you suppose you get software onto the things? They don't come with DVD drives nowadays.

Which reminds me, I must go down the shops and buy a floppy with Netscape on it.

I'm all for network delivery of software (does anyone buy it any other way nowadays?), but I'm not too keen on only being able to buy it from one source - and that is controlled by the OS and hardware vendor.

In reply to a post by AEP:

Well, how else do you suppose you get software onto the things? They don't come with DVD drives nowadays.

What don't come with DVd drives? laptops still do and desktops still do. it is only silly netbook style machines that don't come with DVDs.

The Imac still comes with a DVD, but there is talk of getting rid of it, which is a bit silly.

i need a DVD writer, well blu-ray in my case, i use blu-ray as a back up system.

In reply to a post by AEP:

I'm all for network delivery of software (does anyone buy it any other way nowadays?), but I'm not too keen on only being able to buy it from one source - and that is controlled by the OS and hardware vendor.

I got my last version of Vegas on a disk and if i buy the new version that will come on disk as well. i can get it cheaper on a disk than downloading which is silly I know.

It is like MP3 and CD, i can buy CDs cheaper than the MP3.

Apple computers come without DVD drives. Coincidentally, they were dropped on iMacs just a few hours ago.

So don't hold your breath expecting software vendors to sell Mac software on DVD.

If you need DVD and/or BluRay writers an Apple computer may not be the wisest choice. This will only be more true by the time you have saved the money for one.