Microsoft finalized its upcoming Windows 8.1 Update recently, but the company appears to be sharing it a little early today. While the software maker is expected to release the update officially in April, Microsoft has only detailed a few of the features in the update and has not yet provided an official release date. Links to download a final version of the Windows 8.1 Update, thanks to Microsoft’s Windows Update service, have been discovered. A series of patches are required to obtain the full update, but once installed the new desktop-friendly features are enabled.The update can be downloaded via a registry change, or through direct links, but we recommend waiting for Microsoft to officially release it through the normal Windows Update channels in April.
Don’t try this on a production machine.
They really don’t know what direction to take.
Anyway … more options is good in my book. A lot of people seem to be complaining, but i don’t see how more options is a bad thing.
My two cents:
Windows 8 isn’t selling to their main market, ie the enterprise market. They know they have a big problem. I just think it’s weird that they’re not addressing this very issue. Companies that do buy hardware with win8 on it are downgrading.
The consumer PC market has been winding down for quite a while now, and win8 isn’t helping. So as far as the consumer market is concerned, the push to the cloud has at least one advantage in my book … people aren’t obsessed with upgrading their hardware/os anymore.
PERSONALLY, i think win8 is shit. It’s a usability nightmare.
Computers are fast enough nowadays. The first nuclear explosions were calculated by hand and the first men sent into space were using computer with power mostly equal to a Macintosh Classic.
About the screen, the “retina” factor have already outreached our vision capabilities (try looking at a Nexus 5’s screen to understand) so there is just the big screen/3D factor to address in this field.
Usability was quite good, the user interface was aimed to address common issues, multiple screen and/or virtual desktops, tiling, auto layout, widgets, whatever. Once you get it, you do it.
Windows 8 doesn’t address productivity improvment, just newbies usability. It’s fine for new/aged people getting their first contact with a computer, they will not try to tweek things by themselves and will be forced to buy through the market place.
Microsoft thought that it can also transform consumers into a cash cow, not just companies with upgrade/renewal contracts. You know, Windows 2000 was enough for desk usage (Word, Excel, Access, Internet Explorer) but then you should upgrade to XP with the suitable Office version, then Vista, then 7, then 8, without much more benefit than improved security and hardware support.
Kochise
You are right, Kochise.
Computers are certainly fast enough nowadays. As i said, people don’t care to upgrade anymore as the old model is falling to pieces. Less and less people care about the next version of ms office, windows, etc. There is less and less incentive to upgrade.
Your comments on computing interfaces are absolutely correct.
People seem obsessed with “getting rid” of “the desktop”. This seems illogical to me. The desktop is by far the most productive and efficient environment we have. I’m not saying it’s perfect. Improvements can certainly stll be made.
I wish people would stop trying to shove this touchy feely stuff down my throat. It’s not working. I actually want to get work done.
If i want to get touchy feely, i’ll just get a tablet, kthx.
As for your comments on retina. I own a nexus 5. You are, again, correct.
Not that it matters to me, i’ve got a -18 dioptry. Even 320×240 will do just fine
The added advantage is being able to fit more stuff on the screen … which i think is wasted on the single window full-screen paradigm we’re stuck on now with mobile devices.
And yes, W2K was their best release to date (for the desktop). It went downhill from there. All IMHO of course.
Thank you for your comments, Kochise. It’s good to see common sense out there.
I assume you don’t have a formal education in CS, is that correct?
I’d be genuinely interested in who and how win8 was being used in production. Especially given the alternative options. What’s the win8 advantage?
Last week a sysadmin told me that so far he handed out exactly one Win8 notebook. The receiver is an outspoken Microsoft fanboy so he might be fine with it. One other guy told me that he learned to cope with the Win8 UI on a personal device but it wasn’t a must-have for him.
On my MacBookPro I have a Win8 VM which I set up for emergency cases. Occasionally I boot it up to let it download updates. I used it once to access a UNC share.
Sometimes I use the VM to demo the Win8 UI to corporate colleagues who all run Win7. The reactions range from shrugging it off (let’s deal with it when it arrives) to a horrified facial expression.
In the meantime I use MacOS in big projects. Office365 is not my favorite but to my surprise the Mac version is more approachable than using recent Office in the Win8 VM.
And… well, MacOS still has windows
Exactly. Microsoft fanboys seem to be the only ones who like this crap. If you were to believe them, it is so much better (than previous versions) it is so good, it is the best thing since sliced bread.
We use it at work to threaten people who won’t adhere to corporate IT policy. “If you can’t follow policy, we’ll have to give you a Win 8 laptop instead.” Works perfectly.
Well …
All i can say is that on the server side, it’s the usual BS they pull.
They just stop fixing things on 2008R2 and force you to upgrade to get certain fixes.
A customer of mine is running a hyper-v “cluster” on 2008R2. There are many, many bugs and “known issues”.
They’re not getting fixed.
The recommended course of action is always to upgrade to 2012 R2.
Artificial obsolescence …
EDIT:
Just to add …
If you think using metro/modern/whateveryacallit on a desktop machine is bad, just try using it through a KVM console on a virtualization environment. I can tell you the charm bar loses it’s charm quite quickly after you try to open it 20 times but always end up de-focussing the mouse from the kvm window. It’s insanity. It’s also slow and bandwidth intensive.
