Hello, I'm a Mac. And I'm a $248 Win8 PC. 642
theodp writes "A little birdie told me which Windows 8 machines would sell out fast. 'Cheep' ones! While no official sales figures have emerged, anecdotal evidence suggests that cheap Windows 8 laptops were a big hit with Black Friday shoppers, leaving some Walmart and Best Buy bargain hunters disappointed at missing out on the sub-$250 deals. So, was the Doctor-Desktop-and-Mister-Metro dual nature of Windows 8 and lack of a touchscreen no big deal to these bargain basement 'Laptop Hunters', or did they not realize what they were buying? Or, as a GeekWire commenter suggests, perhaps they were really just looking to score an ultra-cheap Linux laptop!"
I can assure you... (Score:5, Insightful)
They have no idea what they purchased, it was a cheap buy and they will be sorely disappointed when it runs like crap a year from now.
Re:I can assure you... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I can assure you... (Score:5, Interesting)
At that price, toss it a year from now
It'll be a race to the bottom for Win8 PC prices now. That's the only way they'll get them off the shelves.
Windows 8 sales flounder as critics pan clumsy interface
Windows 8 sales in Australia and overseas are below expectations, with one US expert describing its user interface as "a monster that terrorises poor office workers and strangles their productivity".
http://www.theage.com.au/digital-life/computers/windows-8-sales-flounder-as-critics-pan-clumsy-interface-20121126-2a2d0.html [theage.com.au]
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At that price, toss it a year from now
It'll be a race to the bottom for Win8 PC prices now. That's the only way they'll get them off the shelves.
Windows 8 sales flounder as critics pan clumsy interface
Windows 8 sales in Australia and overseas are below expectations, with one US expert describing its user interface as "a monster that terrorises poor office workers and strangles their productivity".
http://www.theage.com.au/digital-life/computers/windows-8-sales-flounder-as-critics-pan-clumsy-interface-20121126-2a2d0.html [theage.com.au]
I recently upgraded from 7 and have to agree that the new UI is clunky. Fortunately there's a plethora of third party UI enhancements to make things work like win7. The biggest benefit to win8 as far as I can tell is that it runs much faster than win7 on lower end hardware (read: computers with 8GB or less RAM). The fact that it runs better on lower end hardware makes it a good choice for these cheap laptops.
Re:I can assure you... (Score:4)
Except if you're Microsoft, people innovate for you then you bring out your own version (in some cases, actually stealing the innovator's code) and put the innovator out of business.
To be fair to Microsoft though, sometimes it seems that people just don't learn. I'm looking at you, Nokia.
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Exactly Microsoft success was in cheap hardware.
They Made a contract to IBM to sell their OS on other hardware. Hence the IBM Compatible PC's that came out that were cheaper than the IBM systems.
Being you now have a choice of many brands of computer that can run the same software you a larger market that was more appealing developers... So there is more software being made for your platform. Increasing the desire for hardware manufacturers to make hardware for the OS that runs all the software.
Microsoft g
Re:I can assure you... (Score:5, Insightful)
it was a cheap buy and they will be sorely disappointed when it runs like crap a year from now.
I know several people who bought very cheap netbooks and were very happy with them for a number of years. Heck, I still use my ageing eee 900 daily.
Cheap doesn't mean bad or badly built. Not everyone needs a 64 processor monster to surf the web.
Re:I can assure you... (Score:5, Funny)
What Moore giveth, HTML5 taketh away.
Re:I can assure you... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I can assure you... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not true since Vista. Slashdot is full of folks who've last used Windows more than 10 years ago and thus complain of things like bluescreens, bloat etc. which makes them look like idiots.
Get with the times and at least update your hate machine.
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s/vista/2000/
Actually in the upgrade list from Windows 2000 to 7, Vista is the one I'd exclude (I'm tempted to exclude Windows 8 due to the added UI fuckups as well, but 3rd party apps seem to fix those).
Re:I can assure you... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I can assure you... (Score:4, Insightful)
Not true since Vista. Slashdot is full of folks who've last used Windows more than 10 years ago and thus complain of things like bluescreens, bloat etc. which makes them look like idiots.
Get with the times and at least update your hate machine.
I've had the BSOD in Windows 7. Not often, but its still there
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Re:I can assure you... (Score:5, Insightful)
I have a BSOD under W7 every other update on my main home machine, i.e. twice a month or so. Must be a driver of some sort, but still inexcusable. The machine runs perfectly fine with linux
You probably have a piece of flaky hardware; Windows is NOT tolerant of flaky hardware. I've had two machines running dual-boot where Linux ran flawlessly but Windows bluescreened, one had a flaky power supply which eventually went out completely, the other was a bad mobo that I noticed some expoded capacitors on. It could be something as simple as a tiny bit of corrosion on a pin.
