Monday, December 17, 2012

Windows 8 First Impressions

Oy, where did everything go? The Start screen is a pain in the rear. Getting to settings for hardware and software takes even more digging than in Vista and Windows 7. This was a particular pain since I had to hack drivers for my audio card to work properly. That little endeavor was painful, but ultimately successful in granting me full optical out.

I don’t like that I was forced into 32 bit Win8 due to the downloadable cheap upgrade locking you into whatever was on the system before. Be warned you will need the much more expensive disc version to move to 64 bit. Me, I’m cheap or I would never have upgraded.

Flash player is being temperamental in Firefox 17, yet works just dandy in Internet Explorer 10.

I do not like how difficult it is to get to programs now. Everything is aimed at the Start page, which is a garish mess. I feel like I’ve been thrown back to Windows 3.1 it is such a step backwards. This interface will not be put on my main PC unless I’m forced to by Microsoft.

If I hadn’t gotten an Android based tablet earlier this year, I’d have no clue where things were hidden. The interface is completely smartphone and tablet centric, which is pretty useless when using a mouse.

At least Win8 is running fast on the old hardware which has an AMD Opteron 180 Dual Core 2.4 ghz processor with 2 gigs of RAM.

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