I don’t understand all the juvenile sounding angst about Windows 8. Yes, metro is unfinished and Microsoft had a massive brain fart when they made those apps full screen. They forget that tablet users and PC users need different GUIs and shame on them for that.
But so fricken what?
Windows 8 is fast and stable and has a huge ever growing driver list. And small companies have filled the key missing feature back in to make Windows 8 to all intents and purposes a better Windows 7 than Windows 7.
The online angst is tiresome … epitomized by such posts as this one:
http://www.zdnet.com/debate/windows-8-can-this-os-be-saved/10117509/
If you read Steven’s opening remarks (click the image to open a new window on the article itself) you will find that he examines the sales numbers and says that this OS has just a bit more than Vista’s market share for OSes. That makes it a failure and “dead OS walking” …
Total bullshit in my opinion.
Vista was born into a pre-tablet world. All Vista had to compete with was Apple’s MacOS and Microsoft’s XP, and because it was a bit of a joke it did not compete well. I know, because I beta tested it and adopted it for production on ship day. And it was not fun … way too many glitches. But it was still a pleasant experience and a lot better as a GUI than XP’s tired interface. Which is why Windows 7 was so successful … the A team at Microsoft built the Vista that should have been.
But the world changed in the meantime … Windows 8 was born into a social and mobile world. It is a hybrid that runs on all device types, but Microsoft fumbled again and brought out big and expensive tablets just as Android devices are shrinking quickly to 7” … I just bought one of those myself.
PCs have far less share overall than ever before, so for Windows 8 to have more total share than Vista is impressive. Windows 7 is still fresh and is a rock solid OS. So Windows 8 doing better than Vista against a nearly new and nearly perfect OS is fricken amazing!
And it does this because it is really good …. and because it is sold on every new PC today
Anyway … one last thing … how do you make it work like a better Windows 7 than Windows 7?
Two things:
- Put the start menu back. I like Start8 from Stardock, which looks and works like the original and is actually more powerful.
Stardock makes an excellent application manager that handles updates etc for you. Really good quality stuff. - Allow metro applications to run in windows instead of full screen. The people who make Start8 also make ModernMix, which handles Metro applications, keeping them nicely corralled in a window.
So once these two have been installed, you boot into what looks like Windows 7 and you only interact with Metro when you want to. I am sold on Windows 8 and I love how quickly it boots. YMMV of course, but I suggest that you stop worrying about Metro and just use what you get and tame it with these applications.
