Last time, I spoke toward the Start Screen and the Windows 8 Store. These two features I would consider to be the largest differences as far as an OS upgrade goes that is readily apparent. I don't think there are a heckuva lot of features to speak of, so I'll talk more about use and more general generic stuff this time around.
App Environments
Note
that any app that has a live tile on the Start screen will open its own
little "environment" if you click on it. It will come to the front, you
can interact with it, and it'll stay open as it's own environment -
like a window, but it feels more like you're opening it's own dedicated
widget. Like on a smartphone, the only way to close any of these
environments is to actively force-close them. Which means hovering your
mouse to the top-left of your monitor and right-click-closing any open
environments. Or, also cool, is to take your mouse to the top of the
environment and drag the top down to the bottom, as if shutting a
window. I like this better. :-)
Now,
the next thing I was looking at was this fairly cool Facebook app I
found in the W8 Store. Let me give you a little bit of a background on
this. Facebook is a site I navigate to a lot in my internet adventures.
But in W8, I hit my firefox icon, and the Desktop screen opens up,
firefox opens up, then I start navigating. Again, I wanted to stay on
the Start screen as much as possible, so I started looking at
alternatives. The first thing I tried was the built in "Messenger" and
"Friends" apps that are native to W8. These apps can connect to facebook
and I started playing around with this first and foremost. At first,
they were cool, because this was very much just a different way of
looking at facebook. The Messenger app transposed everything left-to
right instead of facebook's normal up-down alignment, but otherwise it served it's purpose. What bothered me was the lack of "live updating". It would update at intervals, but when you are as active as I am on facebook (at times, not always), you want to know if people are commenting back and forth with you. Having this come at me en masse at 2-3 minute intervals didn't feel as good. Also, I noticed that I couldn't "like" comments under a thread. No good. I gave that up on the quick and just went back to my internet version.
One thing comes to mind that was strange. This operating system is very much like all of Microsoft's other operating systems in that I don't think it is intuitive at all to a new user. As a matter of fact, for anyone that's already familiar with Windows as an operating system, there are things implemented that make a middle-of-the-road user scratch their heads as well. Those who aren't much into tinkering and poking around can get easily frustrated with some of these new Start screen environments.
For instance. Even within the desktop mode, if you open up a saved picture, it goes back to the Start Screen and into the new W8 Pictures Viewer. Now, that's fine and all, it just happens to be really different than the W7 Pictures Viewer as far as window layout, menus, and commands. When my wife opened up a picture in W8, she looked at the W8 Pictures Viewer and clicked around a bunch, hoping to find some sort of thimberig trick menu system. Little did she know, there wasn't much to find, unless she right-clicked to bring up the hidden menu on the bottom. And even then, she didn't see a "Print" option. To tell you the truth, I haven't looked for it. I don't know if it's there. After several moments of frustration, she yelled to me in the other room "JUSTIN HOW DO I PRINT THIS?" I came in and looked at it for a second and merely replied "Ctrl+p?" That worked just fine, but unless you're someone who uses that command to normally print anyway (I actually assume that most average OS users don't bother learning a lot of keyboard shortcut commands), how would you know what to do? And that's just to print! One step backward in this case it seems.
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| Print button... Print........... pri-- You know, I didn't want this recipe anyway, forget it. |
Later, my wife was having trouble navigating through a half dozen Start Screen sandbox environments that she opened up - Photos, Mail, Storage Cloud, etc. She was going in a circle through these environments, cycling through them when all she really wanted to do is close them and go back to internet browsing. Again, the frustration kicked in and she grunted "how do I even close this stupid thing?" So I told her to hover the mouse at the top of the screen. Click-hold, drag down. Like you're closing a window. She huffed. "Oh, so they turned it into Apple now? You could've just told me to treat it like MacOS, like I was closing a window." /wince. Uhh... I guess so? I couldn't say, because I've never actively used MacOS (and I won't!! :-P). Still, that line cut deep. If what they're trying to do is make all of this more intuitive, kudos to them! If what they're doing to achieve this is copy the rival's OS, then... I don't really condone that tactic. And if they're trying to do all of this while keeping their user base happy, then this step toward a different, more easily navigated OS just leaves people who previously knew what was going on, toward frustration. All in good time though. Change isn't easy, is it? We will all adapt and be better for it.
Out of Box Functionality
Now, this is something I generally thought about Windows 7, but Windows 8 in my opinion blows this out of the water. Keep in mind that I did a fresh install on a freshly formatted hard drive. Out of box functionality on Windows 8 was fantastic. It definitely installed faster than Windows 7. It didn't even do the "I'm going to restart your system just a few times to finish installing it" stuff. It didn't prompt me for drivers, it barely even prompted me for a username to log into. Within minutes, I was in the system and looking at the OS, basically tooling around my machine. Driver compatibility, contrary to popular comments and belief, are completely a non-issue. As a matter of fact, my printer even worked the second the OS was installed. Microsoft definitely did it correctly with this OS.
