Windows 7 | Nevada County

Windows 8 Start. Note that when you first get into the Start you have such useless apps such as camera, XBox games, Xbox live and other apps of no use to a business PC.

I made the mistake of downloading the trial version of Windows 8 thinking it was an upgrade to Windows 7. No, it’s tablet software and downloading it on a PC is, like Microsoft are you kidding? Why don’t you tell people its tablet software and not suitable for PC’s?

The first thing that comes up after you figure out that you have to tap any button on your keyboard to log in is an interface that Microsoft calls Metro or the start screen. I’m sure that’s a wonderful tablet feature. So the first thing I did once I roamed around for a while was to get rid of such useful things as Xbox live, Maps, Messaging, Camera (my PC does not have a camera) and a whole bunch of worthless apps that might be useful on a tablet but not on a PC and most of them will not work on your PC anyway.

As I stumbled around, I finally got to the normal interface and away from Metro. Now where is the start button? Oh, Microsoft did away with the start button. So I Goggled to find out what happened to the familiar start button that’s been with every version of Windows. Well, it’s gone. So more searching and there is a workaround by downloading ViStart. ViStart puts the start button back where it was on all the other Window versions.

Now how do I find my programs without ViStart? Well, programs are now apps. You get back to Metro, left click your mouse, look at the far left corner and there is a rectangle. Click on that and your programs, err, apps appear and are spread out with little icons over four acres of real estate. It would be OK if it was a tablet, but on my PC, you had to use your mouse and slide the apps across the screen. I use 1920 x 1080 resolution. I don’t know what it would look like if I used a lower resolution, maybe like it was on 10 acres of real estate and you would scroll for an hour.

There's that icon "Setting". click on that, click on the power icon and than you can restart or put your computer to sleep. Of course to get there you have to go to the lower right corner with your mouse to pop up those icons.

So the next question, how do I turn my computer off or put it to sleep? First time I had to Google to figure out how to turn off a computer. Well, you go to the far right corner and some icons come up. Click on the lower right hand corner and several icons come up, including settings. Click on settings and there it is “power”. Click again on power and you can put your computer to sleep, restart or shut down. Are you getting it now? Click, click, click.

So after playing with Windows 8 for awhile, I went to recovery on my HP computer, made three recovery disks and reinstalled Windows 7. Once that was done, I had to download the driver for my video card and restart the computer in save mode. Then I could install the driver for the video card. Of course, restoring the HP computer to factory new meant that I had all the original bloat ware that comes with an HP computer. So the next hour was removing the bloat ware and re-installing my programs.

In short, Windows 8 is like Windows Vista which was a disaster. I think Microsoft has a team of engineers who work to see how bad they can make every other upgrade of Windows. That way, whoever buys the bad version, will be ready to upgrade right away to the next version. In short, I would not recommend Windows 8 to any serious PC user in a business environment. It is a disaster. .

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