Hi Greg, I feel you pain. I get that suddenly everything being different can throw you, especially when, as you said, when struggling for consistency.
Tonight I rebuilt my home desktop. An evening of firsts for me. My first 6 core/12 thread cpu. My first LGA2011 motherboard. My first water cooled cpu fan. I put in a new motherboard and cpu, and an extra graphics card. So that gives me three graphics cards in there. There’s another slot on the motherboard I could put one more gfx card in but the case doesn't have the back slots for it... so I’d have to get a new case if I want to do that. Would run it in SLI x 3 but the connector they gave me don't fit the cards. a trip to the computer shop to pick one up hopefully. When I booted my machine after putting in new cpu and motherboard, the old Win 7 didn't boot. Ah well it was only installed a few weeks ago so I decided to install Windows 8 (partly after reading todays thread, but mainly because I could!) Drivers of my old graphics cards were automatically detected. the new graphics card (an Asus) wasn’t recognised. I tried the win7 drivers on asus website but that didn't work. Then I saw a windows update actually had a new driver waiting for it. I installed that and it failed. So I downloaded the Nvidia Windows 8 driver, installed that and now all three screens are working nicely. Loving the speed at which this thing boots up. Installing windows 8 was so fast I looked away and thought it had failed. Wasn't until I realised that it had rebooted from the usb drive again that it had finished. I swear it was less than 10 minutes. I’m typing this email into the email client that I pointed at my google account. Yes everything feels really big, because all the apps are full screen. I can jump to the desktop and install apps or whatever so all the old PC desktop stuff is still there. If you want to pin something first you find it via typing (search will appear when you press a letter) and right click the tile. Menu down the bottom gives pin to start option. That will give you a tile so you don't have to go looking for it. Drag it around to where you want it. Right click the ones you don't want and unpin them. This is beta software. I’ve seen the screen go all pink a couple of times and locked up. It might go better when I’ve got that SLI connector, or when the drivers are no longer beta. It seems really slick and this is on a machine with no touch screen. I did see a preview of a new tablet from Asus that has a laptop keyboard and a screen on both sides of the lid. Designed for windows 8. It looks sweet. Kinda bummed out I just bought this dell xps 13 but it might be months before the new ones come out. I’ll be due for a new toy by then! lol Hang in there Greg. I think you’ll find things more usable. Less on the screen, means more focused. You can still task switch (mouse top left and the tasks spring up). As for powering off... control-alt-delete and there’s a big off button bottom right. If you don't get this, the email client crashed on me. I’ll not be typing it again. :) cheers, Stephen (on the bleeding edge) Sent from my Windows 8 PC <http://windows.microsoft.com/consumer-preview> *From:* Greg Keogh <g...@mira.net> *Sent:* Wednesday, June 6, 2012 8:59:37 PM *To:* ozDotNet <ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com> *Subject:* RE: Win8 Release Preview Chaps,**** ** ** Andrew and Stephen, if you have become productive on Win8, then I am tempted to pay you for tutorials. Do have a specific example of familiar daily tasks that work in some superior way? What’s this “pinning” you like, can I try it?**** **** I hadn’t thought about the corporate training side issues. Lord knows how this will be rolled out in big companies The mind boggles at getting the carbon blobs from sector 7G to upgrade and get back to work.**** ** ** As a programmer mostly on web and desktop for the moment I’m really worried about conventions and standards. For decades I’ve had UI guidelines and conventions about usability and how apps should look and feel and not frighten users. Then WPF came along and everything went rubbery. Now Win8 has come along and everything is melting jelly. How the hell am I supposed to write an app that runs nicely in Win8? Are there any guidelines? Multi-OS targeting issues!? These and a zillion other on-the-ground questions about writing real-world apps now.**** ** ** I’m am utterly bewildered where Microsoft is going both artistically and practically. Perhaps I will be less irritable and confused if someone could explain in clear developer’s geeky technical practical terms why Win8 looks like it does and how I am supposed to respond to it. Any links anyone?**** ** ** The list of points that Ian posted are quite sharp. I also wondered why apps are full screen (on my bloody great screen), where the app menus /options/etc and close buttons are. All of the familiar paradigms that are arguably necessary in software have vanished or moved. I mean, every app needs “options” of some sort, and needs to be closed (unless I’ve woken up in the 23rd century and everything has changed utterly). I eventually managed to join my Domain somehow, but why demand a Live login up front? Alt+anykey or other weird keystrokes will do something random (like 1980s word processors). Moving the mouse around is like exploring in a maze. Hitting Windows key flips between completely different modes, like I’m running two totally different operating systems at once.**** ** ** Overall, I’m bewildered and angry at being reduced to a bumbling incompetent despite 35 years experience on dozens of platforms, it’s like the designers of Win8 had bets on who could invent to most counter-intuitive tricks and traps possible to obfuscate everything as a gargantuan practical joke (like the Office ribbon). I’m also angry as a developer because I have no clear direction now about what to learn or what to use for Win8 (if it matters!). The future of Windows software development has become really muddy.**** ** ** As Homer Simpson said, “it’s my first day”, so perhaps by next week I’ll be struck by a techno-epiphany and apologise for what I’ve said.**** ** ** Greg**** ** ** P.S. My favourite example of Win8 bafflement is trying to figure out how to shut the damn thing down. I leave that as an exercise for the reader.****
