Windows 7 or 8?

[NRG]

I don't really get most of the hate for Winodws 8. Aside from the stupid Metro interface replacing the Start menu, it's really just Windows 7 with some minor improvements. The new task manager is much nicer. You can finally set seperate backgrounds for multi-monitor setups without the need for third party software. Faster boot times. Nice little things like that.

Just get the 8.1 update that lets you boot straight to the desktop. Then, pin all your common software on the task bar, which is what most people have already been doing in 7. Need control panel? Command prompt? It's two clicks away from the start button in 8.1. Very functional. You can easily avoid the metro interface 99% of the time. Still going to complain about that 1% you end up using it? It's functionally the same as the Start menu in 7 (with 8.1) but stretched across your screen.

In my experience, 8.1 has zero downsides once you used to the new indexed search.

 

[Arnox]

For the price, that is a very meh laptop. Try the $599 to $999 section on Power Notebooks.

Here's a slightly cheaper laptop that comes with a Haswell i7 and 8GB of RAM out of the box. For just ~$750 you can get this laptop with a Haswell i7, 8GB of RAM, 17.3" 1600x900 LED-backlit display, and nVidia Geforce GT 740M.

The first one, it looks like, has a terrible gfx card on it compared to the one I posted in the OP. The second one's much better, specs wise, but is a little too expensive. $750's rather pricy for my budget. I'll check that link out though.

 

[DarkED]

The first one, it looks like, has a terrible gfx card on it compared to the one I posted in the OP.

You need to read the specs again - it has exactly the same GPU as the HP you linked on Newegg. They both have a terrible GPU

Still, for roughly the same price you get a Haswell i7 instead of the i5 that comes in the HP as well as double the RAM. The second notebook is a bit more expensive, but it comes with a dedicated (albeit low-end) nVidia GPU - you get what you pay for.

 

[Arnox]

You need to read the specs again - it has exactly the same GPU as the HP you linked on Newegg. They both have a terrible GPU

Still, for roughly the same price you get a Haswell i7 instead of the i5 that comes in the HP as well as double the RAM. The second notebook is a bit more expensive, but it comes with a dedicated (albeit low-end) nVidia GPU - you get what you pay for.

Whoops. I herped a derp. But still though. THIS TIME I took a good look at the config section and noticed something super duper. They charge extra on top of the standard price for any OS at all which actually makes it around $60 or $70 more expensive than the one I was looking at.

I haven't looked at any laptops on ebay but their sorting system is really hit or miss. I'll give them a try though.

 

[Twisted Metal]

The people who hate Windows 8 are the people who are too lazy to download a start menu replacement app such as "Start 8". Once you do that, it's pretty much Windows 7 minus Aero.

It's true that out of the box it sucks because you're forced to use Metro. Cool for touch screens, useless for mouse users. Luckily it takes no more than 5 minutes to download a start menu replacement and transform it back to the Windows 7 experience.

 

[DarkED]

Whoops. I herped a derp. But still though. THIS TIME I took a good look at the config section and noticed something super duper. They charge extra on top of the standard price for any OS at all which actually makes it around $60 or $70 more expensive than the one I was looking at.

That's the best part, actually. All of the big OEMs ship with whatever Microsoft tells them to ship, then they tack the cost of the Windows license right onto the MSRP. Power Notebooks doesn't do that.

Buy the laptop, download a Windows 7 or 8 ISO from TechNet, then re-use your existing Windows 7 license or buy a digital license at a discount.

The people who hate Windows 8 are the people who are too lazy to download a start menu replacement app such as "Start 8". Once you do that, it's pretty much Windows 7 minus Aero.

Sigh. So much wrong in that post.

To begin with, Classic Shell is probably the best start menu replacement, and it's free (unlike Start8 or Start Is Back.) You can also get Aero running via a hack. Even then, it's just not the same. Metro is still there running in the background and wasting valuable resources, and there are pieces of it you simply can't disable or get rid of.

For me, the big problems were stability and performance. My Maschine's drivers had some hiccups on 8 for some reason, and my TASCAM interface wouldn't work half the time because of a bug in the Windows 8 audio panel. I also had some serious issues with Windows update. I had to use system restore to undo failed updates multiple times. The 8.1 upgrade completely broke the system and made it so it'd go to a black screen right after the Windows logo. I couldn't even fix it with the recovery console at that point (I spent half a day trying) so I went back to Windows 7.

As for performance, I've already mentioned that a few posts back. You need an SSD to see any significant gains, otherwise it's no better than 7 (and sometimes worse.) Anyone who says otherwise is lying to you.

I'm sorry, but it's really not worth all those headaches just to get a new task manager and a new file transfer dialog. You can keep the new (fuck-ugly, unintuitive) UI that is basically useless without a touchscreen, because I neither want nor need that.