Re:I can assure you... (Score:5, Informative)
It is still bloated, and it does still bluescreen. It's just that the "bluescreen" now reboots automatically instead of giving you useless error information, so it's an "improvement" of sorts. I would have made the error messages a bit more user friendly, or even rebooted the computer and then alerted the user as to why their computer rebooted... but hey, that would have been harder I guess. Windows 8 is the definition of bloated. It adds a ton of new features that make tablet use more appealing, but most people aren't running it on a tablet. Thus, you are carrying around all of this tablet crap when all you want to do is use your desktop/laptop.
Stability is far, far better than it was in the 9x series of Windows, but I can't say it really has improved tremendously over 2000, though it does seem a bit less susceptible to flaky hardware. I actually like 7 - it was a shame what they did to it in 8.
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Windows 8 is the definition of bloated. It adds a ton of new features that make tablet use more appealing, but most people aren't running it on a tablet. Thus, you are carrying around all of this tablet crap when all you want to do is use your desktop/laptop.
Can you quantify the effect of this so called bloat in Windows 8 in an objective or reproducible way compared to Windows 7?
All the benchmarks and real life usage I have seen show Windows 8 to boot faster and be as fast as Windows 7 at worst. How is that more bloated?
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Did you miss the superfluous nipple that is Metro? It's like two whole user interfaces stapled together, and neither one has any idea what the other is up to. The boot time is nice, but I'll take a few extra seconds of boot time of 7 over the accumulated lost productivity of 8.
Re:I can assure you... (Score:4, Interesting)
Not true since Vista. Slashdot is full of folks who've last used Windows more than 10 years ago and thus complain of things like bluescreens, bloat etc. which makes them look like idiots.
Get with the times and at least update your hate machine.
Bluescreens still happen... My work HP laptop running Windows 7 could be relied upon to provide a couple each hour it was running a skype conference. Sound driver, I believe.
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Bluescreens still happen... My work HP laptop running Windows 7 could be relied upon to provide a couple each hour it was running a skype conference. Sound driver, I believe.
I'm sorry to hear this. My latest HP laptop running Windows XP (corporate build, sorry) manage to be stable after daily stand-by (not shutting down like I suppose to do) for quite awhile (a few months). Every once awhile I shutdown and reboot, but then again, I think I am suppose to do shutdown, I just don't care to. Knock on wood this will be all right for a while. I think it has more to do with the quality of the hardware than the OS itself, unfortunately. So MS is really not to be blamed.
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Your objection can't take away the fact that this really is the rule: "What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away." The rule is not just about performance - it's also about freedom to use your own data.
Even with all your rant about your deep knowledge of MS, the fact remains that my 6 year old AMD Dell HTPC(a hand me down from work) that originally came with Vista speeded up quite a bit with Windows 7 and then even more with Windows 8. All this only one 1 gig of RAM but I upgraded it to 2 after getting a stick free from work. It boots faster, plays 1080p videos out of the box, even Divx/Xvid avi files and mp4 files, so I don't see the point about taking away the freedom to use my own data.
As I said, get r
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Yeah, because Office can't save files to the .odt / POT / .rtf / PDF or many other formats...... oh wait, yeah it can. You can even set the default save format as .odt.
But there isn't anything out there that can read / edit my .doc / .docx files.... oh wait, libre / open office can.
But but but there isn't anything out there that can WRITE .doc / .docx files.... oh wait, damn it, open / libre office does that too.
Open / Libre office does 98-100% of what MS Office can do, is cross platform, and is free.
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If there were a better alternative to MS Office I'd consider using it...
Are you a politician?
Re:I can assure you... (Score:5, Insightful)
While Windows 7 was a vast improvement in many ways from the "open beta" that was Vista, Microsoft still has quite a few early design decisions that haunt them. I often wonder about how the Registry improves from release to release (it was a fairly crappy way of configuring the OS back in XP), but quite frankly the Registry itself is one of the things I loathe about Windows in the first place. But that's just me.
But to say that MSFT can't write a good OS is just the height of arrogance, its elitist horseshit to make little nerds feel good about themselves
What's funny is not that you bristle at the opinion, but that anyone's opinion that Microsoft can't do X or shouldn't do Y is somehow "elitist" horseshit. Sure the opinion was dripping with one poster's view of what makes a good OS, but the fact remains Microsoft has given us some massive turds in the history of Windows. The fact that they appear to have gotten it right with Windows 7 is not reinforced by the massive UI shift to leverage their Windows codebase into the smartphone market in Windows 8. And you agree with most of the rest of /. that the Metro UI is positively junk. It is showing the true nature of what a company searching for relevance in a changing technology climate can do, given enough money and micromanagement. (It could be any company, not just Microsoft...)
