Want a new laptop but do I want Windows 8?

[dmccarty]

Nothing to be concerned about.

Just the NSA fine tuning adjustments, so they can see, hear, and record you better.



PS - I sincerely hope everything starts working better for you, just trying to make you laugh.

Hey, I KNOW THEY are spying on me! I have the photos of the Black Copters flying over my house AND Commie planes to boot! :shocked::laughing::laughing::laughing:

I do really have these photos! And I can hear the Marines at Fort Bragg firing off some big guns too! :shocked: The Jar Heads go to Bragg to use their range and they have been firing all month. We hear them from time to time but this month we have had at least two weeks of cloud cover which helps the sound travel. Really cool to hear once we figured out what was causing that danged noise. It must be really loud in Fayetteville. :shocked:

My GUESS/hope is that the Win 8.1 did not clean up correctly after the first attempt to install it. I have Win 8.1 running on a virtual image so all I have to do is use a saved snapshot I made before I installed Win 8.1. I will be back to Win 8.0 at some point and reinstall 8.1 to see if the behavior changes. For me, I have just lost some work time which is part of the job. If this was a home system, I would really be ticked. Shoot, I used to work on development level operating systems and I have not seen anything this bad before. I stopped using the Win 8.1 image yesterday and went to a Win 7 image to get some work done.

Forgetting the instability issues, the user interface changes do not improve Win 8 usability that much. The chances help but when you have to search the internet to figure out how to do something that used to require a couple of obvious clicks, there is a problem.

Later,
Dan

 

[pacerron]

Forgetting the instability issues, the user interface changes do not improve Win 8 usability that much. The chances help but when you have to search the internet to figure out how to do something that used to require a couple of obvious clicks, there is a problem.

Later,
Dan

I think the so called new "Start button" on 8.1 is a big improvement.
Right clicking on it in desktop view gives quick access to many of the old paths I am used too.
Even Restart, Sleep and Shutdown.

Of course I only played with W 8 for an hour or so and the same time with 8.1, so far.
I think it will be fine once folks get on to it.
Just something new.
Imagine if today's texting had been in use before old fashioned telephones were invented. People would be amazed at a device where you could hear another's voice from all over the world over a pair of wires.

 

[Larry Caldwell]

Texting was in use before the telephone. They called it the telegraph.

 

[330T]

Texting was in use before the telephone. They called it the telegraph.

:thumbsup:

I've been in the IT business for 20 years now and have worked on every OS from DOS 1 through Win9, and OS X and Linux.

Windows 8 (once you take the time to understand it) is really nice. The "Live Tile Screen" puts your most common used applications right there for you to see. Just like people use to do on the desktop. Now if you like to get in and play around under the hood of your OS win8 has moved all of that around and you will have to re learn were to find it.

A new Operating System is like everything else. Sit down, use it for a for a month then judge it. I hated it when i first used it, now I really like it.

 

[pacerron]

Texting was in use before the telephone. They called it the telegraph.

But only dots and dashes depending on how long you held 1 key down. No vision required and only dexterity with one finger.

 

[pacerron]

Has anyone had any compatibility issues with W 8.1 and Norton 360?
The Dell tower I bought my wife has a 30 day trial of MacAfee on it which I intend to uninstall
and run the cleanup tool on.
I have a Norton 360 disk I bought in the middle of Sept. on sale at Staples to use the code to renew 3 pc's.. I have removed the Norton from the old XP tower now and want to transfer it to the new tower with W 8.1.
The prescribed method is to sign in to my management account from the new pc, add the Norton 360 from there and download
the up to date software from there.
I was thinking of just using the disk to load the program and let it update since a full download is about 140 MB but read last night that
there were problems with compatibility and Norton has fixed it now plus changed the look of what they now call the 2014 version.
It looks like I better do the full download.
Just wondering ig anybody had problems already?

 

[rjman]

Sounds like you already ordered the new laptop, so it is probably too late now to make recommendations. I work in IT and have several computers, so I run just about everything, Linux, Mac, Windows XP and Windows 7. My first question would have been what do you do with the computer? Do you have a need for Windows software and if so what software? Based on the answers to those questions, I would have been able to give you some good recommendations.
Personally I am torn between Mac and Ubuntu Linux as my favourites. I give Mac the slight edge for usability and quality of software available. Macs are more expensive though but if you can afford it that would be my choice. If you are just a light user email, web browsing writing the odd document or using the odd spreadsheet, I would recommend a Chromebook. They run the Chrome OS (a version of Linux) and they are dirt cheap about $250 for a fairly good build quality laptop and will do anything a light user needs. You might also consider an iPad too if your just emailing and web surfing and posting the odd tractorbynet post. If you have to have a Windows machine I too like so many others on here would recommend Windows 7 at this time. I remember when I first saw the beta release for Windows 8, I couldn't believe what I was seeing, it was like Microsoft was trying to self destruct.

 

[troutsqueezer]

:thumbsup:

I've been in the IT business for 20 years now and have worked on every OS from DOS 1 through Win9, and OS X and Linux.

Sounds like you're too young to have experience with TRS-DOS, LDOS, SteveDOS, NewDOS, DOS+, CPM (Pickles & Trout). Don't recall a DOS 1. I do remember MS-DOS quite well however.

I used to manage Tandy Service Centers in the 80's. The first order of business, in order to fix many computers that came with problems was to ascertain if the problem was caused by software or hardware. To do that, we had to become well-versed in all the OS's at the time (those listed above), MS-DOS did not exist yet. More often than not, the software was asking the hardware to do something it wasn't equipped to do. A good example is how CPM always wanted the Radio Shack 10" floppy drives to step too fast, causing CRC errors. I liked it when we proved that software was the problem, I could still charge but not have to fix anything.

 

[troutsqueezer]

I have a question (if you are still here). Do you own a Mac and are speaking from experience (like we are) or are you speaking from hearsay - which in not credible in a court of law much less this forum?

I own an iPad Mini along with a plethora of Kindles.

Members of my family and quite a few friends have Macs. Since I have enough knowledge about computers to make me dangerous, they come to me for answers on how to fix problems, pull pictures and videos from different cameras, copy disks, rip DVD's and music, connect to routers, export to MP4 and AVI, etc. Much of the time, this stuff cannot be done with the limited tools available on say, a MacBook Air. My brother was here just yesterday conscripting me to burn a Blu-Ray disk for him. What's it cost for a Blu-Ray burner on a Mac? I don't know but I'm betting it's a lot more than a PC setup and the end result is just the same.

All-in-all, I'm familiar with Apple computer inner workings and have helped design the microprocessors that go into them so I'm not a complete dunce, only a partial dunce...

 

[pacerron]

, in order to fix many computers that came with problems was to ascertain if the problem was caused by software or hardware.

Or if the problem was caused by the user .

Welcome back.