Multiple Monitors
I don't know how many people are using multiple monitors on this OS, but in my opinion, this is a brilliant design and definitely something that they were keeping in mind for how Windows 8 would work. In it's "native" state, my left (main) monitor shows the Start Screen. My right (extended) monitor shows the right-half portion of the desktop. Now, unlike Windows 7, if your main monitor has something running and you can't see your taskbar, you just have no sight on your taskbar. It is lost under whatever is currently going on. In W8, however, both the main and the extended desktop screens show the taskbar with running applications shown on both! So even if I'm running a game, watching a movie, or just on my Start Screen, my extended desktop tells me all my running apps. FANTASTIC. I couldn't be happier.
Another cool thing they did was support different resolution monitors or different size monitors. In W7, I basically photoshopped wallpapers so they would look "native enough" stretched across both monitors. W8 took this into consideration and they just crop a portion of the image so that the resolution or size change doesn't affect the way the image looks, stretched. Yes yes, this is a small thing. But we are nitpicking here anyway, aren't we?
Don't think that the Start Screen is completely "all or none". I know I had that perception in my initial first-go around and it is a general complaint of mine, but there are some cool tricks W8 does for this. I initially thought that I could either look at my Start Screen or it would go away entirely. Well, one thing that was designed into this OS is that you can Snap certain app environments wherever you want. This also includes the entire Start Screen. If you want to snap this over to your extended desktop, that's fine, you can. If you want to snap a W8 app to the right-most side of your right monitor, you can do that, too. Think of this like the W7 desktop window snaps where you can dock any window to the right or left half of the monitor. Only W8 has more options, more sizes, and does it in a fairly fashionable way so you can keep track of multiple W8 apps as well as / alongside your Desktop mode. The pictures below show a couple of examples.
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| A snapped W8 app (PC Settings), a W8 app (Store), and then the Desktop Screen on the extended monitor |
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| A snapped W8 app (PC Settings) and then the Desktop Screen stretched across both monitors |
SUMMARY
Likes
- Faster than W7. W8 handles resources, startup, recovery, and memory management better than its predecessor.
- Beautiful new Start screen to replace the Start menu. It is highly customizable.
- Desktop screen will leave W7 users with a safe place to transition from, since this screen is identical.
- W8 store offers a lot of ways to tweek features and add functions to your Start screen as well as offer games and tons of utility apps.
- Once learned, commands to deal with W8 apps are intuitive to use, like closing the app by click-holding near the top and dragging downward.
- Extremely easy to install.
- Fantastic out-of-box functionality with no complaints.
- Driver and application compatibility is a non-issue even though everyone says it is (or at least it isn't for me and the friends I've spoken to that also use W8).
- Great multi-monitor support with well thought out features.
Dislikes
- Programs do not run native on the Start screen. Clicking on a system program on the Start screen will kick you to the Desktop screen where the program opens up.
- Start screen and Desktop screen feel like two completely disjointed environments. It can feel like you have two different OS's and I wish they'd do away with the Desktop screen altogether to make way for new and innovative interactions with the Start screen.
- Like a smartphone app store, the app store comes laden with a metric crapton of completely useless apps.
- New shortcuts that you're not used to can make a new user feel utterly lost. And fow new computer users, I'm not sure if it will be any easier - Winkey+q to search in the app store? Not intuitive.
- The new Start screen is pretty, but hardly intuitive. Some think (and I'm not necessarily one to disagree) that the UI is somewhat more MacOS-esque.
- If you're stubborn like me and keep your Desktop screen free of clutter (I have a feeling no one is stubborn like me), you will find yourself switching between Desktop and Start screens often.
- In a lot of ways, this OS feels like a touch-screen oriented OS. I'm not using a touch-screen and I don't plan on buying one any time soon. The future may be riddled with touch-screen compatible features, which will force me to either decide not to or to buy one.
- At this point, with the upgrade price no longer available, an OS upgrade is fairly expensive.
Overall Judgment and Recommendation
If you were lucky to have bought the W8 upgrade-price when it was available, then great! Hold off though. Don't install it because you have nothing better to do (at least that's my opinion). I would only look into or consider Windows 8 if you are in the need to do an operating system install. That is to say, if you're doing a hard drive reformat or a new system build and just happen to have W8? Go for it. It is an easy transition and it can't hurt to have a more powerful, more resourceful OS. However, if everything works fine as it is and you are operating "business as usual", then stick with the W7 that's already installed. There should be no real rush to upgrade unless you just feel like having the experience (like I did). If you need to buy a new OS for installation on a new system, I'd do a bit of price checking. So long as W8 is affordable, go for it. If W7 happens to be like, 1/10th of the cost and you're on a budget, then I wouldn't bother.
And there you have it. My full W8 review. If you have any questions or want me to talk about any other features or more in depth about my experiences with certain aspects of the operating system, feel free to ask in the comments. Otherwise, shout out and let me know what you agree/disagree with in the comments.
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