Re: [PCTOL] Win 8

[David Moskowitz]

JD,

Played with the public beta versions and new laptop comes with W7 and basically free upgrade to W8. 

All of my experimentation was in the context of a virtual machine, so I can't discuss some features reported to be improved over W7 including power mgmt, multi-core utilization and reporting, better hard disk mgmt, and more.

That said, there IS going to be a learning curve for W8 that is probably not quite on pare with the original ribbon in Word. Not thrilled with the need for a Windows Live ID to be able to log on (and I don't know if that "feature" is preserved in the RTM). 

The UI is clearly designed for a tablet, it takes some getting used to with a mouse. 

it ran smoothly in a VM with only 2MB RAM -- a bit surprising.

David

------ Original Message ------
Received: 08:54 AM EDT, 09/21/2012
From: John Delaney <del...@gmail.com>
To: pc...@googlegroups.com
Subject: [PCTOL] Win 8

Anyone playing with it yet?  Just looking for initial impressions....  Likes/dislike etc...

Thanks,

JohnD

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[Rich M]

I think you meant 2 Gb ram?

I never used the Live ID so I am not sure why you thought you had to.

It does seem quicker than 7 though it is supposed to boot much faster and that I don't see.

Confusing, this is going to do a number on the average user. I found a third party program that puts back the start menu

in which case it runs now much like Windows 7 and I see little difference except you have an extra step to get to desktop which I hope is gone by final release.

[RBL]

I couldn't get it to boot in a VM, so I gave up. But I plan to upgrade no matter what. I love the concept of Win8. My plan is is to go to Win8 as soona as I see a powerful hybrid that I like, preferably from Lenovo, Sony, or Dell.

I'm also going to be installing it onto my son's XP-era desktop, which is still a fast and powerful PC presently running Win7. He's been asking me for Win8 since the RCs were announced.

I expect this to be no different than past Windows upgrades: A lot of grousing by people who hate change, and ultimately, all of them using it a few years from now and grousing about what's new in Windows 9.

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[David Moskowitz]

Agreed, 2 GB RAM, typo...  Thanks for the catch! :-)

I didn't see a way to activate the beta without a live ID, could have been a function of the running in a VM with an obvious nonroutable IP address and a display adapter that identified itself as VMware.  :-))

The same VM makes it impossible to compare boot times to W7 -- though I'm running W7 in a VM now (as I type) with Linux as the host OS and W7 isn't really that slow in the VM, soooo.....

I refuse to use 3rd party tools (or even Microsoft tools/settings) to set any part of the user interface to look like an older or previous version. That doesn't help me get a feel for what's new.

Even without the tool W8 included a desktop tile so, no additional tools needed. It took a little digging to figure out how to get back to the tile (aka though now deprecated name Metro) UI.

There are a lot of things to like with W8 in a multi-core world. Better resource management, better scheduler, better display of the cores and there use, etc. Given that I've got a quad-core TABLET (Google Nexus 7), and many laptops come with at least dual core plus hyperthreading to simulate quad core...  the additional management in W8 will be appreciated by very knowledgeable/tech-skilled users and up.

Minus the user interface, basically W8 is what I thought should have been included in W7 -- but that wasn't possible given the the horrible OS that was Windows Vista.  Total PoS (and that's not point of sale :-)).

David

------ Original Message ------
Received: 08:36 AM EDT, 09/22/2012
From: Rich M <pcma...@gmail.com>
To: pc...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [PCTOL] Win 8

I think you meant 2 Gb ram?

I never used the Live ID so I am not sure why you thought you had to.

It does seem quicker than 7 though it is supposed to boot much faster and that I don't see.

Confusing, this is going to do a number on the average user. I found a third party program that puts back the start menu

in which case it runs now much like Windows 7 and I see little difference except you have an extra step to get to desktop which I hope is gone by final release.

[David Moskowitz]

I installed it in a VM with VMware and also with VirtualBox -- had to play with the graphics adapter memory setting in VB to be able to install.

New ThinkPad and except for the hard disk, the Windows experience scale 6.9 to 7.6 -- with the drive it's 6.1. At some point I'll pull the hard drive and replace it with either a hybrid or SSD drive. Just need the capacity prices to get "reasonable" :-))

I've got a couple of old systems that won't take W7 let alone 8, so...  they'll stay on XP or Linux. Upgrade to W8 was included with the ThinkPad, so I'll upgrade shortly after W8 release. However, there is something to be said for running virtual machines hosted on a Linux system.  My old ThinkPad had reasonable performance and was better running Linux than Windows; the new one is too. However, the mobo chipset is clearly upgraded and overall performance is MUCH faster than the unit it replaced.  

Linux handles VMs about 10+ times faster on the new (and the overall specs would not lead you to believe that to be the case.  Windows 7 performance handling VMs is about double what it was with the old.  Linux version is newer (CentOS 6.3 with SELinux, LinuxMint 13, Ubuntu 12.04, and Fedora 17), so it's not really a fair comparison. :-)

David

------ Original Message ------
Received: 12:51 PM EDT, 09/22/2012
From: RBL <rble...@gmail.com>
To: David Moskowitz <pc...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [PCTOL] Win 8

I couldn't get it to boot in a VM, so I gave up. But I plan to upgrade no matter what. I love the concept of Win8. My plan is is to go to Win8 as soona as I see a powerful hybrid that I like, preferably from Lenovo, Sony, or Dell.

I'm also going to be installing it onto my son's XP-era desktop, which is still a fast and powerful PC presently running Win7. He's been asking me for Win8 since the RCs were announced.

I expect this to be no different than past Windows upgrades: A lot of grousing by people who hate change, and ultimately, all of them using it a few years from now and grousing about what's new in Windows 9.

On Friday, September 21, 2012, 11:21:17 PM, you wrote: