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My recent PC purchase. Not W8.
I've been looking for what I've been calling "my last computer" for a few months. I wanted something with loads of RAM, loads of HDD space and expansion room and with as many extras as I could find [BD, TV card, memory card slots, USB 3 and any other goodies that were available.]. I seriously considered a Linux box and a desktop Mac Pro as I could run Windows on one of those in addition to whatever native OS they came with.
I decided, yesterday, to go to a retail shop where I could play with the latest and greatest boxes, or at least those available on the shelves. I thought it would help me at least to eliminate things I *don't* want. [Unwanted advice number 1: *never* go to play with the nice shiny boxes unless you want to come home with one.]
Vast swathes of shelving were given over to W8 machines. There were the odd few Win7 boxes and a lot of tablets and some laptops and many Apple boxes but most of the Windows desktops and laptops were W8.
I played with just about all of them. HP, Sony, Samsung, Asus and many others, all sorts of prices and specifications. After about the tenth machine I tried, I noticed I was doing something strange on *all* of the W8 machines: I immediately clicked on the "Desktop" tile. I ignored W8 and all its prettiness completely and jumped to the more familiar interface that looks like Windows 7, Win98, Win95 and WinMe (not very much like WinME but a little). I could immediately discern the specifications of the installed software and the hardware in the Classic interface but I didn't even bother to *try* to find out how to do it in W8.
I saw a really lovely Win7 machine with all the things I needed ["needed" being euphemistic and really meaning "it was all shiny and big and I wanted it"] and I bought it. It was thrice the price of a quite powerful W8 box but it had more bits, more grunt, more room and a vastly easier to use OS.
As I've mentioned, I doubt I'll be buying another box, unless the world gets really unlucky and I turn out to be immortal in which case I'll need something in about a hundred years or so, maybe sooner but not by much.
I never *considered* buying a W8 box nor buying an Apple machine and loading W8 onto it. I did think of running Win7, WinXP and earlier OSes as VMs but I never saw myself loading W8.
Being retired, I no longer need to keep up with new OSes and from what little I've seen of it I have no interest in learning W8 for fun.
I think I'll just skip it.
I realise I'm not typical of the computer-buying public. I know lots, I've seen lots, I've broken many OSes and helped fix them and I am in the enviable position of doing computing for fun, now, as my hobby. I have an Android tablet, a MacBook Pro and an XP box, and now a Win7 giant of a machine. I think I have way enough toys.
What my choice of new box tells anyone is that *I* didn't like the look and feel of W8 and I don't have the patience to acquire the taste for it. I doubt I'm very representative of any market but I did notice that few others were playing with the new W8 machines; most were fiddling with the Macs and the tablets. That may have been a matter of timing, of course.
I hope Microsoft can make a go of W8; one OS to rule them all seems like a noble goal and a brilliant idea, but I don't think I'll buy it.
Indeed, I didn't.
I decided, yesterday, to go to a retail shop where I could play with the latest and greatest boxes, or at least those available on the shelves. I thought it would help me at least to eliminate things I *don't* want. [Unwanted advice number 1: *never* go to play with the nice shiny boxes unless you want to come home with one.]
Vast swathes of shelving were given over to W8 machines. There were the odd few Win7 boxes and a lot of tablets and some laptops and many Apple boxes but most of the Windows desktops and laptops were W8.
I played with just about all of them. HP, Sony, Samsung, Asus and many others, all sorts of prices and specifications. After about the tenth machine I tried, I noticed I was doing something strange on *all* of the W8 machines: I immediately clicked on the "Desktop" tile. I ignored W8 and all its prettiness completely and jumped to the more familiar interface that looks like Windows 7, Win98, Win95 and WinMe (not very much like WinME but a little). I could immediately discern the specifications of the installed software and the hardware in the Classic interface but I didn't even bother to *try* to find out how to do it in W8.
I saw a really lovely Win7 machine with all the things I needed ["needed" being euphemistic and really meaning "it was all shiny and big and I wanted it"] and I bought it. It was thrice the price of a quite powerful W8 box but it had more bits, more grunt, more room and a vastly easier to use OS.
As I've mentioned, I doubt I'll be buying another box, unless the world gets really unlucky and I turn out to be immortal in which case I'll need something in about a hundred years or so, maybe sooner but not by much.
I never *considered* buying a W8 box nor buying an Apple machine and loading W8 onto it. I did think of running Win7, WinXP and earlier OSes as VMs but I never saw myself loading W8.
Being retired, I no longer need to keep up with new OSes and from what little I've seen of it I have no interest in learning W8 for fun.
I think I'll just skip it.
I realise I'm not typical of the computer-buying public. I know lots, I've seen lots, I've broken many OSes and helped fix them and I am in the enviable position of doing computing for fun, now, as my hobby. I have an Android tablet, a MacBook Pro and an XP box, and now a Win7 giant of a machine. I think I have way enough toys.
What my choice of new box tells anyone is that *I* didn't like the look and feel of W8 and I don't have the patience to acquire the taste for it. I doubt I'm very representative of any market but I did notice that few others were playing with the new W8 machines; most were fiddling with the Macs and the tablets. That may have been a matter of timing, of course.
I hope Microsoft can make a go of W8; one OS to rule them all seems like a noble goal and a brilliant idea, but I don't think I'll buy it.
Indeed, I didn't.
Pro Posted by hartiq
10th Jan