What I cannot dismiss, and I do not believe is a fault of poor coding but more succinctly Microsoft's disdain for its customers, is the constant upheaval in Office file formats, phone home DRM, and an otherwise high regard for the *AA's built into the core OS in order to please them. I won't go into detail about that here, because it's been covered on /. umpteen times, but that nonsense alone has made me hate Microsoft at a basic level. Their culture, like Apple's, is one of contempt for the user's freedom to do what they wish with their purchased machine. The SecureBoot fiasco is just another in a long list of crimes. I say crimes, because frankly they were convicted of abusing monopoly power. That wasn't a witch hunt, like some contend. It was exposing the true nature of Microsoft, as reflected in their management. Rather like Jobs' personality and vision is reflected in Apple's walled garden and sealed computers (laptops in particular, but you can also point to the recent iMacs as another in a long line of removing freedom from the user...) I think we can both agree that Microsoft and Apple are one in the same when it comes to putting their goals of lock-in well above making good, solid OSes that get out of the way and let people be, well, people.
Re:I can assure you... (Score:5, Insightful)
But to say that MSFT can't write a good OS is just the height of arrogance, its elitist horseshit to make little nerds feel good about themselves by ignoring the fact that there are literally hundreds of millions of Windows installs out there and you know what? people are happy with them, it does what they want it to do.
This is probably going to come off as rude, and for that I'm sorry. You say that Microsoft can write good software. Being a member of the community these last 30 years and skilled in the art, I would ask: "show me."
I ain't seen it yet.
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Also, they discontinued that product. To complete the cycle for you.
Are you including that in your definition of good software?
Just curious, what is your definition of good software? Can you provide an example? Everyone is going to have a different opinion on what is "good".
Some of their best software, in my opinion, is the stuff you don't necessarily know is there. The NTFS code base is pretty impressive, and interestingly enough, almost always under-utilized by Windows by having the feature set ahead of the curve (features like alternative data streams, sparse files, and
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That's a problem with Adobe's support for Flash in Ubuntu, not specifically a problem with Ubuntu, itself. Were Ubuntu the popular OS instead of Windows, likely you'd see the problem in Windows but not Ubuntu.
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Thank you for paying attention!
See, I can't kill the processes. I can't even get to a term or lxtask to initiate the kill.
Sure, I've had Windows get bogged down by running 100+ user processes with Flash and all kinds of crap. But at least the task manager will pop up within a reasonable time of being invoked, and allow me to get my system back to a stable state. I can't say the same about Linux (and this issue isn't the first).
Microsoft is evil, sure. But they produce some damn good software and have a
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Re:Run 98SE on that computer. (Score:5, Informative)
>7 slowed down on the first SP.
Does anyone have any objective benchmark or reference for this? This is not true at all on the 4 machines I used daily (Work PC/Home Desktop/Laptop/HTPC). The last OS that slowed down with more patches and usage was XP.
Also, XP didn't start off fast for me. It was slower than ME on the machines at the time. Of course, Vista was much more bloated in the beginning though.
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Run Linux on it.
It'll be faster.
I may grant that it's not as bad as Vista, but XP started off fast and as it was patched to less than a virus laden whore it got bigger and slower.
Vista started off big and slow.
7 slowed down on the first SP.
8 will do the same.
I find Linux is faster, but I am not sure that this isn't just because it doesn't need antivirus rather than being faster in itself.
Re:Run 98SE on that computer. (Score:5, Insightful)
Caveat: I'm a 99% windows user with just about enough unix experience to traverse a directory structure.
I'm not sure how you quantify faster, there are a lot of things which mean 'faster' to me:
From the initiation of the OS boot process to when my scripts start loading VHDs it takes about 15 seconds. (I use that as a benchmark because that's approximately where the system becomes responsive to a user on a clean install) I've not yet timed Ubuntu for booting, so I can't compare that directly (I don't think loading from the USB is a fair comparison since my OS is loading from RAID0 SSDs)
However, in terms of actual performance once the OS is up and running or installed on a machine... It doesn't seem nearly as fast. Certainly not the freaking Dash application search thing. The UI design on that is horrible. I find myself wondering if I actually clicked it, I assume yes because the rest of the screen dimmed, but I've been having nothing but trouble with it so I typically just launch everything from the terminal now.
I'll be installing Ubuntu directly to the machine later today, so I'll get a good comparison on boot times and a clean install, but in terms of pure 'faster' performance from the user perspective, not based on what I've seen. Anecdotal evidence, but that's all that matters to me because I don't care if it works better in theory or in general, I only care if it works better for me.
The thing is: I WANT to like linux. It's why I have a semi-annual install fest on my machines (which slowly migrate back to Windows over several months), but there is no way I can consider it 'faster' if the instant I run into an issue there isn't an intuitive way to correct the issue. That eats up my time, and that colors my perception of the speed of the system. Right now, Linux seems to be much like a F1 race car. Sure, when it goes, it goes fast, but in between those periods of speed are significant chunks of time where a team of experts is rebuilding, tuning, and prepping the system for it's next sprint.
I know this is probably pretty obvious, but I run into an issue with a machine that is running an ATI R300x video card. Unity does not play well with it. So right now I'm trying to figure out what is wrong with it, and reading the tech threads mentions things like "This issue is known, and may be worked on" Of course, these threads are 2-3 years old, so I wonder if I'm just missing the obvious fix/patch/update/setting which resolves the issue. I haven't found it yet, I haven't looked hard though, but it's already taken up more time than I care to invest when I KNOW I could just install XP and have the system running well in 90 minutes. I'll probably toss some more time into it this weekend, but in the meantime that system will just be my hobby/learning system and that's a big issue for the perception of linux. Again, I bet it will be fast... after it's running (which may just involve me buying a whole new piece of hardware)
Heck, I wanted to install a python environment/stack (enthought), and it took me a good bit of time to just get it to install (chmod to make it executable, proper syntax to run the .sh file) Then I had to double check the appropriate path since that isn't intuitive to me yet (do I put it in /bin? Or somewhere in home?) So I install it, and then I'm told to make sure my PATH is updated... do I do that in .profile, .bashrc, somewhere else? How do I make I make that stick? Once I do it, I'll know it but...
Remember I'm a newbie to this, and thus all of this tweaking around the backend just to get things to the point where they would be faster costs me time, and every minute I spend looking up arcane error messages, or wondering how the hell do I do..., is a minute that I'm thinking "I could be done already if I had just stuck with Windows"
So faster comes to mean a lot of different things, and the fact that a mail client or firefox loads up 0.3s faster than the windows equivalent doesn't mean much (to me).
Re:Run 98SE on that computer. (Score:5, Insightful)
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First, the signature live of PCs are not at a $100 premium. That's the cost if you take your PC that you bought somewhere else to them for cleaning up.
Second, Windows 8 does not "come with so much crapware". Some OEM PCs do. For example, Vizio machines have zero crapware and so does any PC that is sold at the Microsoft Stores. So, you are making this stuff up.
Perhaps you should share your VM's configuration or check out if there are updates to your VM software. There might be something wrong with the hardwa
Re:I can assure you... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: I can assure you... (Score:4, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re: I can assure you... (Score:4, Interesting)
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More like symantec/McAfee/Avira take away. Windows on it's own is fine. But combined with antivirus software, it's crap.Worse, you can't leave windows box without antivirus, so you're screwed
Or maybe the geek sees only what he wants to see.
Previous versions of Windows Defender have been strictly anti-spyware, while Microsoft offered a separate, standalone tool for broader antimalware protection called Security Essentials. In Windows 8, the two are merged together so Windows Defender is actually a more comprehensive antimalware tool.
Windows Defender is part of Windows 8, and it's enabled by default so you get protection right out of the box.
With Windows 8, Microsoft takes the SmartScreen protection --- which has been a very effective tool for guarding against malicious downloads when using Internet Explorer --- and extends it to the entire operating system. Now, SmartScreen will warn and protect you even if you're using an alternate browser, such as Firefox or Chrome, or just downloading a file across the network.
Windows 8 raises the bar for PC security [pcworld.com]
MSE has a reputation for being light weight and effective.
It is also perfectly clear from even this brief overview that the security analyst looking at the mass market PC does not view UEFI, secure boot, and the app store through the same prism as the geek.
Re: I can assure you... (Score:5, Informative)
For the last 4 years or so, the viruses have been exploiting browser plugins. That would be the collective faults of Sun, Oracle, and Adobe.
Re: I can assure you... (Score:4, Interesting)
All of them - they just aren't all targeted. A lot of browser exploit malware runs in user mode. You don't have to have root to join a botnet, you only need that to hide the malware.
Re: I can assure you... (Score:5, Informative)
Have you been surfing deviant porn sites again?
Religious sites have been serving up malware more than porn sites now.
Indeed, I belong to a financial site whose ads were serving up malware at one point. It wasn't them, but the ad service.
Your point of view is outdated.
--
BMO
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Good argument, wrong reason.
Zero-Days is not exactly what AV is able to defeat easily.
My nine year old P4 (Score:4, Interesting)
it was a cheap buy and they will be sorely disappointed when it runs like crap a year from now.
