Windows 8's usage uptake falls further behind Vista's

Broken is in the eye of the beholder.

I hate it because of the variety of systems I use every day - everything
from Server2000 thru 2012, XP thru Windows8, Windows Mobile6.5 thru
Windows Phone8, Cisco IOS, Juniper ScreenOS, iThings, various AIX,
various Solaris and a couple of Linux variants. "Fixing" the UI on
Win8/Server2012 reduces the number of paradigm shifts I have to make,
and is purely for my convenience. I am fixing my perceived issues,
rather than something that is fundamentally "broken".

I've moved a few single OS users to Windows8 and after week 1 the "I
hate this - it's awful" noises abated and the feedback started being
"This is pretty cool now I'm used to it, and hey, it's fast".

All that aside, I'm a grumpy old luddite who is averse to change and
spend as much of my life as possible at some form or another of command
prompt - of course I'm going to rail against GUIs that change (despite
strongly feeling that Phone8* is a massive evolutionary improvement on
Phone7).

*You can keep that fscking iPhone, I'll keep my Lumia 920..... partly
because it means I can tell iThing owners "I ain't got one, don't know
how they work, I can't help you".

 

"Classic" is in the eye of the beholder. I find Windows 8 similar to
the classic Windows 3.x interface -- the start screen is the new
Program Manager, and title bars are now centred again.

OTOH your perception of 'classic' may be the later Windows "Chicago" UI.

I'm sure I heard the same thing said about Windows "Chicago".

 

So you have a reason to get/use it.

I still don't ... and I suspect that will be true for many.

 

I disagree here. The perception of a problem is in fact a problem.
Change for the sake of change is worse than pointless. Yes, by all means, if
there is a good reason for changing, do so by all means ... but change for
marketing (as 8 seems to be from the great distance I'm looking at it at
), seems worse than pointless to me. Raise expectations then fail to fulfill
them. Sounds like another recipe for vista disaster to me ... though vista
really didn't work.

I'm told that it's easy to market a "new iphone 5" (actually an old 4.2) to
a holder of a 4.2. Repetitions of "it's faster and neater and better than
that crappy olf 4.2 you have!" actually *works* despite the fact that it's
the same. Many OS releases seem to me to be along those lines.
Nothing stops working in the old version.
Some bugs may be fixed (and probably should have been in the old version
).
Some things may be better.
Some may be worse.
Now, it seems to me, the only difference is marketing. The win8 tv ads were
... well, beer or car ads would be the nearest thing. A branding exercise.
No mention of what was better or why anyone might actually want or need
win8.

Quite.

 

Except that Apple has not pushed its iPad, iPhone iOS UI onto it's
desktop UI... as yet.

Perhaps Microsoft is being a market leader here, after all ;-)

 

I fully realise that but it'd be damn nice if, on install, the OS detected
if there was a touch screen and, if not didn't install Metro. But what do I
know? <g>
--
/Shaun.

"Humans will have advanced a long, long, way when religious belief has a
cozy little classification in the DSM."
David Melville (in r.a.s.f1)

 

That, gentle readers is the hurdle that Ms Windows fell at. Well it was the
idea that one GUI could work on all platforms.

I mean do you take your groceries home with an 18 wheeler truck?

 

A certain nephew of mine who was one of the developers had the same idea
Shaun, but they wouldn't listen to him. You're in good company :-D

T'other day my wife and I were sitting in bed trying to read a wiki
article on 'what makes ..... work' so we had no mousing surface. While
using the touchpad on the lappy the stupid "charm bar" kept popping up
or it kept flipping into the tile interface when all we tried to do was
scroll the page in firefox ... yeesh. "Gestures" I guess ... Good thing
I have a mouse for it normally.

Charm bar and gestures make sense on a touchscreen device, but not on a
desktop or laptop i.m.o.!
Having said that, I DO like that I can use the touchpad gesture for
zooming in and out on text.


-P.

