Windows 8

stusser · 2013-09-06T08:34:20.000Z

Yeah, I’m going to hold off until the official release also. I’m not going through that activation business on my primary computers. Now if MS offered a switch to get win8.1 early through the windows store, on the other hand, I would do it.

wumpus · 2013-09-06T13:29:56.000Z

Win 8.1 RTM works fine for me, and activates just fine early… you pussies! :)

Zeitgeist · 2013-09-07T02:12:05.000Z

Do you have to do a complete reinstall for this method? Or can you update an existing Win8 installation?

instant0 · 2013-09-07T06:13:35.000Z

In the old days it was always a good idea to do a full re installation.

Things to consider when wanting to do a upgrade:

How much “old crap” do I want to carry with me into the next windows version.

Things to consider when wanting to do a full install:

Do I really want to reinstall all my apps/games/settings?

A middle option would be to use Windows Reset/Refresh: (This isn’t for updates though…)

PCWorld

Windows 8 Refresh Feature Makes It Easy to Start With a Clean Slate

How many times have you reinstalled Windows because it had a pesky conflict, or was just running slow? With Windows 8, you can simply Refresh to start over.

So you might want to look at “User State Migration Tool” which supports upgrades and keeping old settings/apps.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/jj127984.aspx

You can also do it manually, but it is a hassle.

Zeitgeist · 2013-09-07T07:04:39.000Z

Wow, I thought this “update” was more like a service pack, not a transition like going from Windows Vista to 7 for example.

Chris_Nahr · 2013-09-07T07:09:48.000Z

Uh, I think there was some confusion… Windows 8.1 is indeed like a service pack for Windows 8, and absolutely does not require the crazy measures instant0 outlined. He was probably assuming you were asking about going from Windows 7 to 8.x.

stusser · 2013-09-07T07:53:47.000Z

I upgraded from win7 to win8.0 and it worked just fine.

TimElhajj · 2013-09-07T08:16:46.000Z

Yeah, upgrade has gotten a lot better over the years. Instant0 was probably talking about back in the day.

instant0 · 2013-09-07T08:29:38.000Z

6.x/7.x to 8.x actually. But; yes, Upgrade has gotten better than it was back in Win95-98 etc… :D
But you are still carrying with you a lot of stuff that you probably do not want to have with you unless you had an exceptionally clean system to begin with.

TimElhajj · 2013-09-07T08:36:04.000Z

That’s a good point. With Win8 reset/refresh, one of the options allows you to get back to a pristine state if you need to.

LMN8R · 2013-09-07T12:55:19.000Z

One under-publicized feature of reset/refresh is that you can actually customize your own reset state instead of going to a clean install if you’d like.

Building Windows 8

Refresh and reset your PC

The power of personalization is something we all love about PCs, but sometimes there is good reason to want to roll back to an earlier state. Most consumer electronics devices today can be reset to some factory state, and so we built this capability...

Look at the section Refreshing your PC to a state you define, including desktop apps

stusser · 2013-09-07T14:51:40.000Z

Not really, though. This person was thinking about refreshing to get rid of viruses, or crapware slowing down his PC, or just random accumulated cruft. That procedure simply creates a disk image. All the viruses, crapware, etc, would be retained, unless he thought to create the golden image after installing all his software but before installing kitty screensaver malware.

TimElhajj · 2013-09-08T00:00:34.000Z

stusser:

Not really, though. This person was thinking about refreshing to get rid of viruses, or crapware slowing down his PC, or just random accumulated cruft. That procedure simply creates a disk image. All the viruses, crapware, etc, would be retained, unless he thought to create the golden image after installing all his software but before installing kitty screensaver malware.

I think that’s the point. Otherwise, you just use the default reset/refresh. Am I missing something? If you discover you’ve got a virus/malware, you reset/refresh to get rid of it. If you had the foresight to modify the golden image, good for you. If you didn’t, you’re in the same place you would have been if it were, say, 1995 and you wanted to reinstall the os – only (and this is the big selling point for Win8), the install “media” is now built into the OS, so you can just hit reset/refresh without hunting down your Windows CD.

Razgon · 2013-09-09T23:29:16.000Z

So, I got my new machine with Windows 8 last night and spent the entire evening getting out of apps (Hate that name) by pressing Alt-F4. I also could not find the control panel anywhere, except once by accident and then I pinned it to the control panel.

Today, a colleague showed me how to do both, and its EXTREMELY stupid of MS how they have hidden these things. I can see how it works and I think I’ll grow to like it, but man its obtuse!

wumpus · 2013-09-10T03:39:01.000Z

Windows key maybe? Just a thought. :) Bonus: it also works in previous versions of Windows.

Razgon · 2013-09-10T03:57:22.000Z

wumpus:

Windows key maybe? Just a thought. :) Bonus: it also works in previous versions of Windows.

That doesn’t close down the program though.

mono · 2013-09-10T07:00:05.000Z

Razgon:

That doesn’t close down the program though.

Hah. Yup,the Windows key never shut down programs but it DID previously reveal the Control Panel. Now it does close programs but does not reveal the Control Panel.

Stridergg · 2013-09-10T08:30:30.000Z

Razgon:

So, I got my new machine with Windows 8 last night and spent the entire evening getting out of apps (Hate that name) by pressing Alt-F4. I also could not find the control panel anywhere, except once by accident and then I pinned it to the control panel.

Today, a colleague showed me how to do both, and its EXTREMELY stupid of MS how they have hidden these things. I can see how it works and I think I’ll grow to like it, but man its obtuse!

I don’t use Windows 8 myself but I just bought a new PC for my mother in law, so I got a bit of exposure to it. If I understand correctly what you need, you just have to get to the Metro screen (by pressing the Windows button or clicking the left bottom corner) and, once there, just start typing “control…” and the link will appear.

Also at the store, while at the desktop, I could just move the mouse to the right edge of the screen, a little menu would fall out and Control Panel would be one of the options there. That little menu doesn’t appear on my PC though, wonder why.

No idea how to close apps. Or why the apps (like Skype) are developed to be very long horizontally, forcing me to use scroll bars. I thought a well established standard was to use vertical scrolling and use mouse wheel to scroll.

Generally, after about an hour with Win 8, I kinda like it but find it confusing and awkward in a “UI that is developed for both touch and mouse and doesn’t really work well with either” kind of way.

James_Gutierrez · 2013-09-10T08:56:42.000Z

re:Control Panel - Win+X is your huckleberry.

Don_Quixote · 2013-09-10T08:58:28.000Z

Closing apps is easy. Move your mouse to the top edge of the screen. It turns into a hand. Left-mouse-button and drag down. If you keep going down, the app closes. If you change direction halfway (to the right) you can drag it to the right side of the screen to ‘snap’ it in place. Most well-designed apps have a nice condensed view for the snap. In vanilla Win 8 you can only do the 1/4 screen snap, but 8.1 changes that to be more customizable on a per-app basis. Other than that, to close apps you can also go to the top left corner and drag down a little. You’ll get an alt-tab style vertical list down the side of the screen of all open apps. You can right-click on any of them to close.

All that said… don’t bother closing metro apps. The metro half of the OS is designed to be like a phone OS. You don’t worry about closing apps on your phone very often, do you? If it needs the resources, it just puts them in a no-resource suspended state, like iOS or Android. The only time I’ve had a problem with this is when I’m inking notes on the native .PDF reader app and I switch away long enough to suspend it. When it comes out of suspend, my ink is gone. I’ve just learned to save before switching away.

Edit: please, let’s not get into the ‘discoverability’ discussion about any of this again?