It’s been a few months now, and I’ve adapted fairly well to my Windows 8 machine. It works, but I can’t say that it is an improvement over Windows 7 in any way shape or form. There are two things that I think are worth noting. First is the return of the “Blue Screen of Death”…which I had just about forgotten about. It has now happened to me six times, including once this morning. It happens kind of randomly, but I think it always happens when I am using Internet Explorer or Google Chrome web browsers. Out of nowhere, I get a message that says “system_service_exception”…it takes about 20 seconds to log it, then it shuts down and restarts. Curiously…after the restart, it can’t find the wireless network, but another restart fixes that.
Thankfully…Windows 8 boots up pretty quickly, but all in, aside from the annoyance, count on losing about 5 minutes of your life. As I noted in my first review, I don’t really demand a lot from my PC, but I do usually have a browser open with 10+ tabs. I realize this can use a lot of memory…but crashing the system? Really!! I think I have crashed my windows7 7 machine once since upgrading to the 64bit version of excel…and I routinely have absolutely enormous excel files and massive database linked pivot tables open all day every day. Even when I bog it down…all I have to do is take a coffee break, and when I come back…the ol’ girl has righted herself…I can save, close a few things, and move on. This is quite frankly unacceptable, my problem is…at this time, suffering through hours of hold and attempting to translate gibberish speaking help desk folks….would be worse than just losing 5 minutes of my life once a week….I’ll keep you posted if the math on that changes. I will note that to date, I have not lost any excel files…yet
The second issue could very well be related…maybe 4GB just isn’t enough for windows 8? I haven’t done any scientific comparisons, but it just seems like 4GB isn’t enough, where as on my other machine…4GB is more than enough to handle everything I do….with the exception of some very large access/excel processes. These still work….they are just slow. On this machine, I don’t really handle access/excel files of that size, so that has never been an issue. But all I have to do is open a browser with a handful of open tabs, and memory usage seems to jump up to 60-70%+ and stay there.
I may just get additional memory and see if that fixes all of my problems…