Microsoft hasn’t learned a single thing. Windows 8 is pretty much Vista.
About a month ago I bought an Asus UX32VD laptop. It has a 1080p screen and with the updated track-pad drivers it is a pretty decent laptop. Nowhere close to a MacBook Pro running OSX, but acceptable enough for Windows Development which is what I primarily use it for. It came with Windows 8, which I liked. There are some huge UX blunders that drove my wife crazy; when you drag your finger from outside the trackpad and then enter it, Windows will change apps for you. Wonderful. You have no clue what is going on.
The perverse idea that we should go back to windows 1 and full screen apps is just retarded. Bringing up the calculator spawns a full screen app that can’t be scaled to 1/3 or whatever the size it is that the Microsoft “designers” felt would be reasonable. So to use this app, I have to switch between the web site where I am entering some numbers and the shittiest looking full screen calculator the world has ever seen. I am sure there is a workaround, but defaults should offer the most useful selection, and not the most demented one.
It got worse.
I recently bought a new workstation, and in a seizure of unbridled hubris I installed Windows 8. Big. Mistake. After installing my development tools, pinning various apps to the start bar, and generally getting things in a useable condition (which required booting with the built-in 4000HD GPU rather than the NVidia one because windows had decided to mess around with the settings while I was installing SQL Server), I noticed that IIS was not installed properly. I did the usual song and dance. To no avail. There was no way that I could install IIS on the messed up Windows 8 install. Not a single meaningful error-message was given. Just that it failed and needed to reboot to undo the shit that it had caused. The reboot did remove the IIS service, but didn’t remove the inetpub directory for some reason or other.
After wasting half a day on this crap, I decided to try the magic “refresh” trick. It’s basically a shitty way of re-installing your machine. Don’t ever use it. Re-install instead. I have a smallish SSD (128 GB), after the refresh I had 30 GB free, after supposedly being “back to start”. Turns out that a new directory called “Windows.old” had been created. Like a turd left in the bowl I tried to flush it out. Half of it went, but the other half was sticking to the bowl, or floating around on the surface.
I am now uninstalling Windows 8. And I highly doubt that any IT department is going to suggest that their hardware is “upgraded” to Windows 8. In my opinion, Windows 8 is probably worse than Vista.
Just my 2 cents.
Prescienta's Blog 