Hewlett Packard Promotes Windows 7 On New PCs

[Signa]

Not Plagued with technical flaws? It pushed the 8.1 update pretty hard and I was one of the many affected by the balnk black screen error

Our IT department has been dealing with that left and right. The fix is easy, but damn, it's annoying. MS is just making it worse by how they've handled this.

How did you fix yours, may I ask?

 

[Signa]

There are some things I think they could do better, though. They really need to find a better place for the Search/Run text box, it's a critical part of starting various programs easily and was better where I could reach it in one click, instead of moving the mouse to the top corner and waiting patiently for the appropriate menu to saunter over for the OPTION to click it.

I guess you didn't realise that you don't need to do that - you just start typing and it populates the search field, you don't need to select Search first.

I... er... hmmm.

Looks like I'm forced to retract my previous criticism, that feature is once again considerably better than the Win7 version.

See, this is the thing about Windows 8, especially 8.1. Most of the criticisms don't have anything to do with actual operating system flaws, just peoples perceptions of them. Once you're over the learning curve you see why Microsoft did it this way, everything just sort of works.

Fun fact about the search feature on Windows 8: If you have Office installed on both a Win 7 and Win 8 machine, and type "Word" into the search and press enter, in 7 it will open Word, in 8, Wordpad. If you want to open Word in 8 without clicking through the messy interface, you have to at least type "word 2" to filter the results down to "word 2010 (or 2013)."

 

[Darxide]

It's as simple as this graphic:

 

[goldenheart323]

It's as simple as this graphic:

Don't forget Windows 2000. That was a great one. I preferred that over XP. I know it spoils the pattern, but just once, and there's no down side to having 2 good versions of Windows in a row... unless Windows 8 is so bad because it has to cancel out the greatness of having 2 good Windows in a row.

 

[Poetic Nova]

I really don't see why people hate Windows 8. I use it in a traditional desktop computer, and it works fine. You don't have to use the Metro interface and can easily hide it. And it boots much faster than Windows 7, so there's that.

Haters gonna hate, I guess.

Exactly this, while the whole Metro thingy is a bad idea, all programs running in Metro are easily removed and replaced by desktop items. Windows 8 is the tits when you use the desktop, more hardware friendly and as you said, it boots up faster than you can say "Open sesame".
Funny thing is, W8 is the first windows OS that refers programs as apps, their real name.

 

[grimallq]

Don't forget Windows 2000. That was a great one. I preferred that over XP. I know it spoils the pattern, but just once, and there's no down side to having 2 good versions of Windows in a row... unless Windows 8 is so bad because it has to cancel out the greatness of having 2 good Windows in a row.

While plenty of people might have used 2000 on their home PCs it was never meant as a home OS, so it doesn't really fit into that comparison.

If you want to use 2000 you'd also have to fit 2003, 2008 and all the older NT editons into that graphic somehow, or compare them separately.

 

[votemarvel]

Don't forget Windows 2000. That was a great one. I preferred that over XP. I know it spoils the pattern, but just once, and there's no down side to having 2 good versions of Windows in a row... unless Windows 8 is so bad because it has to cancel out the greatness of having 2 good Windows in a row.

To be fair though Windows 2000 was never meant to be a operating system for the home.

So the graphic still holds water if you discount it for that reason.

Oddly enough I never had a problem with Windows ME and liked it more than Windows 98. It was to me Windows 98 3rd Edition. I also still use the Windows ME icons for the Recycle Bin and My Computer on my current operating systems. The only thing that made me move from ME to XP was that I wanted to play The Battle for Middle-Earth.

Back to the topic though. I bought Windows 8 when it was on offer before release, Windows 8 Pro for £24.99 seemed like too good a price to pass up. If I ended up hating it, the money wasn't a huge amount to lose.

And I did end up hating it. It seemed schizophrenic in its nature between Metro and the traditional desktop, they just didn't work well with each other.

Windows 8.1 seems to have fixed a lot of my dislike with one simple thing, having the ability to have the desktop image on the Metro Start Screen. It makes the transition between the two far less jarring.

I also like how now when installing a program it doesn't just dump every little thing on the Metro Start Screen, keeping it clean to look at and so you don't have to waste time unpinning things. You can go down to the extremely cluttered looking section below and pin just the items you want.

While I still tend to default to the Windows XP side of my dual-boot, I do now with 8.1 find myself using it more and more often.

 

[LadyLightning]

Same thing happened with Windows Vista. It was a buggy piece of shit that broke lots of software developed for Windows XP, and pretty much until Windows 7 came out, anyone who had half a brain kept using Windows XP.

 

[Shalok]

Not Plagued with technical flaws? It pushed the 8.1 update pretty hard and I was one of the many affected by the balnk black screen error

Our IT department has been dealing with that left and right. The fix is easy, but damn, it's annoying. MS is just making it worse by how they've handled this.

How did you fix yours, may I ask?

By reverting to windows 8.0 and not upgrading ever I'll check in a couple of months if they have actually fixed it

 

[Dragonbums]

That honestly doesn't surprise me.

I recently got an HP laptop for Christmas, and I made absolutely sure that it was the one that came with Windows 7 and not 8. I bet HP saw this too, and decided to simply revert their computers back to Windows 7. Since that seems to be the ones that sell the most.

 

[Signa]

Not Plagued with technical flaws? It pushed the 8.1 update pretty hard and I was one of the many affected by the balnk black screen error

Our IT department has been dealing with that left and right. The fix is easy, but damn, it's annoying. MS is just making it worse by how they've handled this.

How did you fix yours, may I ask?

By reverting to windows 8.0 and not upgrading ever I'll check in a couple of months if they have actually fixed it

Heh, not likely. I'm sure MS is pointing their finger at the hardware manufacturers and users over their own faults with 8.1. News flash, MS: not every user is always up to date on every piece of software and firmware ever.

 

[TelHybrid]

I have a Windows 8 laptop. I hate the default interface. First thing I install on a new format is a program that Lenovo includes on their Windows 8 products called Pokki. I have Windows 7's interface with Windows 8's speed. It's great!