 

If your touchpad is an Elan Tech one, then here is where to disable that.

Screen-shot: http://img577.imageshack.us/img577/7655/zzelantech.png

 

... doesn't sound likely when you read it though, does it.

 

Please note my "just kidding" smiley up there, Bruce

Bruce, News Xpress 2.01... What OS are you using for this? My nr is
based *heavily* on News Xpress code, and _it_ is long in the tooth.
Anyways... Kudos to you for using whatever you like to use for reading
usenet news, ay.

 

I did. I suspect you struggled to type it too.

I read somewhere recently (might even have been here... but in case it
wasn't) ...
Microsoft products suck. The day Microsoft products do not suck will be the
day they start making vacuum cleaners.

Gave me some minutes of amusement.

Agreed - its help/about says feb 15 1997.
It's still fast and reliable and running at work on our XP system (which I
have found stable and reliable). I regulaly use notepad for the same
reason (and because it discards all formatting in one easy lesson ).
I'm hoping NXS will continue to run when we "upgrade" to win 7 64 bit. I'm
not holding my breath however.
I've experimented briefly with outlook express (horrible) and even more
briefly with google groups (so bad, words cannot begin to express my hatred
of it ).

 

Microplanet Gravity is still up on sourceforge I believe. I think it's a
very nice nntp client in its current form. Certainly runs on win7 64.
The maintainer is not interested in binaries, so those bits of code are
old, old, old, but everything else is pretty slick (i.e. fast and not
overly complicated and reliable).

-P.

 

Notepad++ is well worth a look.

*If* you hated Outhouse Express you'll probably hate Thunderbird too,
but it's worth having a look at, and there's a lot of plugins and tweaks
to make it less obnoxious.

 

I think that with "Metro" as a default Windows OS desktop on a PC,
Microsoft has shot itself through both feet and gave itself a double
knee-capping while it was at it...

....They aught to turn around and say "Sorry folks, it was all our
fault. Here's the PC desktop you really should've got. Now please
excuse us while we from the management think-tank all go out and commit
hari-kari".

Could be some truth in there

With their announcement that they are locking in their bread-n-butter
Office suite to a single PC, there's little chance of them not sucking
at something in the near future.

There is a good chance that nx 2 will run on Win 7 64 bit if you
install it into its own folder under C:\ as in C:\NewsExpress or
similar. Its what we had to do to get Xnews to work properly in Vista &
newer. By avoiding the Windows default Programs folder for apps, all
together.

Well... there is Xnews to consider of course...

A quote from Xnew's author:
"I'm a fan of NewsXpress so I liberally stole ideas from that program.
NX users should find Xnews familiar. That said, Xnews is not
NewsXpress. I didn't try to clone it. I have my own weird ideas of
doing things. Although Xnews may bear some resemblance to NX, it has
some features the latter doesn't while lacking others."

Cheers

 

Microplanet Gravity is still up on sourceforge I believe. I think it's a
very nice nntp client in its current form. Certainly runs on win7 64.
The maintainer is not interested in binaries, so those bits of code are
old, old, old, but everything else is pretty slick (i.e. fast and not
overly complicated and reliable).[/QUOTE]

This I will file ... in case.

Thanks

 

? Sounds like it would have formatting (a bite like write ?). How's it
different ?

Probably the most similar to NXS news reader I've seen has been pan. I
haven't played with it much, but it looks fast, easy to use and fast (those
being my only requirements for s/w). Oh yes ... and it has to work too.

 

Well... there is Xnews to consider of course...

A quote from Xnew's author:
"I'm a fan of NewsXpress so I liberally stole ideas from that program.
NX users should find Xnews familiar. That said, Xnews is not
NewsXpress. I didn't try to clone it. I have my own weird ideas of
doing things. Although Xnews may bear some resemblance to NX, it has
some features the latter doesn't while lacking others."[/QUOTE]

This too I shall file ... in case.

Thanks