 

[Hadmar]

The people who hate Windows 8 are the people who are too lazy to download a start menu replacement app such as "Start 8". Once you do that, it's pretty much Windows 7 minus Aero.

It's true that out of the box it sucks because you're forced to use Metro. Cool for touch screens, useless for mouse users. Luckily it takes no more than 5 minutes to download a start menu replacement and transform it back to the Windows 7 experience.

The people who hate on dictatorships are the people who are to lazy to rebel and install a democracy.




Seriously though, not everyone has the option to modify the OS they use. If you work in a company that happens to have Win 8 installations, chances are you will have to deal with the stock UI, because no one can predict what compatibility problems you will run into later down the road with non-stock UI addons. Generally, the more workstations there are and the less time the IT staff has to deal with individual problems, the more restrictive that kind of stuff will be handled.

The 8.1 upgrade completely broke the system and made it so it'd go to a black screen right after the Windows logo.
[...]
I'm sorry, but it's really not worth all those headaches just to get a new task manager
[...]

My experience with 8/8.1 is actually rather limited because I kinda lack the time to actually use it, but here's a bit of the fun I had at work with the PC that's supposed to replace my old one:
Installed 8. Right after that I installed the 8.1 update.
-Mouse speed too slow. Type "mouse" into start menu. Start mouse config app. App lacks mouse cursor speed setting.
-Setup backup with the build in tools. Fails. Googling hints at the update to 8.1 left not enough space on one of the volumes 8 creates during setup to sucessfully create a VSS. It's one of the volumes you (seemingly) can't do much with with the build in tools. Fixing this is on my todo list for later.
-Start new great task manager and see that, for litterally everything I do with a task manager, I'll now have to do one more click for that "more details" button.

 

[Wormbo]

Once you do that, it's pretty much Windows 7 minus Aero.

To be honest, I rate Aero Glass much higher than the flat Win8 look. Multi-colored icons, hints that something is actually clickable, etc. The Metro GUI is a lot like "We are Microsoft and we do everything different than Apple" - no eye candy, everything single color, only the background color really distinguishes things.
And they don't apply that philosophy only to consumer devices, even professional software like Visual Studio suffered from it. They even went that far and made VS2012 look like on Win8 even if you run it on Win7. You have this white toolbar across the entire screen and all the icons on it are the same color. They are all the same size and hardly differ in overall shape. VS2012 is the essence of what Microsoft did wrong with Win8: Dropping useful and proven concepts in favor of a marketing decision for a GUI that ignores basic design rules.

Apparently Windows 7 is no longer sold separately, but may still be available as OEM version together with new hardware. I find that a bit odd, because people are actually willing to give Microsoft money in exchange for a Win7 license, but Microsoft are willing to risk losing customers to Apple and the various Linux distributions by insisting that only Win8 can be purchased separately.

 

[WedgeBob]

Well, thumb rule, knowing the trends from Microsoft, it's usually been every other Windows version that has done better. Windows 95/98 was great, Windows ME flopped, Windows 2000/XP was great, Vista mleh, Windows 7 superb, Windows 8 too cheesy, and on and on. Chances are, the next Windows will blow both out of the water. It's always been that way for the last 20 or so years.

 

[Wormbo]

You mean "Windows 9"? According to what leaked out so far, it will be to Win8 what Win7 was to Vista - just a minor touch-up. Win7's main key to success was that it wasn't called Vista anymore, apart from that they didn't change that much. But Win8 is far, far worse than Vista.

From Win95 to Win7, the basics of the Windows GUI changed gradually, and almost always to the better. The change from Win7 to Win8 actually was even larger than from Win3.1 to Win95. If you only look at the desktop, you can essentially say they removed the start menu and replaced it with a separate program - that start screen.
How is that better than in Win 3.1 where you had the Program Manager to start things? Granted, you can access it with a single key press. But that Metro UI also hides other information, e.g. how to switch between programs ("apps") or even which apps are currently running. You need to know how to figure that out. In Win7 you simply had a look at the taskbar and knew pretty much what was going on. With very few exceptions all active programs are either in the taskbar itself or in the notification area, potentially hidden behind an obvious upward-pointing button.

Apparently Win9 will turn around the PC version to put it back on its feet again, i.e. Metro apps actually run in desktop windows like they should have from the start, instead of making the desktop a Metro app.
However, Microsoft still holds on to the "we are the opposite of Apple" design guide, even though UI-psychology-usage-whatever experts clearly gave it the worst scores possible. In other words, Windows will stay a flat mess of guesswork for the user. At least they seemed to have learned that making all icons in a toolbar the same color was a really bad idea. Supposedly they will apply a color to them according to what category they belong into. (at least for Visual Studio 2013, but hopefully also for other applications)

It's a good thing that Win7 support will continue till 2020, so maybe either Microsoft regain some common sense until then or some other OS will become mainstream enough to be usable as replacement. (Linux still doesn't cut it for me and Apple can go fuck themselves.)

