Man of Honour
- Joined
- 21 Nov 2004
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Will it be worth upgrading to this?
The Windows 8 Thread
- Thread starter MR.B
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Soldato
I think something that looks a bit like Alt+Tab would work, just something preferable to thumbing through lots of apps.
It's a bit early to ask but based on what I've seen, if they do the discount pricing again, it'll be hard to argue it isn't worth it even if you have only a passing interest in Metro apps in my opinion.
If you're paying full price, have zero interest in Metro and hate the Start screen then I don't think you'd be at any particular disadvantage if you stuck with Win7 for a few years.
Metro and the Start Screen are very small things overall. I wouldn't even mention them to someone asking whether they should upgrade (unless they're using a tablet).
Far more important things are the improved security, better performance, faster boot, less memory usage, Xbox Live, ARM support, better multi-monitor support, infinite backwards compatibility (Hyper-V)...
Soldato
Wish Microsoft would hurry up and catch up with Mac OS. IMO Mac OS is still years ahead of Microsoft.. functionally and aesthetically
Associate
Can't see the beta coming out until 2012.
Sounds like your trolling because thats just so ridiculous, but Windows is FAR more functional, capable, more advanced and looks better than OSX. Look at where design is heading with everything, then look at OSX with its grey gradients and rounded buttons from the 2001 era. Even OSX Lion has copied Windows is many ways now... you can now finally make apps fullscreen, something Windows has since atleast Win 95.
But it dont even work as good in 2011 because you can only have an app fullscreen on one monitor - all other monitors get disabled when you do it.
They've even changed the shaped of the buttons to looks exactly like Windows now. But you still have the "File / Edit" options menu at the top of the OS, something Windows got rid of after Windows 3.1!
I wont even mention the hundreds of things that OSX cant even do.
In comparison to Windows 8 or even 7, OSX is dated and looks ancient and no amount of shiny icons can save it.
Soldato
Most people would believe the opposite. That OSX is an old kernel design, limited, but with a fairly modern UI glued on top.
Poor APIs, backward compatibility and performance, relative to Windows. Even stability is sub-par.
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Theres a new MS blog post about the improved Task Manager (in the latest build), one of my fave things and which was already great in the dev preview, but now it's even better 
The below shot shows it with 160 logical processors. Apart from showing the percentage of CPU load for each core, each block gets darker blue the more loaded that core is.
Win 8 also now supports up to 640 cores(!!!), Win 7 supported up to 256, and i think Vista supported up to 64.
Compare that^ to this ugly thing Win 7 has and with less options (which hadn't changed since Windows 2000)...
The below shot shows it with 160 logical processors. Apart from showing the percentage of CPU load for each core, each block gets darker blue the more loaded that core is.
Win 8 also now supports up to 640 cores(!!!), Win 7 supported up to 256, and i think Vista supported up to 64.
Compare that^ to this ugly thing Win 7 has and with less options (which hadn't changed since Windows 2000)...
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Soldato
What I'm saying is, not upgrading from Windows 7 isn't going to put you at a significant disadvantage in the grand scheme of things. Of course Windows 8 is going to be better in many areas, but it's not like trying to get people to upgrade from XP. If you have no interest in the big changes then the security, memory, performance, compatibility are largely going to be incremental and not necessarily worth paying for.
And I can't agree that Metro and the Start screen are very small changes. The Start screen is probably the biggest UI change since Win95, everyone is going to have to deal with it, and they're going to either like it or hate it.
Metro on the other hand is basically the entire future of the platform, from WinRT plumbing to the high level design guidelines. Purchasing, download and updating a large proportion of software will be done through the Metro app store and it will change the way software is made for Windows.
I don't know how one could even begin to describe Windows 8 without mentioning them(!)
Soldato
Just put the developer preview on my old (ish) laptop to see what it's like, looks good so far but I can't get hold of the graphics driver for it as Acer never released a win7 driver and windows won't do anything about it so I'm stuck at a resolution of 1024x768 which is horrible. Might have to put Ubuntu back on it.
EDIT: Managed to sort it by installing the driver using Vista compatibility. Can have a good play now.
EDIT: Managed to sort it by installing the driver using Vista compatibility. Can have a good play now.
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Soldato
I admit i shouldn't have used the words "very small", but for desktops/laptops i'd definitely still put many other Win 8 features before Metro, because theres still much stuff thats a way larger leap than what Vista was to 7.
I like Metro but for most PC users, even though Metro is a massive UI change and definitely the biggest since Win 95, i dont think it's going to make much difference for non-touch based desktop/laptop users. From MS's own stats 88% of Win 7 users launch software/games or folders from either the desktop or the new taskbar, being as you can now pin shortcuts/folders/sites to the taskbar itself. Only 12% of the time is the current Start Menu used. Cant see Metro/Start Screen changing this for these people.
And i'm not sure if you can relate the new store to Metro, it may end up being for all Windows software and not just Metro app downloads/updates. Although obviously for desktop apps you will always be able to download from the makers sites, which i think many will still do especially if MS take a sales percentage on there store (Apple take 30% on everything) so things on the store may be more expensive.
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That looks very nice, but I want that many cores!
Check out the Memory and Disk stats too... 1TB RAM and near 1GB/s disk performance...
This is one the the best things about Win8, how it scales from low-end mobile touch devices to super computers
I've not tried it myself for gaming so dont know how drivers are, but people are getting some games to work fine, others dont work at all. There will also be a new DirectX version for Win 8 but it's not included in the dev preview. I wouldn't use it for gaming until the BETA release.
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Soldato
Fair enough the disks, but 1TB ram! Holy ****!
Associate
Yeah its crazy!
8x20 core processors in one computer as well
!i guess the RAM is a little OTT for everyday use
Soldato
I wonder what the fps running crysis would be....
Man of Honour
Bar temporary troubles with VMWare, what I've seen so far I like. Except for Metro, but I'm sure it will grow on me and I can appreciate why they're doing it. At least it's not Unity, so that's good.
I particularly liked the pre-loaded Samsung tablets Microsoft gave out as gifts at their launch event. Very nice. I don't have one, but I know someone who does.
PS - The disk speeds above may be from a caching controller (e.g. hardware RAID) or SAN. Some of our £5k-£10k class servers at work can chuck around data at speeds I can't believe, though I'm not sure whether or not they're connected to the SAN box. Those servers only have 48GB RAM though, so they fail on that score.
I particularly liked the pre-loaded Samsung tablets Microsoft gave out as gifts at their launch event. Very nice. I don't have one, but I know someone who does.
PS - The disk speeds above may be from a caching controller (e.g. hardware RAID) or SAN. Some of our £5k-£10k class servers at work can chuck around data at speeds I can't believe, though I'm not sure whether or not they're connected to the SAN box. Those servers only have 48GB RAM though, so they fail on that score.
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