PC sales Suffer Biggest Slump in years

[Graham]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

Then you are not quite making a fair comparison to the Chromebook. You could just as well use Webapps in Windows. And when she has a number of programs she likes that would not be available on the Chromebook then you can't really compare the two.

Surely the comparison is valid?

Without sidetracking the thread too far, two minutes after getting the Chromebook out the box it was up and running, fully up to date, with all my email, contacts and documents available. I actually carried on working on the document I'd had open on my Windows desktop when the doorbell rang for the delivery.

After turning on this Windows laptop we had to wait for some considerable time (I think it was nearly an hour - my wife went off to meditate) while a lot of Windows and Asus updates loaded. After that we were highly confused as to how to run programs. Bits of the screen would become 'locked' into an app with a bit of the desktop poking out to one side. The tiles that seemed to lead into the Windows world wanted additional setup to supply contacts and email.

Yes, at that point, several restarts later (there were waves of these updates each requiring a restart) if it were my machine I could have installed Chrome, and gone to my web apps and started work.

But my wife doesn't use web apps, so the comparison is a fair one. From her point of view, getting the Windows 8 laptop to allow her to work the way she can on her Windows 7 one has taken many hours of frustration, and she's still not there.

Graham

[forsooth]

where I travel to work is not always web hence no cloud
machines must be self contained, self sufficient

so new Lenovo will be purchased

my wife and 1 child will sample a Pixel
will report back to me

[pl001]

Yes, setting up Windows 8 can be a very frustrating experience, to say the least. Organizing tiles befuddled me as well until I realized it always forces you to have vertical columns in multiples of 2. So you can't have 3 full vertical columns, it will be two full columns then two more tiles will force two new columns instead of one more column of two. Evidently this is to fit double wide tiles in every column, but in reality it's just stupid. Launching, moving, and selecting are more finicky than any other touch interface I've ever used.

I also set up my Surface and Microsoft account with my Gmail account and afterwords set up an Outlook.com account. I wanted to change my main Microsoft account to the Outlook email but after spending an hour or so Googling how to do it decided it was more hassle than it was worth.

I could go on, but the point is there are a lot of things, both small and large, that can make Windows 8 a very frustrating experience. I'm pretty sure people who love it and have no issues with it don't really use it as a true PC or personalize it to specific wants and needs.

[BeccaPrice]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

recently Adobe gave away free Acrobat 8 and Photoshop copies on their websites. Work fine after I installed them with XP compatibility -- but they are not supposed to run according to the specs.

oohhh - is this offer still good? do you have a link to the page?

[Billi]

Acrobat 8 has dissappeared as a single download, maybe it is in the suite file.

The link is here, read the copyright announcement if you're entitled to download.

http://www.adobe.com/downloads/cs2_downloads/index.html

[Dulin's Books]

pl001 is correct. you cant have 3 vertical columns in a group. this may change with the blue update but cant confirm that. for now she'll have to organize in columns with 2 apps side by side i.e. top left>topright> middle left>middle right>bottom left>bottom right or however many rows she has.

of more concern is that you say you cant sign in now. with either account? the live or newly associated email?

and to kept the thread on track i'd understand if you answer in pm.

[K. Molen]

Originally Posted by HansTWN

Something I don't quite understand here...

Everything you said in that post is spot on as far as I'm concerned. I've yet to see a complaint about Windows 8 that isn't somewhere rooted in "it's different than before and I don't like it." Which is fine and a valid point of view, but people keep trying to claim that Windows 8 is somehow more convoluted and difficult than Windows 7. It isn't, it's just different.

I had similar feelings when I first experiences OS X. The whole methodology of the OS just didn't seem logical to me and I thought it pretty annoying at first. After a while I got used to it, and came to appreciate many things about the OS.

[pl001]

Originally Posted by K. Molen

Everything you said in that post is spot on as far as I'm concerned. I've yet to see a complaint about Windows 8 that isn't somewhere rooted in "it's different than before and I don't like it." Which is fine and a valid point of view, but people keep trying to claim that Windows 8 is somehow more convoluted and difficult than Windows 7. It isn't, it's just different.

It's not just being different that makes it more convoluted and difficult, it's the incompleteness. As I mentioned before Modern is not a complete interface that can stand on its own. As a touch interface, it is missing key components of what has made Android successful including but not limited to interactive widgets, centralized notifications, multiple store options, and personalization. As a PC interface, it can't do windows which is a huge omission, and it also can't do most of the advanced configuration. Windows 8 relies on the desktop for a lot of its shortcomings, but even that isn't quite what people are used to in 7.

Another example of a frustration is how the Windows Store installs apps on multiple profiles. In short, it doesn't. You have no option to install an app on anything other than the profile you are in at the time. To get it on the other profiles you have to go into each profile and install it, and in one case I even got charged twice for the same app because of this and have yet to get a refund. The store is very poorly done, by far the worst one out there. If you know the name of what you are looking for you can find it easily enough. If not, or if you want to find similar alternative apps, well, good luck.

How about side swipes to select multiple mail items? Completely hidden feature and different than selecting anything else in Modern. Not to mention the mail app as a whole feels about 4 years out of date.

