Windows 8.1 - why'd I wait so long?

For the record, I have no affiliation with MS, or any company related to MS. This is all based on simple experience in still having some left over clients I do work for after moving into a different field.. (and my personal experience)

I ran WindowsXP far longer than I should have before moving to Windows 7. I found Windows 7 to be essentially the 'same' to XP in terms of how I used it. Nothing much changed, but it was prettier.

I stuck with Windows 7 because all of the negative press about Windows 8 scared the hell out of me. Then a client demanded I install 8.1 on one of their machines - my first experience with Windows 8x. In installed it, along with classic shell, and noticed immediately how much snappier his system had become. I tweaked this machine for half a day, installing his software, making sure it was running fine. Then a few hours later went back to a nearly identical piece of hardware running Windows 7. I felt like I had stepped into quicksand. Everything felt sluggish, I felt like I was waiting - waiting for boot, waiting for restarts, waiting for programs to load, and copy.. It all felt really slow.. Then it dawned on me - Windows 8.1 was simply faster, more reliable, and overall better. From there became deployment to other machines - rapidly - over a matter of a week.

My conclusion: I've done my family/friends/customers a disservice by ignoring 8x for as long as I did, and advising them against it without having a good framework to give that advise.. I listened to the meme naysayers without forming my own accurate opinion, and they were wrong. The most hurtful thing so far is my wifes 5 year old notebook that runs like it had a full hardware upgrade under 8.1.. <sniff>

The best article I have found about this phenomenon is this one;

http://www.forbes.com/sites/tonybra...t-over-the-hype-and-start-loving-windows-8-1/
That brings us to the water cooler crowd. These are the people who haven’t used Windows 8, and don’t have an opinion based on personal experience, but share the doom and gloom stories they’ve read from the Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows XP lovers. Rather than checking it out for themselves, they just perpetuate the negative hype, which creates a snowball effect where everyone seems to agree that Windows 8 has failed, but nobody really knows why.

 

But don't worry this will be soon replaced by Windows 9 negative hype and how better was Windows 8

 

I have had a good experience with 8.1, and 8 for that matter. For people that can't adjust to the changes there a free solutions (like Classic Shell for example). No reason to miss out on a faster, more efficient, more secure OS.

 

Actually there are more than one reasons to miss it, but the most important is that the vendor/company/creator of the OS does not take in account my needs and shows zero respect for me as a customer (loyal for more than a decade). So as long as they treat me like that and want to "reinstruct" me on how I am going to use my systems... I'll never buy anything from that vendor again...

Panagiotis

 

I still have Windows 7, because it's what the laptop came with and works perfectly fine. Why bother upgrading and taking risks? I'd probably say the same about downgrading if it came with Windows 8.

 

Sure but try installing Linux on it and see how fast the computer boots, progams load and how much snappier it bcomes.

As for Windows 8 (didn't try 8.1), yes it is faster than Windows 7. I think there is a lot of posts out here that do come to the same conclusion. Windows 8 is better in terms of security, speed, etc... But the beef that people had with Windows 8 was the change to UI.

For me personally it was easier to change from Windows 7 to Linux Mint UI than to change from Windows 7 to Windows 8. I enjoy much more interacting with my laptop under the Linux Mint Ui.

Sure you will say, there are programs out there that will change the UI to make it look exactly the same as 7, giving you start menu, boot to desktop, etc... But this is not the point. Why would I need to do all this kind of nonsense? i want an out of the box experience. Windows 8 fails miserably in giving me the kind of experience that I want. Windows 7 did just what I needed and Linux Mint picked up where Microsoft left off.

I honestly don't think there were a lot of naysayers in here. I think even the biggest critics of Windows 8 in here did admit that there are improvements under the hood that maybe worthwhile to consider.

As for me, I will stick with Linux for privacy reasons. For my entertainment my next laptop I will either consider Mac or Windows but if and only if I get my Windows 7 menu. Call me stuborn, but Microsoft is not doing me a favor, I am doing them a favor by buying their software. There are alternatives out there including Macs and Chromebooks.

 

On my SSD I have DOS, Ubuntu, WinXP, Win7, Win8, Win8.1. They all work fine but Win8.1 is my favourite.

After learning how to drive Metro, I prefer it to a Win7 type Start Menu.

 

I have tried Win8x from dev preview, consumer preview to the final version, I have full legit copies of 8 pro & 8.1 pro thanks to my Dreamspark membership while going through MS certification.

I don't find it faster than Win7, the fast boot means startup is quicker but that is due to it not fully shutting down in the first place & instead using a form of hibernation, a restart on my system takes about the same as Win7. App startup is the same as Win7 as well both on a HDD & SSD

I have never had a BSOD with Win7 & it has been rock stable.

Win8x on the other hand I have had nothing but issues with, the fast startup causes issues with other MS OS's if installed as a dual boot, in one instance it caused Win7 to constantly run chkdsk on every boot saying the drives had errors, they didn't & that was down to Win8, one fast startup was disabled in Win8 the issue went away.

I also had issues with some of the metro app tiles not working after a day or two, mainly news & weather, tried many things to resolve it but only way was to format & reinstall & they would work again for a couple of days then stop.

There were other issues like services.msc description columns being all blank for no reason at all, issues with the component store getting corrupted (a common issues if you check online) which required use of the DISM command line to fix, also issues with the automatic maintenance running at startup causing things to slow right down, another issue was windows update installing a driver that borked the system causing it to get stuck in a auto repair loop & needed a complete reinstall to fix (if they hadn't removed the last known good config option in boot menu then I wouldn't have had to do that.

