Windows 8 Beta

There plenty of scenarios where a full screen Metro app is fine. Media playback, reading, gaming, even certain types of business apps like point of sale, etc.
 
darksonic said:
Not sure if anyone has noticed this but if the Start Bar is an any side of the screen other than the bottom the Start "menu" does not show up. Very annoying.
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The Charms Bar is always in the bottom-left corner, on every machine.
griffinhart said:
Comparing, on a desktop PC, a machine running only Metro Apps, vs a Win7 desktop running only traditional apps the former will be far less efficient at getting work done over the latter. Only two visible apps (assuming the resolution is high enough) and no desktop is extremely limiting. The ability to run my apps in windows and have more than two visible apps at once is critical and non-negotiable.
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Why? 90% of the time, I have outlook or Visual Studio full-screen on one monitor and a browser full-screen on the other? I use quite a few of my apps full-screen. Metro's no different there. The few times I need things side-by-side are in apps that should stay in the desktop rather than becoming immersive anyway.
 
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seems to be running nicely on my old PentiumD 2.8ghz w/ 2gb ddr2 and nvidia 8600gt. So far everything that I have running in 7 has worked fine in 8. The Metro UI takes a bit of figuring out as well as closing applications yourself instead of waiting for windows to do it for you.
 
I have to switch the start screen button to one of my side monitors when I play bad company 2 as my mouse keeps clicking the start button whilst ingame and bringing me out to the green start screen. Other than that I have no issues :)
 
THOMO said:
I have to switch the start screen button to one of my side monitors when I play bad company 2 as my mouse keeps clicking the start button whilst ingame and bringing me out to the green start screen. Other than that I have no issues :)
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Interesting, I've not seen that problem with the full screen games I've tried though I've not tried BC2 in Windows 8 yet.
 
Steam playing TF2 was playing fine until after the 4th or so time I fiddled with the in game video settings and then it dumped me to the desktop and I couldn't click on anything and I couldn't alt-tab back into the game .. had to shutdown tf2 and hl2.exe via task manager
 
ThreeDee said:
Steam playing TF2 was playing fine until after the 4th or so time I fiddled with the in game video settings and then it dumped me to the desktop and I couldn't click on anything and I couldn't alt-tab back into the game .. had to shutdown tf2 and hl2.exe via task manager
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I've had that happen on Win7 plenty of times; I doubt that's a Win8 issue.
 
heatlesssun said:
Interesting, I've not seen that problem with the full screen games I've tried though I've not tried BC2 in Windows 8 yet.
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yeah so far it's only bc2 it happens in so I ain't gonna whinge :)

also....win8 with NVidia 285.27 for win7 seems to have fixed my low gpu usage issue I had with my gtx460. Previously under win7 my gpu usage fluctuated from 35%-70% max during bc2 multiplayer gaming. Since using win8 my gpu usage ingame with the exact same graphics settings (2560x1600-high) driver etc stays pegged at 90%+.



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Ultramon won't work properly for me in win8 for spanning desktops, it crashes out with an error. Display fusion however works fine if you check the "adjust background for use with active desktop" box :)

http://www.displayfusion.com/
 
giving up on WIn 8 Dev....Win 7 going on this weekend......too many glitches that i cannot live with, going wit the way I actually use the tablet (the driver glitch for the pen, having to hard reset ALOT, no use of metro apps[goes straight to the "store" which is unavailable] .... decent as an OS, long way to go before I can use as a DD on my tablet
 
W.Feather said:
giving up on WIn 8 Dev....Win 7 going on this weekend......too many glitches that i cannot live with, going wit the way I actually use the tablet (the driver glitch for the pen, having to hard reset ALOT, no use of metro apps[goes straight to the "store" which is unavailable] .... decent as an OS, long way to go before I can use as a DD on my tablet
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Well, considering it was not meant to be used for anything other than development I can imagine why it doesn't make for a stable daily use OS.
 
