[amandahansen]

who can tell me which one shoud i choose ?

[vinifera]

1st write your PC spec's
2nd write what is more important to you, shiny UI and new games or Work

[jaclaz]

vinifera, on 23 November 2011 - 06:55 AM, said:

2nd write what is more important to you, shiny UI and new games or Work

...and if you choose the latter you may go for Windows 2000 .

jaclaz

This post has been edited by jaclaz: 23 November 2011 - 07:34 AM

[CoffeeFiend]

vinifera, on 23 November 2011 - 06:55 AM, said:

2nd write what is more important to you, shiny UI and new games or Work

...and if you choose the latter you may go for Windows 7 x64 .

[Aloha]

amandahansen, on 23 November 2011 - 02:36 AM, said:

who can tell me which one shoud i choose ?

If you have a new computer with 4 GB of RAM or more, then Win 7 is a better choice, I think.

[thydreamwalker]

Win 7 is slimmer than XP and easier to configure for any novice user ;but Vista is still (unfortunately! )the best and more Office-Work oriented O.S......(*Until Win8-MSOffice2012 can be assured to a Beta-install) ; *Memory is an issue with XP-Vista . Using either Win7 & Win8 the memory usage footprint is dropping very low on old or new computers!!! Buy a New PC get an O.S. Free XP and Vista should retire but still be user friendly ,like me old trustworthy Win98SE

[Aloha]

Thydreamwalker,

Well, I simply think if the computer can run a newer OS, then I will give it a try. I never use Vista. I installed Win 7 in April this year. However, I rarely boot into it since I started to use Win 8. Actually I want to tell the OP to try Win 8 but he didn't mention it in his first (and only!) post!

Ah, nice to see you around, friend!

[vinifera]

why is pre-beta OS even suggested here ?
its full of bugs

[Aloha]

Why shouldn't a beta OS be suggested here? I suggest it because I find it good enough to try. And above all it's free. You said it was full of bugs? Then at least tell me about one or two of them, please. What are they?

I use my computer for simple needs, and Win 8 works fine for me. So far I haven't got any critical errors when I am using it. Actually I've got some small problems but they are not serious. It's OK because, as you said, it's still a beta.

This post has been edited by Aloha: 27 December 2011 - 09:13 AM

[Andromeda43]

One nice thing about Win-8 is it's an easy download and it's FREE. When did you ever get an OS from MS that was free.

I've installed it about eight times now, so I have a little experience with it.
First, if you install it on a system that already has an OS on it, Win-8 will try to install as an update. This has caused untold grief for the untrained user.

So after several aborted installs, I've come up with a formula for a faultless install.

Download the ISO and burn the Install DVD.

Then prepare a HD for the install by wiping it clean. I used my DOS boot disk and the DOS FDISK program to remove old partitions and create just one new one, for the Win-8 install. Don't worry about the format, the installer will take care of that. If you have an existing OS on another HD, disconnect that drive so the Win-8 Installer can't see it.

For the beginner I suggest to set up just one user, with NO password.

Without a touch screen, the Metro UI which looks like a cell phone touch screen, is pretty useless. There is a very simple registry tweak that turns off the Metro UI theme and restores the desktop to one that looks a lot like XP Classic. I downloaded the City Lights theme from MS and my desktop looks great!



I have my last install of Windows 8 running on a six year old Compaq desktop, running a P4 CPU, just 2 gig's of ram, and a 200gig SATA II hard drive.
All be it a little slow, Win-8 is running just great on that old PC.

I have many software titles running on Win-8, even Sol from Windows XP.

The entire subject is discussed in a lot more detail on the www.windows8forums.com

I run Windows XP-Pro-SP3 as my everyday OS and probably will till I die. I will never run Win-7. It a huge beast and much slower than Win-8.
Win 7 will totally get it's bum kicked when Win 8 hits the market in 2014.

Happy New Year Mates!

This post has been edited by Andromeda43: 27 December 2011 - 08:13 PM

[Aloha]

Hi Andromeda,

Your desktop looks cool! I like your post, but I am a little curious and want to ask something. Why did you have to install W8 so many times? As for me, I've installed it twice and used the Refresh to repair it once.

I didn't want to ruin the current OS on drive C, so I had it on another drive. First I installed it directly on D, where I store games and a lot of other stuff too! It worked fine. But when my friend said that it was better if I had the OS on a clean seperate partition, then I reinstalled it. And it took me plenty of time to remove W8 from drive D safely and completely. I made another partition out of D and named it H, on which I've installed W8 for the second time and it has been working so good so far. I refreshed it once to take back the new-looking Task Manager, which I lost after I tried to disable the Metro Start.

Running the Setup inside folder Sources gave me the choice of upgrading to W8 from the old OS or installing it new onto any partitions I have.

PS. I used Metro UI Tweaker to turn off the Metro Start and it didn't show Microsoft Confidential part on my desktop. You can check it here:

http://www.thewindow...dows-8-released

I wish you a happy new year too, friend.

