Re: Charms?

Maybe it's a just a strange, quarky marketing term riding on the back of the LHC successes and media exposure.

Re: 1.5 billion impressions logged

....or perhaps just read the big full-screen options page with a small number but clear list of switches that ask you, during installation of the OS, whether you want to send data to Microsoft in various iterations....

=

Re: More fake numbers by the Microsoft marketing machine

As someone who's owned an Asus TF101 for a while, and now moved onto a Nexus 7 (TF101 converted to a media center plugged into TV) - I can tell you that even a laptop touchscreen is going to be too big for most gestures.

Gaming will be almost impossible with having the keyboard attached (touchscreen gaming is more suited to hands on left and right edges with thumbs inside), and the TF101 at 10" I'd say was at the limits of comfortable holding (7" is just right). Anyone who's a serious power user is not going to want to keep lifting their arms all day either - just as an experiment for a day, every time there's a button on screen, try lifting your arm to press it and compare to moving the mouse, you'll soon understand.

Ubuntu is starting to go down this route, though not as severely as Windows 8 - I booted up but didn't log in immediately the other day, and came back to the login screen to find some kind of wierd pull-down clock overlay on the screen. It's bloody annoying to have to use a mouse for hand gestures, let alone where a mouse just hasn't even been accommodated in some cases.

Re: Redmond has logged ...

"spies on you" in exactly the same way Vista and 7 did.

Re: Thanks but no thanks

Umm...you don't have to log into a Microsoft account. If you read the screen, there is an option to not do so.

The Start button vs Menu is an argument that's been done to death, so I won't bother. You quickly get used to it if you just take the time to set it up cleanly and properly - about the same amount of time to have a clean and tidy Start button menu.

The Taskbar is perfectly suitable as a Quick Launch bar. In fact, if you pin programs to the task bar it gives you more options, as you can right-click and get a series of very useful options as well. The old quick launch bar has been absolutely superceded.

The control panel is immediately accessible VERY quickly by typing 'c o n' into the home screen. It appears quickly at the top of the list. The lack of being able to get to it is like the mythos of it being hard to shut down. Ctrl+Alt+Del. Power Button, Shut Down.

The default is local storage - that's a myth as well, no idea where you made that one up from.

It's also not a walled garden. I can install all the software I could install on XP, or especially Windows 7, without any qualms or locked down behaviour.

It's strange. I don't particularly like the new Start screen - so much so that I've set up Desktop as the first and main tile that I click on without thinking when I start my PC up, and my Desktop has been set up with my programs neatly arranged on the taskbar as I want them, so I rarely - if ever - need to go to the Start screen. I don't even particularly want to defend Windows 8....it's just that when I see such excessive degrees of bullsh*t as I've seen here I just want to step in and clarify things.

Re: Thanks but no thanks

Oh, I won't argue the point that the Start screen can indeed make a bloody mess - I even posted about it somewhere else in this thread. I do, though, see some potential for it, but in it's current iteration it really isn't all that good. Having said that - I always avoided the Start menu as much as I could as well, because it was always made into such a bloody mess by all these companies who thought they knew better on how the Start menu folder system should be designed. If you actually try to tell me that the Start Menu didn't turn into a debacle after installing a good few programs then I call shenanigans on you. The one practical difference between Windows 7 and 8 now for me is that with Windows 8 I actually have a clean desktop - but that's more because I'm better behaved with where I save my stuff.

Why is the taskbar so confusing? I always get a very strong whiff of 'I don't like new!' when people gripe that they want their quick launch bar back. It's so unnecessary. Where is the advantage? Yes, I admit that if your eyes are so bad you can't see when a program is running then it may be a pain, but then there is also the magnifier accessory for someone with that level of eye condition.

Very true that I don't have to pin programs to the task bar to right-click them! Thank you for pointing that out....was there a point or were you just arguing for arguments sake? I think the latter. Still, you just made the point that it's even easier to use than I said it was.

But what is actually wrong with being able to type 'c o n' into the start screen? It's different, and I've already said it's not my favourite aspect, but it doesn't actually make things any more difficult, does it? So why complain? I could tell you why, but it would just be repeating myself.

Why are you obsessed with the (rather pettily named TIFKAM - I mean, come on, it's like referring to Microsoft as M$ - it's just bloody juvenile) advantages? It doesn't actually make things any more difficult than they were before, but the whole platform works better.

Regardless, you're still perfectly capable of installing and sticking with Windows 7, or even XP, or if you really want you can go back to 2000, 98SE, or even 95, or 3.11 (before that they weren't worth mentioning). If that's what you want to install, then install one of those. You don't HAVE to install Windows 8, and there is plenty of life in Windows 7 (http://windows.microsoft.com/en-GB/windows/products/lifecycle) so if you don't like 8, don't install it.

Personally, I think the Start screen needs a lot of work to make it usable, but then I actually see it once in a blue moon, since I immediately run the Desktop and everything I have is set up from there. However, I LOVE the fact that those of us with an XBox and/or Windows Phone 8 device are getting interoperability and a common shared storage and platform. If you don't want an XBox, then don't buy one, and stick with Windows 7 if that's what you prefer. Just please quit trying to tell us all how bad Windows 8 is when it really isn't all that bad. It loads (very) quickly, it runs everything I've thrown at it, it syncs up my data across my 3 devices (4 counting the spare XBox), and the parts of it I don't like are actually quite easily avoidable.