Microsoft’s new operating system may look like a radical departure from Windows 7, but it works, it makes sense—and it’s the future.
About the Start screen: First, let's deal with the divisive Start screen. I'll admit that I had some misgivings on this score initially. But once I realized that the Windows 8 Start screen simply replaces the old Start menu, my reluctance about moving to Windows 8 vanished. The Start screen is flat, rather than hierarchical, as earlier Windows OSs are; however, that simplification in design makes it much easier to navigate.
Whether you use a touch-enabled screen, a laptop touchpad, or the scrollwheel on a mouse, practically everything you need for launching and managing applications is right there, within easy reach. And if you’re a Start menu diehard, you can right-click the lower left portion of the Start screen to bring up a simplified Start menu.
Numerous small improvements to the desktop user interface make many computing tasks easier to perform. Pull down the File menu in File Manager to see the system's list of frequent places. Click the Home menu to get a pop-down ribbon of commonly used commands. Need the control panel? Move the mouse cursor to the lower left and right-click, or press <Windows>-X, and the simplified Start menu appears with commonly needed desktop commands.
If you can’t find an application by pointing and clicking, start typing its name; you'll likely find it via search.
Under the hood:The biggest improvements to Windows 8 are under the hood. The new graphics subsystem, which uses DirectX to render all text and windows, makes the OS more responsive as you move windows or scroll through the Start screen. Internet Explorer 10 and Microsoft Office 2013 feel faster, too. The graphics subsystem also provides a framework for 3D acceleration on tablets and on Windows 8 Phones.
Both printing and printer handling work significantly better,thanks to Windows 8's use of what Microsoft calls an extensible print-class driver framework. Instead of having to keep track of thousands of individual printer drivers, Windows 8 can use a single class driver to support multiple similar printers. In addition, the user interface for managing print jobs and printer features is simpler and more visual than in Windows 7.
The new Storage Spaces feature allows users to create redundant storage from drives of diverse sizes that may be attached to different interfaces, and the resulting storage pools protect their data from drive failures. File History, another storage- related feature, makes backups simpler and easier to perform.
Yet another noteworthy improvement is Microsoft’s upgraded system refresh capability, which enables you to restore a system to its clean-install or almost-clean-install state after a poorly written application has damaged it—and to do so while retaining all of your files and settings. Furthermore, if you’re willing to work from the command prompt, you can customize what the refresh system keeps and what it discards.
Touch: Windows 8 offers true ten-point multitouch that works well. Skeptical PC users may remember past Microsoft Tablet PC efforts that were clunky and cumbersome to work with, but Windows 8 is a different animal altogether. Touch is an integral part of the experience, not a bolted-on afterthought.
A common ecosystem: Having a common app ecosystem that will run on PCs, tablets, and even phones brings Microsoft into the second decade of the 21st century. Though old-school PC users may lament the changes that their desktop system has undergone, the abil ity to navigate through a phone or tablet similarly to the way you would through a laptop or desktop PC promises to make your computing life easier.
And Why You Shouldn’t
I'm writing this in a Microsoft Word 2010 window that fills less than half of my screen. Also visible are two Chrome windows— one containing my inbox, the other some pages relevant to this article—and Windows Media Player, which reports to me that I’m listening to Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. I can easily get to any installed program with a few clicks of my mouse.
You can probably guess that I'm not using Windows 8.1 have a copy of it set up on another PC for testing purposes, but for the PC I do my work on, I need a powerful and versatile operating system that lets me arrange programs and windows as I see fit. For these purposes, Wi ndows 7 qualifies; Windows 8 does not.
Windows without windows: Does anyone at Microsoft under stand that Windows is called Windows because it has windows?
That seemingly obvious fact harkens back to a time before the geniuses in Redmond decided to weigh us down with the Interface Formerly Known as Metro (which I'll abbreviate to IFKaM). The Windows 8 Start screen has no windows. At best, you can display two programs side by side, and even doing that is impossible if your screen's horizontal resolution is less than 1366.
But the lack of actual windows isn't IFKaM's worst flaw. You can still organize the Start page by dragging your productivity apps, your media players, and your utilities into separate groups; however, IFKaM doesn't allow you to arrange your programs hierarchically, like folders on a hard drive or submenus on the Start menu. Instead, you must accept an arrangement where everything is displayed up front.
The crippled Windows desktop: Windows 8 retains the old user interface, which is now officially called Desktop, but in a sadly hobbled form. You can't use Desktop as your default interface. You can't boot into it or close Windows from it. On the other hand, you can manage files in Desktop. There's no IFKaM equivalent of Windows Explorer.
Even worse, Microsoft has removed the Start menu, except fora cut-down version called "simplified start." Introduced in Windows 95 and improved many times since, the Start menu has evolved into a brilliant work of convenience.
Think about all you can do with the Windows 7 Start menu. You can pin shortcuts to programs to its top level, but you don't have to, because the programs you use frequently show up there automatically. Each shortcut contains a menu of recently used and recently pinned data files.
Two operating systems, little common ground: To make things worse, the two separate interfaces don’t play well together. Going from one to the other is just plain crazy.
Windows 8 includes two versions of Internet Explorer—one for each environment. But they don't work together very well. When you create a Favorite in the Desktop version, it appears only in the Desktop version. Create a Favorite in the IFKaM version, and it still appears only in the Desktop version. (The IFKaM version also has an option to pin a webpage to the Start screen, increasing the congestion at that overcrowded location.)
It could have been so much better: Microsoft totally missed the boat here. We don’t need a confusing mix of Desktop and IFKaM applications. We need an OS that can change its user interface when we change our hardware.
It should all be configurable, and you should be free to decide what criteria create the change—or you should have the option of sticking with the interface you prefer.
Alas, Microsoft didn't choose that route. So I'll stay with Windows 7 for as long as I can, and hope that the company fixes everything in Windows 9 (or better yet, Windows 8 SP1). And if Microsoft doesn't? Well, that's why we have Apple and Linux.
0 comments:
Post a Comment