Was worth a shot, its stable enough for use, just some glitches that are rather annoying, WIn 7 is far from my prefered tablet OS, wanted to try something optimized for touch (8 is close, but not there yet), the handwriting recognition is tons better in Win 8

chinesepiratefood said:
Well, considering it was not meant to be used for anything other than development I can imagine why it doesn't make for a stable daily use OS.
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W.Feather said:
Was worth a shot, its stable enough for use, just some glitches that are rather annoying, WIn 7 is far from my prefered tablet OS, wanted to try something optimized for touch (8 is close, but not there yet), the handwriting recognition is tons better in Win 8
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Thus far in my two weeks with Windows 8 on my EP121, it's usable but not quite as stable as I would like, a number of glitches and I can't get a couple of drivers installed. That said, I do agree with you about the handwriting recognition at some areas, particularly in OneNote, the searches and conversions in OneNote seem to work a LOT better. Recognition in the TIP seems to be faster and smoother but the TIP does flake out more than I'd like, still more than usable and normally just closing and reopening the TIP clears things up. The biggest problem for me has been HomeGroups, it's just pretty busted right now and not really usable with kind of sucks because all my networking with my machines is done via HomeGroups. Doesn't even work on my desktop well.

Other than HomeGroups however, my Windows 8 desktop is proving to be incredibly stable for a pre-beta, games even run great, at least as great as a 430 GT can be great for gaming. I've been writing C# Metro code with the Visual Studio 11 preview and actually is pretty damn stable. The XAML editor is a little sluggish but Visual Studio can get that way now, pretty heavy program but a fantastic development tool.

I think that when this release gets cleaned up and when the Metro apps start pouring in and I think there's little doubt that will, Windows 8 is going to be a huge hit. One of the big questions though will be how the hardware landscape looks and what the pricing will be. 2012 is going to be the most important year in the history of Microsoft, Windows 8 HAS to be be a hit on both desktops and tablets. I think that cheap ARM tablets with digital pens have the ability to help, just don't know how realistic it will be to see a cheap digital pen tablet, $500 or less, hopefully more like $400.
 
I found another bug, maybe.

It seems Local Authority Security Service uses 80% to 90% of the CPU. It wasn't until I disabled RPC-related services to reduce it.

After searching on Google, this seems to be an issue going as far back as XP. Oddly, never seen this issue in Windows 7 or XP.
 
All I want is for the main UI to be killed when fullscreen apps, such as games, are open, and for a lightweight, low footprint UI to be opened in it's place in case you need to alt-tab out to open another program. It would be so nice to get rid of all of those resources that the main UI uses and free them up for games..
 
Windows 8 supports most products on Windows 7 right? Just wondering how people are liking it, I won't try the beta until the official release anyways.
 
lilxskull said:
Windows 8 supports most products on Windows 7 right? Just wondering how people are liking it, I won't try the beta until the official release anyways.
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Yeah, anything that runs Windows 7 should have no problem with 8, Microsoft is pretty much promosing 100% backwards compatibility with 7. I have it on an EP121 slate and a desktop and thus far I really like it. It's a bit flaky on the EP121, the video drivers are quite there along with a couple of other drivers. MY QX9650 desktop is actually very solid, currently it's been up since 9/26 without a reboot doing everything from surfing, to gaming to coding in Visual Studio 11.
 
Is anybody here running Windows 8 on a multiple video-card system (not to be confused with a multiple monitor system which does not necessarily require multiple video cards).

If so I would be curious whether you've had any issues with DWM (massive memory spiking or Windows disabling Aero or Warning about resource/memory usage in systray) when using a GPU accelerated application on a monitor that is powered by the non-primary video card.

If not I am curious whether you have CrossFire or SLI enabled.

Currently running Process Explorer and examining dwm.exe's specific memory usage while using Applications that use Microsoft's GPU Acceleration API results in some outrageous memory allocations on all systems I've used.
 
Fort_Major said:
Is anybody here running Windows 8 on a multiple video-card system (not to be confused with a multiple monitor system which does not necessarily require multiple video cards).