This post has been edited by Aloha: 27 December 2011 - 11:11 PM

[MagicAndre1981]

Andromeda43, on 27 December 2011 - 08:09 PM, said:

Without a touch screen, the Metro UI which looks like a cell phone touch screen, is pretty useless. There is a very simple registry tweak that turns off the Metro UI theme and restores the desktop to one that looks a lot like XP Classic.

Win 7 will totally get it's bum kicked when Win 8 hits the market in 2014.

Metro is WINDOWS 8, the RPEnabled keys were only added to protect Metro against leaks in the early development stages when MS released builds to OEMs. In beta the option is removed So Windows 8 is the ugly phone UI.

And Windows 8 comes in 2012 Windows 8 will have no chance on the Desktop market. I know nobody who want to update from Win7 to Windows 8 on the desktop. On tablets it maybe ok, but not on normal desktop PCs with mouse and keyboard. I

[CoffeeFiend]

Andromeda43, on 27 December 2011 - 08:09 PM, said:

One nice thing about Win-8 is it's an easy download and it's FREE. When did you ever get an OS from MS that was free.

It's a time-limited buggy pre-beta that will expire in March. That isn't free by any stretch of the imagination. Not anymore than Vista & Win 7 which also run for a limited time, with re-arming for a certain number of days, or the 180 day evals of previous Windows versions that have existed for a number of years.

MagicAndre1981, on 28 December 2011 - 11:28 AM, said:

Metro is WINDOWS 8

Nah, Windows 8 has several nice new features. However, I refuse to believe MS would be stupid enough to ship Win 8 without the ability to disable Metro easily. Nobody would want of that OS, PR-wise it would be worse than WinME+Vista combined, all you'd hear about is "downgrade rights" and so on. If anything, it would just make people think Windows is turning into a confused mess, and drive more people to buy Macs while everybody else stays on Win 7 until Win 9 comes out in 2015 or whatever. I might be dense, but I don't think that's what they want. Releasing a Metro-only Windows 8 would be worse than not releasing it at all. All it would do is damage their image/reputation.

And no, I don't actually think tablets are the future. And I say that as someone who's used a HP tablet (with Win 7, an i3 CPU and all) for a while at work and who also owns an Archos tablet with Android on it (basically a fancy mp3 player). And without Windows "tablet" catching on (which I don't see happening) there won't really be much Metro apps either, so little use for Metro, and with no users that means no developers hoping to get rich from the app store... It feels like they're trying to duplicate Apple's idea for mobile devices but on a traditional desktop OS which always had better options in the first place. I don't see millions of PC apps selling for $1 being available anytime soon either. It will most likely fail pretty hard, much like their Azure "cloud" offerings.

Edit: not that I think Win 8 so far is a worthwhile upgrade over Win 7 specifically (more like a suitable replacement on new PCs, if you can disable Metro). Hyper-V might be a "nice to have" thing but it'll never replace VMware Workstation/vSphere/ESXi for me, heat maps in task manager are nice but not a must have (I'll still use process explorer half the time anyway), mounting ISOs is nice too but daemon tools lite is free anyway (and works great still), which only leaves the few explorer enhancements (mainly for copying lots of large files at once, which you only do once in a while) for me, and I don't think those aren't worth $100+ per pc.

[MagicAndre1981]

no, read what Sinofsky wrote:

http://blogs.msdn.co...ons-part-2.aspx

Quote

We've seen some small amount of visceral feedback focused on "choice" or "disable" - a natural reaction to change

this says everything. Windows 8 = Metro Phone tablet touch UI!

And Hyper-V sucks compared to VMWare Player 4 (terrible guest UI performance because it only supports the software rendering WDDM driver) and it will be only part of Enterprise/Ultimate.

[CoffeeFiend]

MagicAndre1981, on 28 December 2011 - 02:02 PM, said:

no, read what Sinofsky wrote

I'm not really reading the same thing as you in that sentence I guess. But his speech sure shows commitment to Metro overall. So long as there's a way to get rid of it, it'll be a decent OS (just not one upgrading to from Win 7). But if they make Windows Metro-only from now on, then I guess I have to ditch C# and start learning Objective C soon (and PowerShell -> BASH, etc)... That would be very sad, after being a user of MS products since MS-DOS 3.x!

If they end up making it Metro-only, the sales will be non-existent (unless you count those making use of the downgrade rights), and one can only hope that the shareholders will want the CEO's head on a platter and have someone else make things right.

MagicAndre1981, on 28 December 2011 - 02:02 PM, said:

And Hyper-V sucks compared to VMWare Player 4 (terrible guest UI performance because it only supports the software rendering WDDM driver) and it will be only part of Enterprise/Ultimate.

No idea if it's any good, I've never actually used it. I don't use VMWare Player either, but we have years of expertise and investment in VMWare's solutions: we've been using Workstation since ~forever (and we have a large-ish library of disk images in this format), we've used GSX in the past, now we're using vShpere (ESXi hypervisor) which is also the only solution consultants around here recommend and support (all that I've talked to recommend against Hyper-V) which is important to us. Add to that some experience with PowerCLI and also having done automation using the old COM-based scripting API (I've even used VmPerl a couple of times)... We're not about to throw all that away anytime soon, for a less mature, less complete platform that seemingly offers no real advantages in any way.

