Discussion on:

10 things to try when applications won't work with Windows 8

I'm not liking W8. My Virginmobile U600 wireless broadband isn't recognized by Windows 8, nor are updated drivers available.
Complete wish / dream here, but I *WISH* in the first service pack, the ability to change to Windows Classic like in 7 and XP is put in. I completely cannot stand the new interface. I remember back in the day when Windows 95 came out, how pleasing it was to have an intuitive interface, coming from the program manager days of Windows 3.x. This time, for me anyways, it was a complete step backwards. From a usable easy to use interface to a literal "OH MY GAWD THE THE FFFF IS THIS!?!?"

Windows 8 hasn't started off well for me at all.

eM DuBYaH

http://www.classicshell.net/ - Take a look if your major gripe is "ability to change to Windows Classic / XP / 7 interface."

I'm with, and against, you here. While I find the Windows 8 modern UI Start screen a bit overwhelming at first.. it becomes intuitive after realizing you can simply start typing and easily find the results you were looking for.. like you should have already been doing in Windows 7/Vista (going thru a start menu to find an application is barbaric). And yes, there are the weird changes with the Windows Explorer itself that I consider both annoying and pleasing at the same time (ribbon, address bar, etc); however, overall I find the entire experience rather nice.

I have just had one customer drive 1,200 K to get me to dump 8 and load XP at their demand.

The problem with 8 is that they hate Metro or whatever Microsoft is calling it now though this is what i find funny they love it on their Windows Phone 8.

So I can only surmise that for Metro to work effectively you have to have a Touch Screen.

And the other big problem no games.

Col

unless you download it, that is.

Yeah, Metro can get annoying once in awhile. I've found that it doesn't really go away until you finally set some of the 'default program' extensions to another application. ClassicShell takes care of the "metro" start menu nonsense and some of the explorer shell issues. Now that I've done ClassicShell and set of default file extensions to use other applications besides ones that rely on "metro" I have no problems. It works and feels like Windows 7.

I love users like you just mentioned (love the phone iOS, but despise the same features in a PC OS). They really do crack me up. I completely agree, Metro (including the start menu) would probably be much more enjoyable with a touch screen computer.

I'm a huge gamer. I've had no troubles with any games on Windows 8, including many 'old school' titles. What games were you referring to?

Why no mention of Windows 7?
You complained about every other Microsoft OS including DOS.

Though personally as neither Vista or ME where big sellers or there for a long time who really cares?

Col

Oh? I'm sorry, I thought we were nitpicking each other. My bad...

NT was developed from scratch and was not based on the DOS platform. The same is true of its successors.

In fact, MS-DOS was run in an emulator in every version of NT, as long as it was supported anyhow. The NT kernel effort was lead by Dave Cutler, who came out of the VMS development group at DEC. The NT kernel was always capable of running multiple OS stacks simultaneously. Everyone knows the Win32 API, and now as well the tablet centric WinRT API, but NT operating systems have always hosted a POSIX (portable UNIX) personality as well (used primarily for shell stuff by IT guys, and sometimes to qualify as an acceptable OS on publicly funded projects).

Indeed, NT was the product of Dave Cuttler and his group from DEC. They use a lot of OpenVMS (slient prefex) technology in the product. Many of us felt that they had to rip out too much of VMS to make NT, but they were working on the constraint of a 32bit os, whereas VMS was and still is a 64bit os.

Then why, oh why, do we still have files and folders with names like SysWOW32, cwbrxd, and cewmdm.dll? (I picked those three at random to make a point.)

Seriously, I used to be a Mac user back in the Classic OS days. Macs always had 31 characters available for file names. When Win'95 came out, one of the big bragging points was 128 character names, (or is it 256?) It doesn't matter because they are still naming files with the 8.3 convention 18 years later.

Even though NT was developed from scratch, they scratched it out of the same pile of ones and zeros. The more things change...

except for the following embedded DOS:

using windows exploder
try creating a directory or file with any of the following names

CON
PRN
AUX
NUL
COM1
COM2
COM3
COM4
COM5
COM6
COM7
COM8
COM9
LPT1
LPT2
LPT3
LPT4
LPT5
LPT6
LPT7
LPT8
LPT9

these are DOS reserved Port Names that were dragged into NT

or try using any of the following characters in Directory / File names

*
?
"
/
\
>
<
|
:

these are DOS reserved characters for File / Directory & Port handling
that were also dragged into NT

until I can have a File named:

</this is "my * file"\>.|?|

in the PRN directory

then there is still DOS in NT

That was a Freudian slip, right?

The author failed to name the applications that he tried don't run on Windows 8. Like which video editing software? Specifics would have helped.

would be interesting to know what's not working - only app i ever had issues with so far was crappy real player, that was fixed by logging in directly as admin to install it - that was some weird crap installing process it ran, fault of realplayer more than anything!

And admit it? LOL!

I have been preventing it from 'infecting' systems I admin and/or use for over a decade!

err "keyboard" that is!

So you pass up a FREE option included with the $39.99 OS upgrade by spending $Thousands on new hardware and an every greater learning curve. Pure Rocket Science.