Windows 8 Desktop Share Approaches 2%

But playing with a Wii controller is hardly the same as having your arm outstretched driving a touch monitor for extended periods and getting gorilla arm. You can be damn sure Enterprise will never adopt touch monitors because they don't want carpal tunnel and repetitive motion injury burdens. Its ergonomically retarded to drive a monitor by touch on a desktop.

I have to wonder on what device you think your arm is outstretched driving a touch monitor a long period of time. On touch laptops, I have a full keyboard and only invoke touch on the occasion I want to do something quick that is easily accomplished with a gesture or tap of my finger. On slates (e.g. the Surface when keyboard is removed) I'm holding the device like a book and can use the split keyboard to thumb type. On my desktop, I don't have a touch monitor but have a better mouse than laptop, so most of those touch operations are easily accomplished using the discrete mouse. Under no circumstance am I sitting there with a device a distance in front of me and my arm extended for any period of time.

Whence comes gorilla arm?
 
well I built two gaming computers this christmas for my kids, they are both win8 64bit. the 16 year old figured out everything herself after handoff. the 13 year old had some issue with gfwl communicating with gta iv/dead rising2 for saves but got it figured out with some whining and googling. They aren't crashing, are both overclocked and have been run constantly since christmas. That's pretty smooth for a new os.
 
Yeah, that's an effecitve GUI where you have to use hotkeys and a partial commandline for a simple task.

The various ways I can think of doing this:

1) click the search charm and type de
2) press the windows key and type de then choose "settings" with mouse or keyboard
3) press the windows key and type co then press enter to launch "control panel" and work from there
4) invoke the search charm with keyboard (win+w) and then type de
5) invoke the settings charm with mouse or keyboard (win+i) and choose "change pc settings" then choose the "devices" tab
6) from desktop, invoke the settings charm then choose "control panel"

On top of that, managing devices through the control panel is not typically considered a "simple task" by the vast majority of users. They typically plug stuff in, and will respond to either the toast notification or the desktop popup, if the device doesn't "just work" after being plugged in for a few seconds and the system installing its drivers.
 
how is that device even tangentially considered a "remote control" -- the MCE remote is set up and wife-usable exactly like a TV remote.

It's not a perfect analog, it is missing the category buttons, however it possible to control every feature not only in Media Center but Windows as well since it is basically a keyboard and mouse. Plus it's Bluetooth and not infrared, no having to point the thing.
 
About how crappy Windows 8 is, it's sad but true how true to form the every other OS sucks, every other OS rocks, it's been for MS, like that pic that's been posted tons of times. ME, Vista, 8, all sucked. 98SE, XP, 7, all rocked.
 
I'm more surprised by the fact that 7 is ahead of XP in terms of market share. I wonder if 7 is bound to become the next XP (everyone is going to user it forever)?
 
I'm more surprised by the fact that 7 is ahead of XP in terms of market share. I wonder if 7 is bound to become the next XP (everyone is going to user it forever)?

If I were a betting man, I'd bet that 7 will become the new XP as you said and will have the plurality if not the majority of the Windows market for almost a decade.
 
I'm more surprised by the fact that 7 is ahead of XP in terms of market share. I wonder if 7 is bound to become the next XP (everyone is going to user it forever)?

This will certainly be the case.

Sure for home users they can load Win8 on their kids PC and say everything runs just fine, what's the problem?

The problem lies when you manage thousands of PC and need to support various levels of user knowledge. Switching between the metro and desktop UI is very cumbersome and feels unnecessary. The OS should not 'need' to be relearned. It certainly needs to evolve but that doesn't mean let's skip natural iterations and start using our eyes and toes to open mspaint.

Win8 is too much of a support burden on IT department staff to just jump right into. Win7 is stable and performs just fine for enterprise usage and if there isn't a business need to jump into touch enabled software, it won't happen any time soon.
 
The various ways I can think of doing this:

1) click the search charm and type de
2) press the windows key and type de then choose "settings" with mouse or keyboard
3) press the windows key and type co then press enter to launch "control panel" and work from there
4) invoke the search charm with keyboard (win+w) and then type de
5) invoke the settings charm with mouse or keyboard (win+i) and choose "change pc settings" then choose the "devices" tab
6) from desktop, invoke the settings charm then choose "control panel"
Or in Windows 7, two mouse clicks.

And if I don't do it everyday, I don't need a cheat sheet or commit the key strokes to memory because the printer option jumps up once I click the start menu.
 
Why do OS companies insist to introduce new "improved" GU"s that kill man years of knowledge or radical changes the users don't like. No W8 for me, I didn't do W- ME either. :)

W7 seems OK.
 
Or in Windows 7, two mouse clicks.

And if I don't do it everyday, I don't need a cheat sheet or commit the key strokes to memory because the printer option jumps up once I click the start menu.

I like how you removed the end of that quote which addressed the necessity of such an action. How often are you going into devices that an extra click is causing you strife?
 
I like how you removed the end of that quote which addressed the necessity of such an action. How often are you going into devices that an extra click is causing you strife?

Exactly. A point that I make constantly is that the changes in the Windows GUI shell have very little effect on where most people send their time which is inside of applications.
 
Exactly. A point that I make constantly is that the changes in the Windows GUI shell have very little effect on where most people send their time which is inside of applications.

Not anymore, you will be spending most of your time trying to figure out the OS!
 
I didn't care for it that much at the beginning, but Start8 fixed that for me pretty quick. I've been running it on two of my machines for 2 months with zero issues. I got my copies free from school so I can't complain. My only gripe is the issue with streaming MKV/AVIs with AC3 audio to an xbox via media center.
 