If so I would be curious whether you've had any issues with DWM (massive memory spiking or Windows disabling Aero or Warning about resource/memory usage in systray) when using a GPU accelerated application on a monitor that is powered by the non-primary video card.

If not I am curious whether you have CrossFire or SLI enabled.

Currently running Process Explorer and examining dwm.exe's specific memory usage while using Applications that use Microsoft's GPU Acceleration API results in some outrageous memory allocations on all systems I've used.
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Interesting, do you think the issue you list would be present on a dual GPU, switchable graphics laptop? All I have to do is throw in my Win 8 HDD into my new dv6t to test.
 
Uberbob102000 said:
Interesting, do you think the issue you list would be present on a dual GPU, switchable graphics laptop? All I have to do is throw in my Win 8 HDD into my new dv6t to test.
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Posssibly, From the posts that I've seen on Microsoft's Connect Website there appears to be users running laptops with 2 GPU (one Intel and a NNVIDIA/ATI) reporting problems with IE9 and Firefox's GPU Acceleration disabling Aero. I am unable to confirm whether this is related to the problem but in almost all of the reported instances the user is leveraging both GPU with secondary monitors.

The issue is easily monitorable if you are familiar with using Process Explorer and monitoring the dwm.exe process using the above instructions and happens to all applications that are using Microsoft's new DX GPU API. The most common ones I know of are IE9/Firefox with GPU acceleration enabled.
 
running Win8 here with GTX460+8400GS using softTH for gaming over three displays......with no gpu/display driver issues.
 
Fort_Major said:
Posssibly, From the posts that I've seen on Microsoft's Connect Website there appears to be users running laptops with 2 GPU (one Intel and a NNVIDIA/ATI) reporting problems with IE9 and Firefox's GPU Acceleration disabling Aero. I am unable to confirm whether this is related to the problem but in almost all of the reported instances the user is leveraging both GPU with secondary monitors.

The issue is easily monitorable if you are familiar with using Process Explorer and monitoring the dwm.exe process using the above instructions and happens to all applications that are using Microsoft's new DX GPU API. The most common ones I know of are IE9/Firefox with GPU acceleration enabled.
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Yea I am, I'll see if I can't reproduce it with and without a secondary monitor, as well as if I can tell if the Aero disabling has something to do with that same issue.
 
It should only be reproduceable if it's the non-primary GPU/Card.
Aero must be enabled.
GPU Acceleration for the offending application must be enabled. (and with IE there's no way to ensure that - in firefox you can go to about:config and search for "gfx" and search for "direct2d" and you can ensure it's enabled and you can also force it to use it (I believe that's what the force-enabled" option is.

You then have to be using the GPU accelerated application on a monitor that is connected to the non-primary video card. This should be tied to the "Make this my primary monitor" setting in the Screen Resolution Dialog but I've never tested it.

Aero disabling itself is a worst case scenario. The actual behavior is a result of DWM allocating too many private bytes.

So the test is (assuming you're using a GPU Acceleration Enabled Browser).
Have Process Explorer with the DWM private bytes window showing (double click dwm.exe process in PE)
- Move the browser to a monitor powered by the non-primary video card. Visit a web page that requires lots of scrolling - or has rollovers. [link=http://video.search.yahoo.com/video;_ylt=A0oG7lQ2apdOdygAiTWl87UF?ei=UTF-8&fr2=tab-web&p=]Yahoo Video Search[/link] is a great one.

Hover over the various videos and pause for a second to wait for the rollout to happen then move to the next one and repeat.
While doing this watch DWM's private byte usage.

If the video card is using GPU acceleration properly DWM's private byte usage should remain the same. (e.g. it's on the primary video card)

If it's on the secondary video card and the video card is not being treated like a proper video card it spikes every time the DOM changes - which I am assuming triggers a repainting.

The size of this spike should be related to how much physical ram you have. So if your have less ram DWM might spike less for you - But if it spikes at all then something is going awry.

For me with 12GB of physical ram and a combined 2GB of Video ram DWM allocates almost 100mb per hover on the aforementioned url.
 
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