Thread: Windows 8

Originally Posted by p38arover

I'm still an XP user.

X 3

Originally Posted by JDNSW

I don't use Windows.

John

I can't get my head around Linux. Too difficult for me. I've tried Ubuntu and others.

Originally Posted by cal415

the main thing i am waiting on though is server 2012

You might be interested in this then...

Download Windows Server 2012 Release Candidate (RC)

Cheers, Mark

I liked the Developer Preview, was disappointed with the consumer preview, don't hink I'll bother with the Release Preview, UNLESS, MS decide to make a touch and non touch versions.

you guys using XP should make the move to W7 x64 if you have 4GB or more you will notice an increase, especially if you have a decent size video card too. If not, stick with XP.

Im a big W7 x64 fan, at home 4GB ram on a dualcore, 7200k hdd, at work 16GB on a i7, SSD & 10k HDD - even the home system runs pretty good considering its now aged internals.

W8, I must say personally I don't like the metro style interface for a desktop BUT I can see it would be a big hit with the touch screen/tablet brigade.
I does come into its own for applications such as media server/terminal, public interaction, mobile computing.
As for desktop you can turn off the metro type interface and have "normal" windows style desktop which is what I would do for work on the desktop.
I have tested W8 on a desktop and a tablet and they ran as one would expect W7 to run but these where the pre-release versions so i would expect the consumer release to be somewhat improved.

I have a laptop at home as a media player/server for movies and I can see that W8 would be of benefit there.

W8 is, I believe the first Windows OS that is actually LESS resource hungry AND more efficient (read faster) than its previous version, so running it on your W7 system you should see a performance increase. But better value would be a SSD or another few GB of ram saying that SSD 8GB and W8 might be pretty cool.
I think before i get my hands on a full consumer version its a bit hard to have a solid opinion on performance but IMO metro for mobile, standard for desktop.

one thing to add, as I remember it was very quick and easy to install.
I was just reminded this after doing a fresh XP install a couple of days ago.

Not that XP is difficult but it does ask too many stupid questions IMO.
a bit like a new install of IE8 :/

Between home and work I have 4 linux machines, 3 XP machines (Lab for datalogging - sadly most US and DE manufacturers of scientific equipment like windows), and one Windows 7 machine. We won't get windows 8 until the IT people have "approved" it. By then my sole win7 machine will have been replaced with either a mac or a linux machine.

Use it. Like it.

Most people fail to see that the Metro UI is nothing more than a glorified "Start" menu. Wrap your head around that (which is not hard if you're willing to try).

The rest is much the same, with benefits for touch, pen, speech and motion (e.g. kinect) input.

Oh, and its smaller and faster.