 

[Twisted Metal]

Metro is still there running in the background and wasting valuable resources, and there are pieces of it you simply can't disable or get rid of.

Windows 8 uses significantly less memory than Windows 7. So that's not even an argument.

Look, I'm no Windows 8 fanboy. I hate Metro and the flat color look is not the greatest, though it is clean. What I do know is that Windows 8 has been rock solid stable and compatible with everything that I throw at it. It's snappy as hell, boots it seconds, and with the start menu replacement there's really no functional difference when compared to 7.

 

[WedgeBob]

I think I agree Wormbo with that "We are the Opposite of Apple" part of it. If you compare Windows to KDE Linux, well, Microsoft uses that style of interface, yet Mac OSX has been closer to the GNOME style interface for the longest time. I know that it really is apples to oranges on either end of it, but...for interface comparisons, yeah.

 

[Hellkeeper]

I know that it really is apples to oranges

No, no, it's like apples and microsofts.
Badum tshhh.... I'll show myself out.

 

[WedgeBob]

Hehe. Yeah.

Anyway, I do admit, maybe Linux might be looked at more often now, as it just seems that the war between OSX and Windows just seems to get uglier and uglier. Ubuntu/Canonical just, imo, seems to be the alternative that everyone's going to anymore. Even Steam/Valve is making pushes towards following those who think they had enough of the MS failures. Seems like trying to get people to budge past Win XP or Win 7 is a tough sell.

 

[DarkED]

Windows 8 uses significantly less memory than Windows 7. So that's not even an argument.

No, it doesn't. Windows 8 Pro x64 uses more or less the same amount of RAM that Windows 7 Ultimate x64 uses. It's between 1 - 1.25 GB usage at idle if you have 4GB of RAM like I do. That was the first thing I checked after the Win 8 install and updates were done. It doesn't boot to a usable desktop any faster, either.

Please, stop saying it's faster and more efficient when it actually isn't. That's the same shit Apple fanboys pull whenever a new version of OS X comes out, and it gets old really fast.

Look, I'm no Windows 8 fanboy. I hate Metro and the flat color look is not the greatest, though it is clean. What I do know is that Windows 8 has been rock solid stable and compatible with everything that I throw at it. It's snappy as hell, boots it seconds, and with the start menu replacement there's really no functional difference when compared to 7.

Again, it's great that it's working so well for you. I didn't have the same experience. Windows 8 was not entirely compatible with hardware/software I must use to do my job, was full of instability, and had a bunch of annoying changes just for the sake of having annoying changes. This is all besides the fact that it's fuck-ugly and unintuitive.

If you like it, use it. I didn't, so I won't, and I'll tell everyone who mentions it why. Windows 7 is supported until at least 2020, so I'll be just fine.

Ubuntu/Canonical just, imo, seems to be the alternative that everyone's going to anymore.

Heh. Unity is killing off Ubuntu's original fanbase faster than Saddam with sarin gas Many longtime Ubuntu users have since given up on Canonical and are now using Debian, Mint, Elementary, etc., etc.

Lubuntu, Xubuntu, and Kubuntu are still pretty nice if you can get past the lolitics. I wouldn't bother with Ubuntu, though; it's basically the Linux version of Windows 8.

 

[JohnDoe641]

Ubuntu/Canonical just, imo, seems to be the alternative that everyone's going to anymore.

Arg, I know someone else who uses 'anymore' like that. Why? WWWWWWHYYYYYYYYYYYYYY??????

 

[Wormbo]

[...], and it gets old really fast.

Well, that part actually does get faster every time.

 

[DarkED]

Well, that part actually does get faster every time.

Truth.

 

[Arnox]

Huh. I didn't expect there to be two sides to this. One side's saying it's just as bad as Vista and another is saying that it's really not that bad at all besides Metro.

Then again, there are some apps that I think can't be used with any other OS besides 8. Anyone encountered those yet?

 

[DarkED]

EDIT: I got bored so I installed 8.1 on my netbook. Upgrading to Update 1 now. We'll see if it's any better.

EDIT 2: Well, I wasted four hours and then discovered that no Metro apps support 1024x600. Don't waste your time installing Windows 8 on a netbook, it's only usable in Desktop mode. May as well just install 7. Luckily I didn't wipe my Elementary OS partition. I was able to boot a live cd and restore grub in five minutes.

Then again, there are some apps that I think can't be used with any other OS besides 8. Anyone encountered those yet?

Only the native Metro apps. Not that it really matters - most of the Metro apps I've tried were just ports of pre-existing Windows applications that have been simplified to work better in a tablet/touch environment. Using Metro and it's native apps is very much like using Android or iOS and their respective apps.

In short, if you want to run Windows 7 (or 8 without Metro) and you need something specific, chances are "there's an app for that"