Ever try getting the contents of an SD card to be seen in Modern apps in an RT device? Something automatic on other OSs that you almost certainly won't be figuring out without Google and some technical savvy.

Try opening the Photos app, select your Facebook or other online picture account, then try to copy a picture from there onto the PC. Can't be done. something that started as a great idea and then not finished.

As I said earlier, I could go on and on and on about these little frustrations, but the bottom line is my Surface RT was a very frustrating experience overall. I have spent literally hours on forums and Google looking up stuff I never needed to for Android or previous versions of Windows. Now that I have had it a couple months I am used to it. I do love that 8/RT is the most powerful mobile OS out there and right now I find it the best OS overall for my mobile needs. But I still don't really like it.

[taustin]

Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg

Typical of overstated tech journalism. Everything is either the best of the best or worst of the worst.

While that is entirely true, it's hard to ignore the largest quarterly drop in PC sales in the history of the industry. Microsoft is in trouble, and it's more trouble than they were in when Vista bombed.

[taustin]

Originally Posted by jgaiser

I support too many Microsoft users that don't even know how to do security updates.

Then they probably don't know how to turn off automatic updates, which are on by default (and get turned back on at least twice when catching up a new install).

[taustin]

Originally Posted by afv011

Yes, MSFT has elevated this to an art, baffles the mind how they can get things this wrong, you'd think they are trying to make a poor product, and indeed succeeding at it.

It is an even numbered release, and they have a reputation to maintain.

[taustin]

Originally Posted by K. Molen

Everything you said in that post is spot on as far as I'm concerned. I've yet to see a complaint about Windows 8 that isn't somewhere rooted in "it's different than before and I don't like it."

How about "It's different than before in ways that actively prevent me from doing stuff that was easy to do in Win7"?

[Ankh]

Originally Posted by K. Molen

I've yet to see a complaint about Windows 8 that isn't somewhere rooted in "it's different than before and I don't like it." Which is fine and a valid point of view, but people keep trying to claim that Windows 8 is somehow more convoluted and difficult than Windows 7. It isn't, it's just different.

Oh, but that it is the essence of Microsoft failure with Windows 8!

The company that had a virtual monopoly on computing just a decade ago cannot afford to introduce a product that simply ignores the expectations of the majority of its users. And, lets face it, majority of Windows users don't want newer and better interface, they want to minimize the investment of time (and, for companies, money) to re-learn the basic manipulation of their computer.

Gone are the days when Redmond controlled the PC as concept (the machine was shaped by the OS specs). These days, a growing number of users are telling Microsoft that their latest OS... is not "Windows" at all?!

The customer ends up always being right, one way or the another...

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by K. Molen

Everything you said in that post is spot on as far as I'm concerned. I've yet to see a complaint about Windows 8 that isn't somewhere rooted in "it's different than before and I don't like it."

I'm not even going to start typing a complete answer to this, because it would take me half a week, and MobileRead's server would possibly explode when I post that manuscript into the forums. I'll limit myself to Metro and the Start-menu.

Windows 8 just prevents me from doing things the way I want to do them. I *hate* the Start-screen. I *don't* want a full screen start-menu that blanks out my desktop when I want to start a program. The Start-screen can't do some of the things the old Start-menu could. And being thrown out of the desktop into that damned Start-screen each time I hit the Windows-key (which is a lot, since I do many things using the keyboard to avoid having to reach for the mouse), a Start-screen that's half an OS by itself with it's own programs, gives me the feeling that Windows 8 is schizophrenic.

Granted, I've tried Windows 8, cleared the Metro UI, and installed the trial version of StarDock's Start8 to get "my" Start-menu back; a UI-element that MS had been perfecting for almost 15 years, and when they got it almost perfect, they threw it out.

Start8 makes Windows 8 workable; but if you do that, you've just got Windows 7 with a new, flat 80's-like look, and some teeny-tiny improvements to the desktop and internals. After blocking out Metro with Start8 and returning the (a) Start-menu, Windows 8 does not offer me anything new.

I've got a computer that is working fine, and runs everything I want it to run. I also got a non-used Windows 7 x64 English license lying around. (Having had Technet / MSDNAA-access from 3 places at once due to circumstances netted me 3 legal copies, 2 of which I've used to upgrade Vista on my desktop and notebook, and one is still in the drawer.) A new computer, which is probably due in a year, maybe 1,5 years, will also run Windows 7, right up to 2020.

Then I will see what I'll run on my main workstation (keeping my current and next computer to run my old games). Definitely it will not be Apple on that post-2020 computer. Maybe not Microsoft, we'll see. FreeBSD is a good candidate, if I can build a computer with hardware for which FreeBSD has drivers. It's the only Unix-like OS (beside OSX) that doesn't feel like it's made up of half a million 2x2mm Lego bricks.

[Graham]

Originally Posted by K. Molen

I've yet to see a complaint about Windows 8 that isn't somewhere rooted in "it's different than before and I don't like it.

That isn't what my wife is saying. Her view is "it's different and I like the look and feel of it, but I can't get it do what it's supposed to do and it's frustrating me to the point of madness."

Graham