After one day of use, I guess I'll just bring up a few things I've noticed about Win 8. This will be written in an incredibly simplistic style because I'm easily distracted by big technical terms and stuff. And none of this will be relevant to gaming because I'm not a PC gamer.
So far, the biggest change I've encountered is this:
This replaces the start button. So start button--->start menu.
It's taking some getting used to, but see the desktop icon in the bottom left corner? It brings you to this:
From there on out there's not a whole lot that's different from Win 7. I'm still trying to find my way around the whole start menu thing but it's not that hard to do.
Going back to the start menu, though, what takes up most of the screen? Apps, of course. This is not compatible with me because I don't use apps, and have never even heard of some of these. Aside from Microsoft Office there is literally not one of these apps I have ever used. However, this isn't a big issue for me because the whole app thing isn't really intrusive to what I'm usually up to. It tries to sell you on some apps the first time you open up a program like paint or IE or whatever but if you say no they don't bug you about it.
So what's good?
- The search feature- It's smooth and fast. No complaints about it so far.
- The start up wait - It doesn't take a day and a half to boot up from restarting or shutting down. Granted, this is the nicest computer I've had in a long time, but all my previous ones took at least five minutes to get fully going.
- Memory usage - This is me coming off the heels of a laptop that ran Vista. I actually don't know how exactly Win 8 holds up in terms of memory usage but I have Pale Moon, SAI, AIM, the avast interface and a video going and it's eating 35% at most. Doing this on my old laptop would eat 80% if it was feeling happy.
So what's not so good?
- Getting used to the start menu - As of right now I don't have any complaints beyond the mere fact I have to learn my way around it, but I hardly hate it. It's not an especially frustrating task, and there's more space to pin your icons. The apps clutter it but I can just ignore them.
- Windows Media Player doesn't run dvds or video or something anymore - So I downloaded Media Player Classic and the K-Lite Codec pack. It fulfills my needs.
- Everything new ever - This complaint is an entirely personal one. On my old laptop, the measures I took to keep it functioning at all involved stopping a bunch of services and drivers and disabling Windows Update so it didn't freak out. I had to do this several times and each time it was like bringing it back from the brink of no return. So now, installing updates or new drivers makes me very uneasy. It's a knee-jerk thing that I can't really help. I'm slightly worried that if something goes wrong I won't have access to as many resources to fix it given it's a new OS, but it's not an incredible worry at the moment.
Segueing into my next list,
Problems I've encountered
- A strange beeping noise - I was worried at first because whenever I played a song or a video online, I'd hear this little blip of a noise every six seconds or so. It turned out to be a problem with the most recent Adobe Flash, so I downgraded to a slightly earlier version. Problem solved.
- Constant ethernet disconnection - I use a cord, not wireless, so this was especially baffling/frustrating. It turned out it was Norton, which came pre-installed. I uninstalled it, installed avast. Problem solved.
Like I said, I've only been running Windows 8 for a day so these lists are fairly short. However, I should say it speaks to how well it's doing that I'm settling in nicely already. Maybe the computers I've had in the past were such messes that owning a desktop that I know how to manage well is blowing my mind. Either way, take my initial assessment for what it's worth.