Edited 2014-03-07 12:34 UTC
A quick Google-search for “windows 8 hotkey for charms bar” gave me “Windows key + C” as a reply. Just a hint..
Windows key is not captured by KVM console, goes to the host.
There are other ways around it. For vmware, you can set it to capture hotkeys exlicitly, but there are still exceptions, such as ctrl+alt+del, etc. You have a menu item for that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Genuine_Advantage
/jk
Edited 2014-03-07 16:36 UTC
Windows 8 + Start8 = better windows 7 (way faster, more stable, etc.). Everyone complains about metro, but in practice, its easy to ignore.
I haven’t actually noticed any difference there. Windows 7 is rock-solid and the speed is the same on both in most cases. For some reason I do find Windows 8 churning the HDD longer than Windows 7 after reaching the desktop, however, and things like e.g. creating a new user-account or deleting one take tens of times longer under Windows 8.
I’m propbably comparing unfair things. I’m comparing my 4 year old desktop with an upgraded SSD, and an old laptop (32-bit celeron) running Windows 7 to my same system running Windows 7 on a 7200 rpm disc, and my wife’s laptop running Windows 7. Both machine running Windows 7 always felt way slower than both machines running Windows 8.
But these aren’t direct comparisons, so who knows.
I bought a new laptop for home, and of course it comes with Win8 nowadays. It’s actually a touch enabled laptop, which for things like scrolling is actually pretty nice.
However, Win8 I found totally unusable. Win8.1 is marginally better, still the world switching creeps me out each and every time. It’s awful. I’m not happy with it, and my productivity is probably much lower than if it was Win7.
I am a linux embedded system engineer, so most of my professional life evolves around Linux. I am not particularly a fan of Desktop Linux distributions, they’re all flaky and quite honestly my wife just doesn’t have the skill to deal with every day linux problems. Plus, it’s so much maintenance to keep a Desktop Linux system running, every update seems to break something, or randomly stuff just stops working. Doesn’t matter what distro, doesn’t matter what hardware, it’s a pattern. Windows on the other hand usually appears to require very little maintenance effort. So, since my time at home for computers is quite limited, I run mostly Windows, and at work I run mostly Linux (plus a Win7 machine, since I also need to do some Windows development).
I quite like Win7 for a Desktop OS, and I quite dislike the Win8.x line, it’s awful in my opinion. They did make a few improvements that I actually like, like the new file explorer. Anyway, while I’m forced to also at times run Win8 at work for software development reasons, I still haven’t gotten used to it and this Metro garbage just annoys me every time.
It’s a desktop/laptop, not a tablet machine for goodness’ sake. If I wanted a tablet, I would have bought a tablet! Is it really so difficult for them to understand?
I hope all of these new features are optional, ideally off by default for updated systems and (probably) on by default on new systems if Mictosoft is going to release this update as system images.
Guess what the os of choice is?
Windows 8.1.
Guess what I have used every day for work for 10 years?
Debian.
It’s nice to see random speculation but we just did 1500 8.1 installs and know of at least 10 thousand new 8.1 deployments from friends I’ve worked with before.
Enterprise is either sticking with their image for another year like they did with xp, Vista, etc and the rest have already moved forward.
I removed the Windows store and apps as part of my image and nobody really cares about the changes from 7. The changes in this update might convince me to open it up again.
Edited 2014-03-07 11:55 UTC
Back in the days there was NT, and it was also called Windows for Workstation. That’s exactly what they should do, release a workstation version of Win8 that boots right to the desktop is basically Win8 Core with a Win7 GUI, maybe some improvements, but no metro. This is what you sell to your enterprise costumers. Easy as pie.
Then they can experiment freely in the consumerspace and try all the fancy things and see what sticks and slowly include some things back into the Workstation release. It’s what they did in the 90s with NT and 2000 and it’s what worked. But alienating their cashcows is borderline suicidal.
Just read they are indeed booting to the desktop with this release. Good move!
Things move and change very fast in the technology industry. You can’t turn the clock almost 2 decades back and try what worked then with the market now. It’s like telling IBM to quit trying to be a services company and instead start making teletypes again.
May (sometimes) work in the consumer world but for us developers/geeks/superusers?
Let us assume that I’ve been developing an application called NumptyWindows for a number of years. This app has been shipped to a number of users and my workstation is being use for support. As a result I have for arguments sake, 10 versions of ‘NumptyWindows’ on my machine. The main executable name is identified by the app name plus the version and build date which many here would recognize as good practice. IMHO, letting users see our (to them) arcane .exe identification system would be totally confusing.
By some strange coincidence the app installs into the start menu by version.
To start the application I have the choice of using search and getting all the different versions and having to decide from the application name which one I want OR using the hierachical start menu and getting there in a simpler and more logical way. Easy-of-Use winds every time IMHO
If someone who advocates search for everything could explain why in this case it is better than the old fashioned and clearly obsolete (in the eyes of MS) start menu I’d be really happy.
I do readily accept that in many cases the StartMenu got unwieldy and that if I am using Windows 8.x I can install a replacement for it but just to please this old fogey can someone answer the above question.
Finally, I have to say that I can’t remember the last time I used Windows Search if ever and I’ve been writing software for 42 years(longer than MS has existed).