I'm more surprised by the fact that 7 is ahead of XP in terms of market share. I wonder if 7 is bound to become the next XP (everyone is going to user it forever)?

You're damn right it will be. The only reason XP didn't last even longer is because MS realized that if they continued to support 64 bit XP then they would have real problems. So XP is only truly valueable right now for older systems via 32 bit and hence the 4gig cap. Windows 7 64 bit means people won't be upgrading for a long, long time.
 
One more fatal crash, and there will be one less. I've had just about enough.

Exactly this. I've given this OS so many chances and opportunities. I actually don't mind Metro and have put many hours into this OS. But from a reliability standpoint, it has let me down a few times and after one more crash, I've told myself I'm with it.
 
Exactly this. I've given this OS so many chances and opportunities. I actually don't mind Metro and have put many hours into this OS. But from a reliability standpoint, it has let me down a few times and after one more crash, I've told myself I'm with it.

This is always the problem with Windows, so many different hardware configurations and some will always have problems when a new version of Windows comes out. Overall I've been quite happy with Windows 8's stability, I've not experienced any major crashes with any of the machines I upgrade from Windows 7 in many months though the Samsung Ativ Smart PC tablet I bought with Windows 8 did have issues but all of the updates Samsung has put out for it have covered all of my major issues.
 
Just got my Acer W700 tablet. Jeez, that thing boots up fast. It's faster than my HP TM2T with Win 8 on it. I've not had any problems.
 
Or in Windows 7, two mouse clicks.

And if I don't do it everyday, I don't need a cheat sheet or commit the key strokes to memory because the printer option jumps up once I click the start menu.

it's only 3 clicks in win 8...

right click the bottom left corner, click control panel, click devices and printer.

It's not like an extra click is eating up all that much of your time.
 
it's only 3 clicks in win 8...

right click the bottom left corner, click control panel, click devices and printer.

It's not like an extra click is eating up all that much of your time.

so if you say one click slower, and he says 50% slower, who is right?

both are right
 
Typing this on a Dell Precision M4700 with Windows 8 Pro while a Server 2008 R2 VM builds and updates in Hyper V using 8 logical cores. Getting Hyper-V for free is awesome.
 
If you use the control panel that often, just put the icon on your desktop. That's where mine sits. 2 clicks on Windows 7 or 2 clicks on Windows 8.

If no icon on desktop, it's Start Menu + control panel on Win 7. It's pull the bar from the right side, select Start, then select control panel on Win 8. At least for me.

After I load Windows, I customize my Start Menu in Win 7 or the Metro UI in Win 8. Win 8 definitely needs some getting use to, but I'm at the point where neither is going to be slower or faster than the other when in use. Now, Win 8 definitely boots faster than Win 7.
 
It's running on my main rig (see sig - it's the Core i3) for more than a month and had 0 crashes so far.

The start screen is good, even better than the old start menu. My problem is that I don't like the integration between it and the old desktop. It feels clunky. Hard to explain, but that's what I'm experiencing.

Other than that, it's a lot faster than Win7, and some improvements are really, really nice. If you want the old start menu, install Classic Shell (it's free, available on sourceforge) and be happy.
 
Ah, family and friends LOVED the weather, news and sports apps. My wife "travels" with its travel app a lot, and want a copy of 8 just because of that, lol.

Computer nerds like us will have all sorts of grips with it, but the masses that use tablets+smartphones and don't have attachment to any OS/platform get used to 8 real quickly, and like it a lot.
 
It's running on my main rig (see sig - it's the Core i3) for more than a month and had 0 crashes so far.

The start screen is good, even better than the old start menu. My problem is that I don't like the integration between it and the old desktop. It feels clunky. Hard to explain, but that's what I'm experiencing.

Other than that, it's a lot faster than Win7, and some improvements are really, really nice. If you want the old start menu, install Classic Shell (it's free, available on sourceforge) and be happy.

Ya, I know what you mean with the integration between the Metro and old style desktop. It's like they randomly toss things in, when it's unneeded. Like when connecting to a bluetooth device, it takes you to the Metro style PC settings, while the old Win 7, was just a popup window. I don't like the new style, cause now I'm stuck on that Metro style PC settings fullscreen window, instead of being able to do other things at the same time.

I did recently find out, you can swipe the screen over from the left side of the screen and make it sort do a half screen of like, your desktop and half screen of Metro (or two of whatever you're working with).

I would have preferred the Android style though, where you'd get a thumbnail view of all your apps along the left. Don't know if that's stock in ICS or if that was just something Acer made in their GUI for the A500 tablet. You get something similiar in Win 8, but only by using the mouse. Move the mouse to lower left corner and bring up the start menu symbol. Don't press it. Now keep the mouse along the left edge of the screen and scroll up. You get the thumbnail view. Doesn't work with touch, I have no idea why.
 
Very little of these are are probably upgrade licenses. I most are probably oem.
I have however found 2 uses for which I would prefer windows 8 over 7/Linux distros. The first being a touch laptop such as the yoga 13 or twist. And the second being an htpc because tiles seem easier to use with a remote or air mouse than Windows 7.
 
I have however found 2 uses for which I would prefer windows 8 over 7/Linux distros. The first being a touch laptop such as the yoga 13 or twist. And the second being an htpc because tiles seem easier to use with a remote or air mouse than Windows 7.

Too bad Microsoft abandoned their own MCE Remote in Metro. And Metro Apps. Example, launch Netflix in Metro and try to drive it with an MCE Remote and see what happens (or doesn't).

Air mouse might work however.. but Metro as an HTPC front end = migraine. You're better off driving WMC in Win7/Win8 for HTPC purposes - at least it supports plugins like MediaBrowser.
 
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