OK, I found a reason to hate Windows 8...

[TreasonousBastard]

my primary machine, an XP dinosaur, is getting flaky, so it's time to move stuff to either the Win7 laptop or the shiny new Win8 desktop I got real cheap.

When I first got the Win8 box, I got it to where the tiles disappear and I had a workable desktop just like I'm used to. Then I was too lazy to do much more after realizing how many programs settings, passwords and other stuff I have to move. Now, after a month or so I fire it up again and it wants a password.

Huh? Password? I don't remember any password? Damn thing locked me out!

After an hour or so I found my Hotmail password and that worked. I vaguely remember it asked me for a Hotmail address so I set one up. Looked through all the settings and there's no way I can find to disable the password nonsense.

It's a small aggravation, but an aggravation nonetheless.

Now that I'm actually using it, though, it's kinda neat in some ways. Can't download the driver for my Epson printer, though, and have no idea what the problem is.

[olddots]

1. I should have returned this bag of shit the next day .

I was sick and drugged when I bought it and thought it was all my pilot error for about a month .

This is a magic experience --you can have your hands a foot away and the thing pops out of page .This 8 garbage platform was made for touch screens and HP hasn't made a good computer for years .

[TreasonousBastard]

2. Meh. I found a way to get the Epson drivers and...

the other two printer drivers I need should be easy.

There are a couple of popups I can't seem to get rid of, but they may be my fault for allowing some crapware to come with stuff I wanted.

Opera Link happily moved most of my settings, bookmarks and passwords here, and works much better than on XP and a little better than on 7. Abiword and Firefox work a little better than on 7, but it hides things from Revo uninstaller. I await with bated breath what mysteries Thunderbird may have for me. LibreOffice installed OK. but I haven't actually used it yet. Dunno if I'll have to buy another copy of WordPerfect or if I can use my wormhole cable to get it over here.

There's a dozen or so other things I use here and there that will probably be OK.

Actual "productivity" seems to be fine once you get past the unfamiliar. This one doesn't have a touchscreen, but that mainly means less screen cleaning. The keyboard is nice except the spacebar is at a weird angle where my thumb doesn't always hititproperly.

And, yeah, HP doesn't really make shit worth buying any more. But, who does?

[GoCubsGo]

10. If you have Word Perfect on a CD, it should work.

My WP is from my desktop, which is 10 years old. I was able to load it onto my Win8 laptop just fine. Otherwise, see if you can load it onto an external hard drive, and try transferring it that way. If that doesn't work, they have on eBay for relatively cheap.

My big gripe with the laptop is the touch pad, but that's because I hate touch pads. Nothing a USB mouse can't cure. Otherwise, with Classic Shell installed, I don't see too many major functional differences between Win8 and XP, other than it's much, much faster. I also like that if you have a couple of browser windows open, it pops up little mini windows. You can mouse over them, and toggle between the window. I can watch hockey and baseball at the same time. I also love that it takes a few seconds to boot up and shut down. My desk top takes freakin' forever.

My laptop is an HP, too. It's fine, so far.

[TreasonousBastard]

13. I've been wondering what I did with the CD...

but if I can't find it, buycheapsoftware.com has earlier OM versions pretty cheap. I got X5 for around 20 bucks that way.

And I haven't tried the wormhole cable yet. Years ago with Win95 there was a thing called Aloha Bob that came with a Laplink type cable and let you migrate stuff from one box to another through the printer port, including installed programs with registry entries. If the wormhole cable works that way it would be great. And faster through USB. Much faster.

Anyway, the point isn't so much getting a deal on WP, but I was answering why I stick with Windows when I use a lot of free software also available for Linux.

Boot time is fantastic-- even with the login bullshit it boots in almost no time at all. Most of the time I just let it go to sleep by itself and a quick slap on the keyboard wakes it up. It almost looks like instead of loading full libraries it's just loading stubs to fill out when you need them.

[CaliforniaPeggy]

3. I've heard so many bad things about Windows 8...

I was determined to avoid it.

Buying online is the way to go, and this is what I did. I ordered a Lenovo Windows 7, and I'll have it in early June.

Good luck! I am not one little bit computer savvy, and so this will work for me.

[TreasonousBastard]

5. Tain't so bad once you get used to it...

and I have a Lenovo Win7 laptop that has some "quirks".

I use AbiWord a lot for light text editing and for some reason it won't scroll upward when I use a mouse wheel, and there is an astronomy program I use where on that machine all the buttons disappear so you can't do anything.

I'm assuming there's a BIOS glitch causing this kind of stuff, not Win7 itself, and it was only in a small production run. Other than that, I like Win7 a lot.

Win8 seems to have gotten a much worse bashing than it deserves, and the real problem with it seems to be people suspecting change. I find it works quite well so far, and some things are actually improved while other things are a minor PITA.

[hunter]

4. Why are you still using Windows if you use all these open source and free programs?

I'm not being a Linux fanboy here, I'm just curious. I use Debian myself and I won't use Windows, Apple, or even Android now unless someone is paying me.

The most common answers I hear are from people whose fingers "know" Microsoft Word or Adobe Photoshop. My sister-in-law's "must have" is AutoCad; she lives and breathes it at work and at home.

As a university student my first serious operating system was BSD. Switching from Windows 98SE to Debian was like a wonderful homecoming. All the tools I knew were there and they were free.

[TreasonousBastard]

7. WordPerfect is neither open source nor free...

nor are some other things I use. Besides, if Windows comes in the box and doesn't add much to the cost, why not use it? Everyone knows how it works and it's finally almost foolproof.

I have the pieces of another computer "over there" and will get around to putting it together eventually. It will get Ubuntu and probably used primarily for online stuff.

[pokerfan]

6. Vista 8 sucks

Can this OS be saved?

This is not a debate. This is an autopsy.

The formal question may be, "Can this OS be saved?" But, we already know the answer. It's a dead OS walking.

This isn't a matter of opinion. The numbers don't lie.

Windows 8's market numbers are even lower than Vista's pathetic ranking at a similar point in their sales cycle. Even if you buy the most optimistic reading of NetMarketShare's numbers, Windows 8, after being in the market for six months, has just 3.31% of the desktop marketplace—that's just over what Vista had with 3.02% in three months.

[TreasonousBastard]

9. Well, yeah, they said that about Vista and then fell in love with 7...

so we're back to the Microsoft habit of every other OS sucking.

Some places, like say, the Metropolitan Life Insurance company or GM, or NY State upgrade their thousands of Windows boxes on a schedule but can wait until they see something they like. Maybe they will pass on this cycle and wait a year or two until Win9 comes out. But, whatever they do, it will have a lot more effect than what some dweebs blogging about it does.

My employer, a Federal agency, took a few years to work out a contract for field laptops and we ended up with Vista, which actually works very well, not the least because we extensively rewrote a lot of it and it has no outside nagware, crapware, or other bullshit consumer computers are stuck with.

My first Win95 computer sucked ass, but I bought a clean copy of it to install on another computer and it worked very well. It wasn't win95 that caused the problems, but the way Compaq "improved" it.

[jakeXT]

8. I setup a Win 8 machine about 3 weeks ago, and I didn't use any email adress.

I hope it will never ask for a password.

The Acer computer had 5 blank DVD's, so you could make a system backup.
But it's Win 8 operating system only let's you do it with an USB stick.

[mgcgulfcoast]

11. what can be done?

[SleeplessinSoCal]

12. I've got passwords written all over the place and still have problems.

But, I think that they may actually be blocking some malware on my Asus, which moves along very fast. As for the Win 8 features, I have no idea why it exists, excepts possibly for gamers.