I know several people who bought very cheap netbooks and were very happy with them for a number of years. Heck, I still use my ageing eee 900 daily.
Cheap doesn't mean bad or badly built. Not everyone needs a 64 processor monster to surf the web.
At home I have a nine year old Dell P4 that was average at the time. It runs Ubuntu 12.04 now, serves as backup host and for my scanning project, batch scanning my slide collection. Browsing the internet is not a problem. Yes it's a lot slower, but still acceptable. Converting a 500 MB DNG image to JPEG takes 5 minutes, but who cares if it's a batch job. I added 3GB RAM and a new videocard four years ago, and just added a 4TB drive. If necessary I can start Virtualbox with XP and run Photoshop and Illustrator CS4 inside. For not too extreme images, it's OK, although that can be sluggish.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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What operating system do you use with your Eee PC 900?
I use Arch. I've started using it more and more, slowly replacing my ubuntu machines.
Funny thing is that it's quite an old install and I've avoided switching to systemd or any of that bullshit. Because the boot scripts aren't written by monkeys on crack, my eee 900 boots way faster to the desktop than my quad core i7 (with faster SSD) laptop.
People keep inventing technical ways to get around the fact that they suck at writing boot scripts. The trouble i
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They have no idea what they purchased, it was a cheap buy and they will be sorely disappointed when it runs like crap a year from now.
Well, Win8 is more effective than Win7 on low-end hardware (lower memory and process footprint, optimized performance), and supposedly much better at keeping system fresh, not degrading (but let's wait and see on that one). But regardless, some of these "cheap" PCs are actually impressingly powerful, compared to what a more mid-priced PC would be just a year ago. Just look at the specs linked. To get that much for that low price is impressive. It seems that the main drawback going this low on price isn't as
Re:I can assure you... (Score:5, Insightful)
Every couple of years, my parents ask for help buying a laptop. I tell them to just go to a PC World-type shop and pick out one with a screen size they're comfortable with, that feels solid enough from a build quality perspective. They don't want to compile kernels or play Crysis; they want to run Word and a browser. So I know anything in the shop will do what they need for a couple of years at least.
A comment on Geekwire? (Score:3, Insightful)
WTF? Slashdot is referencing a comment on Geekwire as a basis for people installing Linux? How low can it go? Idiot submitters like theodp and symbolset are turning Slashdot into a anti-Microsoft tabloid rather than any place for serious discussion. Not surprising that people with half a brain are ditching Slashdot in droves in disgust.
Re:I can assure you... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Best Buy offered a 15.6-inch Lenovo with 2GB of RAM and a 320GB hard drive for $187.99,"
lemme tell you, those chromebooks have a lot of work ahead of them.. pc isn't dead at that pricing, far from it.
Re:I can assure you... (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been doing home computer repair for the general public for literal decades. I used to do it as a side job or for charity, but it's been my sole income for many years now. Bottom line: I've got a fair amount of experience working with equipment that's on the failing end of its life cycle, all of which has been entrusted to the tender mercies of your typical non-savvy user.
And I'm a pattern recognizer, too.
And nowadays the pattern is one of complete random events, for all classes of home computers.
I've got people with ten year old eMachines running XP who's hardware continues to run without the slightest issue, and I've got people with brand-new three-thousand dollar specialty machines who can't catch a break, with bad motherboards, PSU's dying and taking other components out with them when they go, hard drive failures of every stripe and color, and on and on and on.
I've decided that there's really no sensible difference in equipment anymore, so far as reliability goes.
It all comes out of the same factory in China somewhere, and none of us really know what the hell is going on over on that end of the production cycle.
It has become a crapshoot, plain and simple.
Used to be, more expensive, "quality" computers could be expected to last longer, but no more.
They're all using the same components from the same vendors, and if that's not enough, the batch-to-batch variabilities and imponderables are now completely impossible to keep effective or meaningful track of anymore.
And what once was a clear pattern of "quality" goods giving a nice return on investment, has now become random noise.
Nowadays any of it can fail for any reason at any time. May as well get the cheap stuff and try to cut your losses up front.
I really hope.... (Score:3)
Re:I really hope.... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I really hope.... (Score:5, Insightful)
There isn't (well not a normal desktop). There is a tutorial about Metro when you first log in.
I was hugely skeptical about 8 and installed it on a spare machine the wife will be using. I have probably put about 5 hours in of just playing around and to be honest it is surprisingly easy to get used to and not bad to work with. The Windows key is definitely your friend. I was thinking you would need touch as well before but it works fine without. There is still a couple areas where I question but I wouldn't necessarily reimage a machine back to 7 if it had 8 at this point.
Re:I really hope.... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's nowhere near as bad as the many reviews make it out to be.
Yes, it has its issues and I don't agree with everything they did. And it's obvious they're trying to bring Tablet and PC together.
But I applaud trying something "different" Face it, the UI design for Windows hasn't changed much since the 3.1 days (or I perhaps the 95 days). Even OSX has had pretty much the same UI since it was released, and has a LOT in common with its old System X days.
And Windows 8 is actually fairly nice, ONCE you get used to it. That's the problem: you're getting used to something that's different that what you've known for the last 20+ years. The various reviews use previous OS's as a template to say "THIS is good design, and here's why" when really they're just stating UX concepts that were founded AROUND the interfaces that were popular and long-living.
The only real annoying things to me are:
- Shutting Down / Rebooting is insanely stupid. Like 8 mouse clicks.
- The 3rd party metro apps go over-board with the scrolling text. To the point that you can't tell what a lot of those 3rd party "tiles" actually are. Most of the ones that come with Windows 8 are fine though: the title of the app or an icon is on the tile so you know what's what.
Will it last long? Probably not, enough people will not like getting used to it that I'm sure Microsoft will have to back-peddle in Windows 9 to a more classic UI.
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In installed Windows 8 on three machines this past weekend. There's no tutorial, but while it's finishing its install there are instructions that tell you to move the mouse to any of the four corners of the screen. In all three cases, it seemed to know it was running on a non-touch device.
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Re:I really hope.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Two were HTPC front-ends for Plex (a Zotac MAG and a Zotac ZBox). Win8 is reportedly less resource hungry than Win7, so on those little Atom nettops, it seemed like a good way to get a performance boost. Although given that all they do is run Plex, performance wasn't really an issue anyway. Chalk these up to "new toy," then. (No Windows key over VNC kind of sucks, though.)
The third was a VM install, which I mostly need for EveMon, OneNote, and Access (no Mac versions). Given my use, Win8 isn't as bad as a lot of other people seem to indicate; it doesn't take too long to get used to. I've always been a keyboard shortcutter anyway, and the stupid menus are only stupid if you have to use a mouse. I miss alt-v-d in the "File Explorer" (né "Windows Explorer") though.
Maybe (Score:5, Insightful)
People aren't buying "Windows 8" PCs, they are buying "cheap" PCs that, as an amazing coincidence, come preinstalled with the latest version of Windows (which is... Windows 8)
What's the point of this article, and why the comparison with Apple?
Re:Maybe (Score:5, Insightful)
What's the point of 99% of the complete shit that theodp submits?
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Actually I used 2K for a while and still thought XP was decent. Of course, I've always used XP Pro at home and work. If you don't like the theme, you can switch back to boxy windows if you want. I actually use the Zune theme on my XP VM. It's a nice grey and orange style. Reminds me of Half-Life I guess.
Now I use Windows 7 Pro at work. Think I have Home Premium at home, it does the job fine.
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Sarcasm in the title?
Re:Maybe (Score:4, Interesting)
I did just that: bought a cheap laptop which had windows. Then I created a bootable linux mint usb, and installed it. It runs like a charm. :)
So, my purchase was just the PC, and definitely not windows 8.
I have to say that Microsoft have a pretty sweet deal that they get paid for that. I would have bought the laptop if it came pre-installed with DOS 5.0 too - as I would have installed Linux anyway. It seems that the only way not to pay for windows is when you build your own desktop computer.
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Offtopic, but having only just switched from Vista to Ubuntu 12.04 for the simple reason that MS seems to be abandoning professional users and I'd rather switch now than be forced to in a few years. What are the major differences between Mint over Ubuntu other than the obvious benefit of having a classic desktop GUI. Changes in the directory structure? Driver support? Packages available? etc? And would it be easy to switch to Mint (and possibly back) without having to reinstall anything? I just can't seem t
Boot from usb. (Score:5, Insightful)
They work fine, once you put an operating system on them.
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Windows 8 is a fail (Score:5, Interesting)
Earlier today, the entire chess club surrounded one of these new $250 Windows 8 machines. They were all poking at the screen, but while it was changing colors on them, it wasn't responding. (Guess what guys? That's not a touchscreen. Those colors are what you get when you poke a normal LCD display.) They were convinced that all Windows 8 machines had touchscreens, though, and so they never used the touchpad.
And then they tried shutting it down. I was mocking them for a while, as an entire chess club couldn't figure it out, so then they passed it to me and I couldn't figure it out either. Turns out the option to shut it down is hidden behind an invisible menu, hidden behind two other submenus unrelated to shutting things down.
We eventually had to look it up online, as I expect many people will have to do.
