Microsoft's summer update will be called Windows 8.1

Re: Will "Windows"™ brand OS offers Windows again

> It's the STD of OS options.

STD? What has Subscriber Trunk Dialling got to do with Windows? Or are they going back to acoustic couplers for network access now?

I get tired of the argument "If you used Windows 8, you wouldn't hate it". I am using Windows 8 and my hate comes from months of firsthand experience. I hated the UI when I first started, and then when I started to play with it I hated it even more. While it has nice performance improvements, it makes tasks that were quick in Windows 7 much slower. Do this: Type "System Restore" in Windows 8 and tell me how long it takes you to find System Restore. Type "Uninstall" and Windows 8 and tell me how quick it takes to get to the Programs and Features part of the control so that you can uninstall a program. In Windows 7, just click start, type "uninstall" and in 1 second you could click on "uninstall a program" that is a short mouse distance away. Done. In Windows 8, you type "uninstall", then move your mouse to the right and click on Settings then move you mouse all the way to the left and click on Uninstall a Program. The UI is counter-intuitive with a mouse and touchpad.

The only three good things Windows 8 is good for is a home theater PC, a tablet, and a phone.

Is anyone actually running Windows 8 ...

" ... It's loads faster (on my relatively old laptop) - long time issues have been fixed for copying files etc and it's stable. The menu is quick ... "

[ Fast Boot ] ... It should load faster since by default it employs a hybrid sleep and not a full shutdown and is "resuming" rather than a full POST and bootstrap. Additionally, many people are obviously using newer UEFI streamlined systems rather than traditional BIOS. I guess comparing Apples and Oranges is back in vogue these days.

I have a theory that Metro and Windows 8 appeals to the definitive "serial-tasker", those that operate one task at a time like the instruction pointer in a CPU. They press the "On" button and wait. I say this because a "multi-tasker" would press the computer power button 30 seconds before he needs to jump in and do something. That means, press the button, grab a coffee ( or anything else ) instead of standing there waiting interminably. Multitaskers naturally know how to timeslice so that few seconds at startup never ranked high on the things-to-fix-in-Windows bullet-list when there are so many other real consequential annoyances to address.

[ File Copying ] ... What "copying files" issue might that be? Most people are referring to the yet again updated file copy dialogs, the ones that could have only been designed by a committee and were already getting ridiculous in Vista and 7, but now they have added an option to "pause" a copy. But for what possible reason? Well, I guess it makes sense since a serial-tasker might just need to pause. Multitaskers know enough that they can simply jumpt to something else if a copy takes too long. In truth, copying a file has worked reliably since 1995 for the consumers, but was made foolproof with NTFS based Windows even earlier.

[ Quick Menus ] ... GPU accelerated menus should be fast. Especially since it is essentially only rendering HTML+CSS basic geometry ( Playskool blocks ) in primary colors, kinda like simple webpages from 15 years ago. Were you expecting slow? I'm not impressed by Microsoft advancements here, nor should we be thanking them for these little baby steps forward. By now in 2013, instead of romper room shapes we should have game-engine style 3D user interface elements, like those which already perfected as far back as 1999 ( Q3 and Unreal ). And it should be fully user-customizable, not locked in to their one childish theme.

Not that amazing, really. It's been some time since its release and not a lot has changed. Yes, it may be a bit faster than W7 but not that much and, should you ever switch off Aero on W7, that increase is barely perceptible. OK, I agree that "mee too" trolls are a pain - they were frowned on in some places when I was a net noob so why we have them now is a bit of a mystery, but what you are seeing now isn't really that different from what we saw with Vista. While there are those that like W8 and will champion it, just as some folk did with Vista, the majority villify this version because they just don't like it.

I'm saying little about my opinion of W8 myself, partly because other folk have said everything already, partly because I'm fed up doing it. My sole W8 installation, I shall say, has been deleted and, beyond my only W7 system and what gets done at work, everything else is Linux or RISC OS and is unlikely to change anytime soon.

Re: Fail == Fail

Windows 8 has many haters from inside the Windows community, the trolls from outside are largely superfluous in any argument about the merits or negatives of all the different Windows versions they are outside the experience by their own choice. Conversely there are quite a few Windows lovers who like everything about whatever has been recently released from Redmond. Sometimes I even hear defenders of Win8/phone describing how tasty their new interface looks, I think the best description of folks like that would be Windows lickers.

But seriously folks, the real reference I'd measure the popularity of any system would be the usage share of OS on the net, wikimedia measures Feb 2013 like this: Win 7 34.72%, iOS 23.75%, Win XP 14.28%, OS X 6.98%, Android 6.03%, Vista 4.3%, Win 8 2.23%, Linux 1.42% and Win Phone 0.79%.

M$ still have a 56.32% market share so they don't need to worry what they call their next OS or how it performs, it will still be part of the biggest herd. Only just mind.