Windows 8

In short…I no longer despise Windows 8. I don’t love it, and I probably never will, but I don’t hate it. In about a week, I have figured out how to more or less do everything I could before. The saving grace is the “Desktop”…a feature hidden under about a hundred useless apps that come pre-“pinned” to the new start page. So after I unpinned all but about 15 things, I discovered the desktop…which is pretty much like windows 7, less the start button. I will be spending 95% of my time there. I usually have 10-20 windows open at a time, and I don’t know how to do that any other way to do this in Windows 8.

I know that Microsoft is attempting to provide a unified experience with Windows 8 across all platforms, but what perhaps they are forgetting is that I use different devices for different things. No phone or tablet will ever replace my PC for “work”..including blogging. I need a big desk, a comfy chair, a couple of huge monitors, plus a keyboard and mouse to work. I can barely stand working in excel on a 16” laptop. Doing it on a 9″ touchscreen tablet is never going to happen. You can miniaturize everything else, but don’t try to shrink my display, my keyboard, or my mouse…they are just fine thanks!!. That said…Windows 8…outside of the “desktop view” looks pretty, but it doesn’t use space efficiently. I have a 27″ monitor for a reason…so I can have a ton of things open at the same time without scrolling. Windows 8…perhaps so it can be used on multiple touch screen platforms does not seem to realize this. Sorry, but I don’t need a gigantic excel icon…I’m not trying to teach a grizzly bear how to use a touch screen.

Just for kicks I did one simple speed test. I have one particularly large database in Access. The single table has about 5M rows and is 1.6GB. I lined up a 2 year Windows 7 old laptop with 4GB of memory with the new Windows 8 laptop, also with 4GB of memory. I closed everything else, and pushed the enter button simultaneously. The tables opened within a fraction of a second of each other… after a few minutes of processing.. so performance where I need it is about identical…no complaints here.

Anyway…it’s certainly not worth upgrading too, but thanks to the new hipsters at Microsoft, you’ll  be forced to make a change in 3 or four years when your laptop finally dies. It’s an annoyance…change for the sake of change, but you’ll quickly adapt.  If I were a teenage girl, perhaps I could appreciate the beauty of Windows 8 more than I do, but alas…that ship sailed a long time ago. To me, Windows 8 is like a new coat of paint on a dirty old work truck….It was fine before so what’s the point?

Played around with it for 30 minutes yesterday and absolutely hate it…but….willing to give it a chance. I only need a few things from a computer. First, it has to be able to browse the intertubes, and second, it has to be able to handle some pretty huge excel files, as well as access and even a little sql. Fortunately, none of these are particularly demanding…Just about any windows 7 computer with 4GB or memory can handle everything I do, though 6 or 8GB would be better. Windows 7 handles all of that quite well, so whatever fancy new tricks windows 8 has will likely be wasted on me.

I did get office 2010 installed, but then couldn’t figure out how to open it without the start button. So I found an excel file and double clicked on it…which launched excel. Excel seems to run and look normal…check!!

Then I gave up for the day. I’m willing to keep trying because a few years back when I upgraded from office 2003 to 2007, I absolutely hated it for about a month. After that, I pretty much figured it out. A few months later, I switched to another job at a company still on 2003…and only then did I realize how great 2007 was. So, I’ll keep trying, and I’m sure I’ll figure out how to do everything I need to do, but honestly I don’t really expect it to actually be any better, just different. I see this as Microsoft’s attempt to “be cool” Maybe that’s what they need to do to stay competitive and profitable, but as a business user of my PC, I could care less about being cool, I just need a computer and OS that can handle my pretty basic needs without too much hassle.