It was an interesting case study though, in how fucked up Microsoft made the Metro UI.
Re:Windows 8 is a fail (Score:5, Interesting)
It's alike an OSX 10.3 (or later) Mac - you don't have to shut it down. Just let it sleep. It'll run rock solid for months. A restart is an advanced trouble-shooting technique.
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It's alike an OSX 10.3 (or later) Mac - you don't have to shut it down. Just let it sleep. It'll run rock solid for months. A restart is an advanced trouble-shooting technique.
That's nice but it sounds as if he wanted to shut it down. That doesn't seem like an extravagant desire, even if he doesn't "have to".
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Ok, this is going to be even more off topic, but here goes: Is sleep mode acceptable on an airplane during take offs and landings? Searching the internet, I can't find any answers. I really don't care one way or another, but travel quite a bit and am curious.
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Yes, sleeping a laptop/tablet is normally sufficient.
They have pretty much stopped trying to perpetuate the lame excuse that things without an active radio are dangerous to the airplane's electronics. after all, pilots are now using iPads in the cockpit to access technical documentation during all regimes of flight.
The truly justifiable reasons for putting away these devices & unplugging ipods & whatnot is so that:
A: You are not distracted from any orders given by cabin personnel during the most pot
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The difference is, on a Mac, you can still easily find the "Shutdown" menu option, should you want to. You don't need it all that often, but it's easy to find.
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The power button on the device itself didn't do the job?
Cheap? (Score:5, Informative)
Great Value (Score:5, Interesting)
If they wanted a cheap netbook to put Linux on, Google is selling Acer's Intel-based dual-core 64bit VT-enabled chromebook with 2GB RAM and a 320GB HDD for $200.
I noticed this too. They do seem incredibly good value. I have no idea why Google are not pushing them more. The deal is also unfortunately US centric. I did notice that Google is planning on launching a touchscreen version, which hopefully would bring me Ubuntu with Androids in a virtual machine.
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Bought a $298 Gateway A8. Windows 8 lasted 15mins (Score:2)
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Moving the cursor to a corner of the screen is incredibly painful?
Let's nip this one in the bud (Score:5, Informative)
I find it interesting that this tidbit was glossed over.
However, the scene wasn’t so rosy for Microsoft at the Mall of America in Minneapolis, where analyst Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray and team observed and tabulated traffic and sales at Microsoft and Apple stores. Microsoft saw 47 percent less foot traffic than the Apple Store did, and far fewer sales — 3.5 items per hour, compared with 17.2 items per hour at the Apple Store, as reported by Fortune’s Philip Elmer-Dewitt. Most of the items purchased from the Microsoft Store were Xbox 360 games. During the two hours that the Piper Jaffray team observed the Microsoft Store, they didn’t see any Microsoft Surface tablets being purchased.
Simple. Cheap Christmas shopping. (Score:4, Insightful)
SImple. They were buying what they thought was a great deal and the cheapest computer around, as this is the only computer christmas present they could buy while thinking it is a real computer.
Wow (Score:3)
Comment Subject: (Score:3)
I spent 3-4 hours and about $20 in parts this weekend getting a "cheap" Win7 laptop back into decent condition and it's still not quite right. Not worth the money. The worst issue seems to be the hinges but this one also had crappy heatsink design (requiring a full teardown and a shim). Keyboards and screen connectors also seem to be weak spots. These days I spend the extra money and buy something that will last. I'm liking the Thinkpads but there's other brands too (Dells Latitudes seemed to be pretty decent).
Re:Cheap windows 8... (Score:5, Insightful)
A turd is a turd, I wouldnt touch it even for free. Think about TCO and ROI. I used my Mac for more than a year at my job until they actually bought one "for me".
Well yeah, but the underlying hardware might be decent enough. If that's the case then you can put Linux have the best of both worlds: cheap hardware and an excellent OS.
Re:Cheap windows 8... (Score:5, Insightful)
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A Linux VM can be a wonderful dev "box". Lots of tools just an apt-get away. But yes, it can be torture trying to get it to on (say) an old Atom netbook with Intel graphics. For some reason, I couldn't get it to recognise the graphics chip as legit :/
Re:Cheap windows 8... (Score:5, Informative)
That's because Atoms use a licenced PowerVR graphic core from Imagination Technology that provided a binary-only linux driver, and it sucked hard.
Later kernels have the gma500 driver that provides at least basic functionality on those turds.
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But yes, it can be torture trying to get it to on (say) an old Atom netbook with Intel graphics.
On Intel's own graphics, Linux works fantastically well.
That netbook must have had one of those wretched PowerVR derived ones.
Intel releaed them then basically shat on all the users with poor drivers. The Windows drivers were terrible and badly supported, the Linux ones were even worse.
