bash Windows 8

[Darrin]

I have been doing winblows tech support for a friend that's tech challenged and has a winblows 8 netbook. To help her with Win 8 I installed a neat program called Classic shell. This gives you a winblows 7 desktop look and feel while still having winblows 8 there. The start button is a circle with a scallop shell in it. Even though she has MS Office I put Libre office on it. It's sad but you pretty much have to replace so much to be safe and as amiga1260 said VLC and classic media player are by far better.
People always say not to judge a man till you walk a mile in his shoes... I have had to use windoze for games and a bit of web browsing... (I find it funny Firefox can't log in here on Amiga.org It says thank you for logging in but drops you right back out ) The Amiga and PegasosII/MorphOS are still my primary systems though. I do all my e-mail and art and news letters for Amitech-Dayton on them. I have walked that mile and then some. Having used xp and win7 pro and had to repeatedly fix an 8 system, (Because the trained tech keep breaking things. >.< ) I think I've earned the right to bash it. This thing will never be as good as Amiga.

Same here.  I dropped my Win 7 laptop and had to rush out and get a new one.  The only one available at the shop with the specs I wanted was a ASUS ROG i7 with Windows 8.0.  After a couple of hours pissing around with Metro, I did a quick search online, found and installed Classic Shell and then assigned the different file-types to open using the old "classic" programs instead of the full-screen metro apps.  I did the 8.1 upgrade later.

Now I've got what looks like and feels like Windows 7 running on my machine, but with the benefits of the faster Win 8.1 (it certainly feels that way) and better software compatability that Win 7 (I'm running old games on 8.1 that point blank refused to run on Vista or 7 even after spending ages screwing with compantability modes).

The only thing I hate is the forced password log-on and the attempts to stuff Skydrive down my throad.  I have absolutely no itention of storing anything on the "cloud" even if I can easily swap data between my other machines and/or my Windows phone.

[Darrin]

must say i didnt even downloaded any classic shell, just dont use the metro apps almost at all, working with 8.1 desktop most of the time. im rather content with it so far, after i expected pure hell, listening to opinions in advance.

The Classic Shell is nice as it gives you the real START BAR back and it has extra features like the ability to disable those annoying slide-in menus that pop in from the side if you happen to move your pointer into any hot-zones.  Plus, it is free.  

If Microsoft had just included a "classic theme" with Windows 8 that could have been applied with one click then nobody would have been complaining.  The Metro look works great on my smart phone, just not on a 1920x1080 32" monitor with multiple programs running that need to be flipped between quickly or run side-by-side on a single monitor.

[Darrin]

Classic Shell is great for home users (from what I hear), but useless for enterprise.  Even if it is free now, what admin wants to run around installing something else on dozens or hundreds of workstations, just to provide functionality they already should have?  I suppose it could be baked into the image, but since it's not supported by Microsoft, what if a Windows Update breaks it?  Too much headache for corporations, thank goodness Win7 will be available for the foreseeable future.

Windows 8.2 is "supposed" to bring back the full start bar.  After that they can fix that bland theme to Office 2013.  Honestly, they hit you with huge, day-glow icons in Metro and then suck all of the colour out of your life when you start up Office 2013!

[Darrin]

Every version of Windows I've tried since XP has been a disappointment.
That being said, I purchased but never installed Win7.
I just haven't found the need for it.

Then again, I spend more time using MorphOS than Windows anyway.

Every version of Windows since XP and before Windows 7... hmmm... I wonder what that could have been....

[Darrin]

Well, I guess that was a pretty pointless point.
But no matter how bad Win8 might be, it can't top Vista.

Most crash prone POS I've ever used.

LOL.  Exactly.

Mind you, Vista became a lot more stable when the final service pack came out, but by then you could get Windows 7.

[Darrin]

Well of course you could.  Vista was a lame duck by then, and they couldn't really call it Vista SP3, which is what Win 7 basically is.  Pretty much everything, including drivers, that works with Vista will work pretty much identically on 7.

I expect Windows 9 will be Windows 8.x with all of functions people want back by default and with a "theme" option for Metro and full screen, touch sensitive apps.  In other words, Windows 8.2.