Windows 8

[Guest Frankie5fingers]

Intel's naming conventions are getting fucking unwieldy.

honestly i dont know why they just say how many gigs. thats all i need. why do i have to look up what an i5 or i7 is. i know what they are now but thats how i thought when they first introduced the i's. its just dumb.

[oscillik]

Intel's naming conventions are getting fucking unwieldy.

honestly i dont know why they just say how many gigs. thats all i need. why do i have to look up what an i5 or i7 is. i know what they are now but thats how i thought when they first introduced the i's. its just dumb.

 

It's not dumb at all. It's because the speed of the CPU is no longer a majorly defining characteristic.

 

It's almost as if you want the CPU market to adopt the same kind of marketing that digital cameras and mobile phone cameras end up in ("this phone has 24 megapixels").

[zazen]

I have read and understand both articles.

 

Maybe a benchmark can prove me wrong, but I doubt the raw page level memory deduplication they implemented will make much of a difference in most use cases. The Linux kernel has a similar feature with KSM and it's pretty much only useful for virtualisation with many instances because it adds significant CPU overhead. I can't imagine it being effective if you run a bunch of different software. In fact, I'd rather have it off and not take the CPU hit.

 

Ok. Don't use Windows 8 then.

 

I heard it works well when applications reserve more memory then they need (i.e. most apps) and then have lots of blank pages - the OS can then dedupe all the blanks and re-inflate them as needed

[Guest Frankie5fingers]

Intel's naming conventions are getting fucking unwieldy.

honestly i dont know why they just say how many gigs. thats all i need. why do i have to look up what an i5 or i7 is. i know what they are now but thats how i thought when they first introduced the i's. its just dumb.

 

It's not dumb at all. It's because the speed of the CPU is no longer a majorly defining characteristic.

 

It's almost as if you want the CPU market to adopt the same kind of marketing that digital cameras and mobile phone cameras end up in ("this phone has 24 megapixels").

good point. didn't think of it that way

[Joyrex]

Intel's naming conventions are getting fucking unwieldy.

honestly i dont know why they just say how many gigs. thats all i need. why do i have to look up what an i5 or i7 is. i know what they are now but thats how i thought when they first introduced the i's. its just dumb.

 

It's not dumb at all. It's because the speed of the CPU is no longer a majorly defining characteristic.

 

It's almost as if you want the CPU market to adopt the same kind of marketing that digital cameras and mobile phone cameras end up in ("this phone has 24 megapixels").

 

Indeed - I think most people should look at how many cores, and how much cache RAM the CPU has - how fast it is is not as much of a factor anymore like Oscillik said.

 

I think they did well with the i3/i5/i7 monikers, though.

[GORDO]

cheesus christ it's kind of a mess, sometimes if you add a desktop program icon to the start menu the icon will dissapear for who knows what reason. having both metro and desktop parallelly and functioning as separate programs is stupid.

 

some hardware is not supported anymore.

 

gonna take some time to get used to it.

[oscillik]

Windows 8 really comes into it's own on a multi-monitor setup. Can have the Start Screen on one monitor and the desktop on another. Quite like that.

[modey]

Hmm, think I might have to bite the bullet with this one. Been running Vista for 3–4 years now without a reformat (lost the disc that came with my laptop ugh), haven't had any major problems but it's just cluttered. Win7 is too expensive. I assume I can't dual boot Vista/Win8? Just worried that my obscure music software might not work with Win8.. It was a pain in the ass getting Buzz to work properly on Vista!

[Ivan Ooze]

This is why they fuck with meeee

[goffer]

Recieved the new WIndows "Surface" tablet at work that comes installed with Windows RT. Didnt read into it at all and was surprised to find you cannot install Windows programs on it, only "apps". I thought that was strange so started poking around and noticed an nVidia ARM chip installed. Why would they go this route?

 

Don't understand why they didnt use windows mobile as an OS instead. Dont see why people would buy one now over an andoid tablet or ipad.

[oscillik]

Hmm, think I might have to bite the bullet with this one. Been running Vista for 3–4 years now without a reformat (lost the disc that came with my laptop ugh), haven't had any major problems but it's just cluttered. Win7 is too expensive. I assume I can't dual boot Vista/Win8? Just worried that my obscure music software might not work with Win8.. It was a pain in the ass getting Buzz to work properly on Vista!

 

You can dual boot if you have a fairly modern motherboard that lets you hit a key (F8 in POST screen on mine) to get a disk selection screen to tell the computer which drive to boot from. Then it's just a case of unplugging your Vista drive while you install WIndows 8 on a second drive.