I had a project a while back which involved using a Toughbook CF-U1 (a super hardened macine for which there is basically no sub
Its not the 1990's (Score:2)
A Linux VM can be a wonderful dev "box". Lots of tools just an apt-get away. But yes, it can be torture trying to get it to on (say) an old Atom netbook with Intel graphics. For some reason, I couldn't get it to recognise the graphics chip as legit :/
I'm quite surprised that someone would be brave enough to make this comment today. What your saying is not just untrue, Linux has dedicated distributions just for Netbooks, and light Linux ones too. If for some reason you still need to force the "intel" driver. There are many ways to achieve this (forcing the intel driver with an /etc/X11/xorg.conf, removing the xserver-xorg-video-modesetting and/or xserver-xorg-video-fbdev, but if your capable of running a VM you are more than capable of these solutions.
Re:Cheap windows 8... (Score:5, Insightful)
, but cant bother to have Linux for my desktop. Time is money.
When it comes to installing all the programs I need, keeping security up to date, making sure all the tools run well together, making sure my development environment has access to the libraries I need etc, I can't be bothered with anything but Linux for the desktop. Time is money.
and the overall inconsistency (yet), of the several Linux desktops /
Overall inconsistency? Surely you jest? My window manager config is not much changed from the late 90's. I've not had to adapt to new and more poorly functioning (I've tried, but always revert) desktop environment in a decade and a half.
Linux is the only system that has provided any degree consistency over all these years. Heck, the Window decorations bear much more similarity to pre Window-95 than to 95 and after.
Oh and because of the flexibility of X11, I can configure my window manager to beat poorly behaving applications into submission so thay they behave consistently with the rest of the system. This is some not generally possible on the less good operating systems: if an application programmer thinks they know better you have to put up with their poor decisions. (And now the Wayland folks are trying to bring that to Linux. But that's another rant.)
I haven't even had to give up compositing support. FVWM works side by side with any of the xcompmgr derivatives. I played with drop shadows and transparency and animations a bit for fun, then disabled them because I found they intefere with work.
So actually, if you look at it from another point of view, Linux, or specifically X11, offers a far more consistent user interface than the other operating systems.
Time is money.
Yes and no. I use Linux for two reasons. Firstly it's much more efficient. Secondly it's much, much more pleasant to use. I avoid jobs where I have to use Windows for the same reason I avoid jobs which involve being repeatedly jabbed with pointy sticks. Sure the jobs might pay well, but why do something I disklike?
Time is more than money. You only get time once.
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I love seeing posts like these where someone explains how great, easy, and trouble free their custom config of Linux is, but not where said distro can be downloaded on ISO.
Yes, I know Linux is wonderful if you spend 50 hours getting everything just right (I had to do it many times in the course of upgrading through the Ubuntu line), I just dont have that kind of time anymore.
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I love seeing posts like these where someone explains how great, easy, and trouble free their custom config of Linux is, but not where said distro can be downloaded on ISO.
Why? Custom configs can be applied to basically any distro. Window management schemes are elmost entirely distro independent. That's one of the joys of unix/Linux .
I currently use the same FVWM setup on Arch and Ubuntu. I've also used an older version (sometimes much older, since this goes back some way) on OSX, Cygwin/Windows, OpenBSD, S
Re:what?? (Score:2)
but cant bother to have Linux for my desktop. Time is money.
Are you kidding? Tell that to my windows 7 installation that spends more than 20 minutes in endless updates and reboots, every single time I turn it on.
Re:Cheap windows 8... (Score:4, Funny)
Same for me. I've had to use my own Porsche for months on the job now, my boss just refuses to buy me a decent car! I just won't touch that Prius they bought me, a turd is a turd and I wouldn't feel safe driving it. SO I have requested all employees to recieve only Porsche company cars from now on, that will increase speed, efficiency and therefore save a lot of money.
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Paranoid much? Watch out, they're probably all out to get you!
On a related note, TFA is extremely biased and anti-Windows.
Conclusion, you are the actual pro-Apple shill. We're not stupid you know.
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I am pretty sure making a few tens of thousands of machines(lets be real about demand for such a device) with the all the above features will cost much much more than the $500+ per each machine you're offering.
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Yes... Apple has the market cornered for people with money to burn on gadgets, but I take exception to the belief that a $250 laptop that has a faster multi-core cpu, more memory, and more disk space than the $800 laptop I bought in 2006 (and still use) is not a "real" laptop. Yes, they were selling netbooks cheap, too - but you could get a "real" laptop for that price, too (which made getting a netbook pointless, IMO... in recent years, netbooks have gotten bigger and more expensive while low-end laptops