Moving to windows 8 from windows 7

So it got in my mind with Microsoft moving from windows 7 to windows 8, and the much needed upgrade to make their operating system work on smart phones, that this was the start of a needed upgrade to the future as they will eventually drop support for anything previous to windows 8 to stay in competition with the likes of iphones, androids and blackberries.

Reasons to upgrade from top of my head:
1) Developers must upgrade in order to learn how to stay up to date with technology, i.e.: writing apps for windows phone, or playing with latest features to see what apps they can write, or just in general to help others with their OS from experience with it.
2) It boots faster, and if done up right, can serve just as windows 7 did, just faster and better(as developers stop coding for windows 7 and backwards)
3) You will most likely want the latest and greatest software, and this will most likely only run on windows 8 on in the future.
4) Windows 8 incorporates all your Facebook, LinkedIn, personal email, Gmail, Hotmail, Skype, and even China’s Facebook equivalent: “Sina Weibo”, so you have one app called “People”, where you can talk to everyone at once which is very handy.
5) You will be able to use latest internet explorer browsers. If your a developer you should be using internet explorer, firefox and chrome for testing your website builds to begin with, so another good reason to upgrade.
6) The list goes on, but what it comes down to regardless, is every new laptop sold will have windows 8, so the move is inevitable, embrace the change, and move on.

Reasons not to upgrade:
1) If you are running on really old hardware, and still on something like Windows XP, then you might not meet specs to even install it, and even if you did, it would run to slow because you most likely do not have the computer memory to handle it.
2) You are anti-Microsoft. Well even though there are a lot of those, wouldn’t it make more sense to install their latest and greatest so you aren’t just giving intelligent people un-useful lip service and just get flamed in forums from your lack of knowledge of the new product?
3) It is an unnecessary expense when windows 7 works fine. Well then you cannot play with all the new toys and how much fun is that? Surely if you do not want to pay for it, you can just download a copy off a torrent site and use MS toolkit to run it for free, so really comes down to time vs money in this situation, so get your tech family member to do it.
4) You run Linux or Apple as a client. Well biggest problem here is people write new apps and then you cannot use them unless they lend support to these 2 OS’s. In either case you are still better off installing a virtualization technology like “VMware” and running an instance of Windows 8 inside there so you have the best of all worlds. Personally I run Linux only on servers, and use Windows as a client to access them so I don’t have complaints from my better half wanting to use my PC or I cannot run this and that because I am limited. There are free virtualization technologies, I don’t suggest going out and spending money on one if you have tech ability and can get a free one. Things like KVM under Linux or open source projects on sourceforge.net for windows ones are just fine. I ran Windows 8 beta when it first came out under KVM in Linux and it was fine, but I would not do that on my main desktop as I have triple monitor setup and want to utilize all my monitors. Graphical power users I know usually have MAC laptops and run a Windows 8 instance inside it as well.

I would also like to state: I have 2 HP printers, one of them I always had to go to website and manually install driver in Windows 7, in Windows 8 I did not have to do anything. As you can see support is starting to drop for Windows 7, and it will make your life harder not better.

My experience of dislikes with installing Windows 8 and how to fix the issues:
Now remember I am a power user, so moving quickly around to do things is very important, so I will go over the issues and how to deal/cope with issues.

1) There is no start menu. This makes it difficult to work with desktop, where if your like me, where you will spend most of your time being productive instead of in the app screens. Solution: Install one. Go here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/classicshell/ , now you can install whatever version you like of it, XP, Windows 7 etc. and it is a time saver especially when first installing to quickly right click apps off it to pin to your taskbar.
2) You cannot go directly to desktop after logging in. The great folks who wrote classic shell above solved this issue to, now waking my computer up I go right to the desktop or even rebooting.
3) Too many clicks to find the shutdown or restart button. Again classic shell solves this above putting it back in place it should be.
4) You have to click through a start screen in order to login all the time. Who wants to do this? This is annoying and an extra click to get into your PC. Here is a quick way to disable that lock screen:
http://blog.laptopmag.com/how-to-eliminate-the-win8-lock-screenz

1.Hit the Start key, type gpedit.msc, and press Enter. This will open the Local Group Policy Editor.
2.Navigate to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Control Panel > Personalization
3.Double click “Do not display the lock screen,” and select Enabled from the dialog that pops up. Click OK.

5) Power users really dislike UAC being enabled and Windows always asking to confirm this and that all the time. Unfortunately our old way of sliding slider to bottom to disable UAC in Windows 7 does not actually disable it. I was trying to patch a program in Programs Directory or modify system files and it would not let me! That’s great security against hackers, but just more annoying for people cracking programs from torrent downloads. Other issue completely disabling it is Microsoft chose to make sure apps on app screens do not run till you re-enable it again. So with this knowledge in hand this is what we do since we are to lazy to go into registry every time to disable it. Create this file called , “disable_UAC.reg” on your desktop and put this code into it:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System]
"ConsentPromptBehaviorAdmin"=dword:00000000
"EnableLUA"=dword:00000000


Now every time you need to modify system or program files directly, double click on that on desktop, reboot, do what you need to, then go click on any app on app screen after that will give you a link to enable it again, then reboot, and your good to go.
6) Another annoying issue is when we store things on network drives and install programs from there. Microsoft seems to detect if file is not owned by you and denies the install! Good security from someone trying to elevate their privileges as a hacker, but bad for us. Solution: copy program from network drive to your desktop, files will then be owned by you, then you can install as usual.
7) Triple monitor setup and I want screen saver to run on all 3, different wall papers on each monitor, and use a different monitor as my primary monitor , my center screen, instead of one on left. Solution:
install “Ultramon” and this solves all the problems.
8) Microsoft’s way of moving mouse to top of right screen to go to apps menu has a key flaw, in a triple monitor setup, instead of just throwing my mouse over there, I have to be exact so my mouse does not go over to next monitor, this is really annoying and more of a pain than anything. Unfortunately something we seem to have to live with, hoping to find a solution to this issue, but overall I do not go in apps screens enough to care, all 3 usually in desktop mode just like Windows 7 was.
9) Pain to close apps and move around to different ones. Only 2 solutions I could find was drag app from top to bottom to close it or use the old Alt-Tab trick to move around between different things quickly. The other way of going over to top left of screen and right clicking to close, takes way to long.

Overall if your a Windows 7 user, you can see how I solved most issues to function just as Windows 7 did, plus having next operating system at my disposal now. It is a bit of a pain to get use to, but spend an hour or 2 with interface and you’ll be an expert in no time.

Till we meet again,

Dan.

SunSaturn