 

If you're on a laptop, you're kinda screwed.

 

Recieved the new WIndows "Surface" tablet at work that comes installed with Windows RT. Didnt read into it at all and was surprised to find you cannot install Windows programs on it, only "apps". I thought that was strange so started poking around and noticed an nVidia ARM chip installed. Why would they go this route?

 

Don't understand why they didnt use windows mobile as an OS instead. Dont see why people would buy one now over an andoid tablet or ipad.

 

"Why would they go this route?"

 

Because the Surface uses the ARM architecture for the CPU, which cannot run x86 code.

[modey]

Yeah I'm on a laptop. Gah! I'm all for a fresh install but I think I just need to do it when I have enough time to get things up and running again..

[oscillik]

Yeah I'm on a laptop. Gah! I'm all for a fresh install but I think I just need to do it when I have enough time to get things up and running again..

 

You should be able to install Windows 8 to a secondary partition on your existing drive. The Windows 8 bootloader will detect that you've got a previous version of Windows and add it to the bootloader menu.

 

But that involves you resizing your disk so that you have a second partition to install into. You can use various tools to do this, but my favourite is a Gparted boot disc (which is open source and free)

[mcbpete]

I'm an Easeus man myself ( http://www.partition-tool.com/personal.htm ), GParted for me has always been a little intimidating

[oscillik]

I'm an Easeus man myself ( http://www.partition...om/personal.htm ), GParted for me has always been a little intimidating

 

Didn't know they did a free version, that's cool!

 

I gravitate towards Gparted because it's the dogs bollocks, and I know about it because of Linux.

 

But yeah, Easeus is definitely a decent alternative if you find open source tools too different.

[encey]

I can't tell the difference between this thread and one of those joke threads where people make up fake obscure computer terms to confound the reader.

[Joyrex]

ftp://clownfart.crez/poopfizzle~etd

[goffer]

 

Because the Surface uses the ARM architecture for the CPU, which cannot run x86 code.

Well duh, I wasn't saying why doesnt it work, simply why build a whole new OS with an "app" mentality when they already have Windows Mobile and soon to be releasing Surface "Pro" which runs off x86 chipsets.

[oscillik]

Because the Surface uses the ARM architecture for the CPU, which cannot run x86 code.

Well duh, I wasn't saying why doesnt it work, simply why build a whole new OS with an "app" mentality when they already have Windows Mobile and soon to be releasing Surface "Pro" which runs off x86 chipsets.

 

"Windows Mobile" no longer exists. It is called Windows Phone 8, and it supposedly is capable of running the same apps that are available for the Surface. Also, Windows 8 for x86 machines can run apps that are meant for Surface.

[GORDO]

seriously, those fullscreen metro apps are so dumb in a desktop. And the start Menu has such a weird behavior, it should allow empty spaces. And there's some stuff I coudn't figure out how to do but i forgot. Ah yes, it does a weird thing where it automatically enters a certain users home screen after booting up, no idea how to change that.

 

Overall it's okay I guess, didn't give as much as a performance boost to an old Vista system as I expected it to, but it works fine, having that awkward metro system pushed into your face is so annoying tho. I don't mind the start menu at all but having to juggle with metro and desktop programs is a pain.

[oscillik]

seriously, those fullscreen metro apps are so dumb in a desktop.

 

Definitely agree, that's why I never use any Metro apps.

 

Ah yes, it does a weird thing where it automatically enters a certain users home screen after booting up, no idea how to change that.

 

Mine doesn't do that. At all.

 

having that awkward metro system pushed into your face is so annoying tho. I don't mind the start menu at all but having to juggle with metro and desktop programs is a pain.

 

Do as I do, and don't run any Metro apps and you're fine. You can even mitigate having to deal with the new Start Screen by using one of the many 3rd party Start Menu apps that are out there right now. I've bought Start8 which is probably the closest to emulating the Windows 7 Start Menu, but to be honest I've stopped using it, as the Start Screen is faster at dealing with searches (which is how I use the start menu anyway).

[mcbpete]

oscillik, have you tried the free Classic Shell - it emulates all the start menus from XP onwards:

 

[Joyrex]

My best Windows 8 advice is to use a Mac

[mcbpete]

It's true, add a cigar and you could look as cool as this guy -

 

[oscillik]

oscillik, have you tried the free Classic Shell - it emulates all the start menus from XP onwards:

 

 

I've not tried it, but I know of it. I didn't choose it in the end because I just plain don't like the look of it after having gotten used to the Windows 7 start menu.

 

But it's certainly an option for those who are trying Windows 8 out