[MagicAndre1981]

CoffeeFiend, on 28 December 2011 - 02:38 PM, said:

I'm not really reading the same thing as you in that sentence I guess. But his speech sure shows commitment to Metro overall.

On each Blog post there were several users who asked if it can be disabled or not. And his reaction shows that we will never get this. Look at the blog post, only metro topics. The funny fact is that Apple came to the conclusion that working with touch on a desktop is not an ergonomically way to work and only MS want to force the users to use a PC this way. I don't want to unbend my arm 9 or 10 hours a day by touching a Monitor to work with a PC. This is a horrible UX. The human arms are not "designed" for such an thing

And the unbounded cheek is that MS censors now negative feedback in the blog comments

Also a disadvantage of Hyper-V is that it requires SLAT support. So all Intel Core2Duo/Quads are not able to use it. Booting from USb drives is also limited to Enterprise Edition only because each stick requires a VLK (MAK, KMS or the new AD based activation).

Overall Windows 8 = MS Metro 1.0. If there is a way to disable Metro, it is only Windows 7 + stupid license restrictions for the few new features. I'm now typing this from Linux, Windows is dead for me.

[CoffeeFiend]

MagicAndre1981, on 28 December 2011 - 03:57 PM, said:

And his reaction shows that we will never get this.

Call me naive, but I'd like to believe MS won't commit suicide like this. They'd either be handing the whole computing market over to Apple, or forcing people to stick to an outdated version of Windows for far too long, until they correct their stance (after that epic flop). But most likely it would be a bit of the former, and a lot of the latter.

MagicAndre1981, on 28 December 2011 - 03:57 PM, said:

Also a disadvantage of Hyper-V is that it requires SLAT support

Oh, so yet another reason to stick to VMWare's products? Great. Along with the "only available on certain editions" thing, which only makes it available to the kind of people (IT guys basically) who already have a lot invested in their competitor's superior products?

MagicAndre1981, on 28 December 2011 - 03:57 PM, said:

If there is a way to disable Metro, it is only Windows 7 + stupid license restrictions for the few new features.

Well, some of the features seem nice still, but again, nothing really amazing. But it's possibly the first Windows version that doesn't really bring something I really care for. There's small things here and there (e.g. I believe it's going to get an AV built-in, but all that does is save me installing MSE by hand). It feels more of a Windows 7 R2 (very little changed) -- besides Metro obviously. Seemingly it's going to be the 2nd MS OS that I skip updating to (the first being WinME), in ~25 years of using their products. That's definitely not a good sign. As for work, with or without Metro, we definitely won't be migrating to that (we're not completely finished moving to Win 7 yet!)

MagicAndre1981, on 28 December 2011 - 03:57 PM, said:

I'm now typing this from Linux, Windows is dead for me.

Honestly, this VERY much sounds like a knee-jerk reaction. I'd MUCH sooner keep using a very much outdated WinXP copy (*shudder*) for the next decade than Linux (and no, it's not because I didn't actually try it! Much the inverse actually). At least XP still runs today some of the most useful software, that are today far ahead of what Linux will have to offer in a decade. If you said a Mac then I'd agree it's slowly becoming a credible platform. They got a version of MS Office, they have the whole Adobe CS Suite, they recently got a version of AutoCAD, the SolidWorks folks have been working on a Mac version for a while, they have several popular apps (most of which are pretty high quality, relatively-speaking e.g. Aperture, Final Cut, iWork, VMWare Fusion, etc), they got Steam recently, etc. At least I could do some of my work on a Mac, whereas a PC with Linux would only serve me as a boat anchor or a door stop. It doesn't have the software that's required to get work done and it's not going to get it anytime soon due to its "philosophy" being incompatible with commercial software. Heck, I'd sooner stick to a Metro-only Windows!

[dencorso]

amandahansen, on 23 November 2011 - 02:36 AM, said:

who can tell me which one shoud i choose ?

Did you all realize the OP started all this discussion, interesting as it may be, with a one liner, and never came back to reap the results?

[Kelsenellenelvian]

Also lets not forget the ot WAS "winxp or win7"???

You all seem to want to debate if he should JUST use an OS that isn't even realy past alpha!

[CoffeeFiend]

What, are we off-topic at all? I actually did consider splitting the topic.

And while we're off-topic, well, the VS 11 preview is kind of deceiving too. Besides support for Metro stuff, it just doesn't bring what I wish for (particularly as someone who mainly writes C#). Yes, async will be nice to have (it has very little else, and for things that you'd use async for, we normally have other threads running anyway), but how about integrating things like the Windows API Code Pack 1.1 into the .NET framework, to access the core features of Windows? You know, things like TaskDialogs, Direct2D and Direct3D11 (then again we have SlimDX and SharpDX), control of the Win 7 taskbar stuff, etc. This basic stuff should be built-in really, along with equivalents to Resharper / CodeRush+Refactor! / VisualAssistX, and LINQPad too. I'm not convinced yet that VS 11 will be a worthwhile upgrade either, unless you're primarily a C++ person in which case C++11 support probably sounds nice.