I personally hate metro & the flat bland desktop they chose to go with in Win8x & also the fact they removed aero, I have had numerous calls from family & friends to help them with win8x on new computers due to the changes that confused them, some just wanted Win7 installed instead as they knew their way around it.

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, I respect yours & I would hope you respect mine but I have to admit the last bit of your post under the Forbes link did make me chuckle, Win8x failures are many & even MS are starting to acknowledge that with the boot to desktop options & adding back the start button. Just look at the wide market in Start menu apps for example, that to me shows that MS got removing the start menu wrong, I mean when folk have to install one them just to make the OS more usable & user friendly it says a lot.

I can see both sides of the arguments about Win8x & don't dismiss those that don't like it or those that love it

 

Thanks for clarifying that, I wondered.

But isn't that often the case when you have a new PC vs an older one? Or if you install a new OS and presumably reformatted the drive prior loading the new OS. Of course, in most cases there will be a discernible performance difference. I do have to give you props for your Win 8.1 enthusiasm tho.

 

Nah, according to the curse Windows 9 will get a better welcome. Unless the world has chosen to be on my side once more and proven my theory that Windows 9 will be a massive failure.

If I don't see much benefit offered by Windows 9, I probably will just stay with 8 and try to upgrade to 8.1, while waiting for Windows 10. Overall Windows 8 is better than 7 and Vista, in my personal opinion of course.

 

For me the free solution is to stick with Windows 7 until Windows 9, or whatever it will be named come out.Why should I give my money to Microsoft in the mean time?

 

You can have weather and social network news in a tile. Wow. That's really something. Can't wait for these shills to find excuses when someone will infect Windows 8 systems using ads in metro applications. In fact, I know already know what they'll say: "Yeah, but Chrome/Android have had same problems".

 

For the reasons I mentioned that you left out of the quote...

 

i found the only major Linux distros that can match the speed of Win 8/8.1 were those using using XFCE.

there might be faster ones like LXCE and others but the nice ones are not faster than Win 8.

i am using an 'old' i3 computer with a SSD and Win 8.1 feels very fast and responsive.

 

I am a recent 8.1 user (2 days). Skipped 8 altogether. Classic Shell here also. Boot to desktop & uninstalled ALL Apps.

As far as copying files go I gave up Windows to handle the tranfers. I use TeraCopy Pro on all my laptops from XP to 8.1. It's like moving files in Linux FAST!

8.1 is on 1 of my laptops (SSD) so far. I wiped 7Ux64 & put 8.1 Pro N. Much faster. The impressive thing that I keep noticing over & over is with 8.1 restarts are fast like 15 seconds. On 7 this laptop takes 60 seconds. But by far the thing that blows me away is 8.1 shuts down in 2 seconds & 7 takes 20 seconds.

I want to address the MS ID registering query. I think this will be helpful to other deluded soles like myself who like to think the MS Borg doesn't know everything about me. And yes I am quoting myself from another Wilders post.

"I heard about mandatory Windows ID & I said **** that. Then I heard you can bypass Windows ID. I swear this was the hardest part of the install. I almost created a new ID. Then I noticed I could skip this. The skip option was not present until I chose to get a NEW ID. Very sly of MS."

Oh & if MS had any humility they would've named this release Windows 8SE instead of 8.1.

 

Windows 8.1 is running quickly on an 8 year old Toshiba I just installed it on. I had to download and extract the RAID drivers to a flash drive, as the Windows 8.1 installer was not finding my hard drive. But, after that, the install went fine.

It's a touchscreen laptop and I still hate the Metro interface and apps, even when using touch. It just seems so much more logical to use Window with a touchpad and keyboard . For touchscreen apps I'd much prefer to stick with Android.

But once I have Classic Shell or something similar which I have yet to install, I can say that Windows 8.1 is definitely much better than Windows 7.

Also, it's worth noting that you can't install the latest OS X on an 8 year old laptop.

 

LOL. Nothing noting. Thank you.

 

I just fixed it

 

Linux fast is right.. People talk up Linux Distros in terms of speed, but in every case I have seen Windows 8.1 (Windows 8SE) is just as fast, and in some cases faster than most Linux distros. As pointed out, only XFCE may come close. People find it hard to believe a windows 'anything' can outstrip Linux Distros in speed.

Can you show me on the doll where the mean man touched you?

 

Something is wrong with your 7 installation, because my XP takes also 2 seconds to shut down on an extremely slow Maxtor hard drive. But than again I've removed most not needed components:

 

Nothing is wrong with my 7 install. I've worked on dozens of laptops running 7 & a 20 second shutdown is about par give or take a few seconds.

 

You can't expect different operating systems to shut down at the same speed. Also if you were using a standard XP install, I'm sure you shutdown speed would be quite a bit slower.

 

My intelligence. Something that people that stayed away from an OS based only on "the negative press" can never understand.

Panagiotis

 

Just couldn't agree more. I use Classic Shell and now I find Win 8.1 to be better than Win 7 in many respects.

 

Well, I have used 8 since alfa and I did not like then and I do not like it now, so I keep spreading doom stories, but indeed, just a copy of 0 KB file took 5 seconds in 7. I have tested myself, that 7 was faster with Aero disabled, even though it was supposed to be faster on GPU rather than just on CPU, Aero is actually slowing down 7, but who cares about some a little speed on the desktop? It disabled itself once a full screen application started. I would definitely welcome it in 8, its GUI looks like made by 3 years old.