Microsoft’s “latest and greatest” isn’t even able to get a larger share than the acknowledged failure that is Vista. I’ve been telling clients that Windows 7 is a worthy replacement for XP. Nice to see some independent data to back up my thoughts.
Category: Windows 8
I have a client’s laptop and he has windows 8 on it….of course he hates it. So i advised either take the laptop back or buy windows 7 and upgrade to Windows 7. I’ve been trying for a couple of hours just to get into the UEFI in this thing…finally found it in the insanity that is windows 8. Once i finally got it to boot to the dvd…guess what? The screen shifts to a red box that says secure boot failed operating system is invalid. This machine is so locked down YOU CAN’T INSTALL ANYTHING OTHER THAN THE PREINSTALLED WINDOWS 8. So now my clients have something to think about:
1. Stick with Windows 8.
2. Take the machine back
3. Buy an Apple
4. Have ecc build you a tower that doesn’t have this crazy lockin.
5. Hope the vendor gave you an option to kill secure boot so you have control of your computer.
Luckily in this case i was able to kill secure boot so i could wax the hard drive and put a real operating system on the machine.
So this OS lives online. Considering the lack of password strength I’ve seen just in my clientbase alone…this one is going to lead not only to live.com hacks but now you’ll be able to easily compromised ANY Windows 8 machine…anywhere. This “feature” alone should make Windows 8 a total non-stater for any business that is concerned about privacy or data disclosure regulations.
You can now log into any Windows 8 PC with a Microsoft ID. Boom: your wallpaper, online mail accounts, contacts, photos and SkyDrive contents are instantly available. (SkyDrive is Microsoft’s free seven-gigabyte online hard drive.)
This is going tob e the next Vista but for a different reason. The tile interface I can handle..however Windows 8 is a badly done hybrid. There’s the tile interface and then the regular interface and Win8 jumps back and forth between the two. What MS should have done is made the tiles for mobile and the modified desktop for well…desktops. if you aren’t on a touchscreen the desktop experience is now a jarring, undecided experience. What’s worse is server 2012 is also cursed with this undecided interface as well. Hit the link below this excerpt for the full details.
This may be the biggest week in Microsoft’s 37-year history. The company is releasing its very first computer the Surface tablet, a new phone operating system Windows Phone 8, and, believe it or not, two PC operating systems.RelatedState of the Art: Sleek Tablet, but Clumsy Software October 24, 2012Enlarge This Image Stuart GoldenbergEnlarge This Image Internet Explorer 10.Enlarge This Image The new operating system is partly designed for touch screens. I’m not talking about Windows 8 and Windows RT, which are, in fact, two new and distinct operating systems from Microsoft. I mean the two different worlds within Windows 8 alone, one designed primarily for touch screens, the other for mouse and keyboard. Individually, they are excellent — but you can’t use them individually. Microsoft has combined them into a superimposed, muddled mishmash called Windows 8, which goes on sale Friday at prices ranging from $15 to $40, depending on the offer and version.You can easily imagine how Microsoft got here. “PC sales have slowed,” some executive must have said. “This is a new age of touch screens! We need a fresh approach, a new Windows. Something bold, fluid and finger-friendly.”“Well, hold on,” someone must have countered. “We can’t forget the 600 million regular mouse-driven PCs. We also need to update Windows 7 for them!”And then things went terribly wrong.“Hey, I know!” somebody piped in. “Let’s combine those two Windows versions into one. One OS for all machines. Everybody’s happy!”Whoops.Let’s tackle each version one at a time. A note: I have written a how-to manual for Windows 8 for an independent publisher; it was neither commissioned by nor written in cooperation with Microsoft.
Without turning off the built in A/V..:)
The Windows hosts file offers a great way of blocking or redirecting certain Internet hosts. I’m for instance using it whenever I move websites to a new hosting company to check the life site before the DNS has fully propagated. You can also download software like Hosts Man that allow you to add lists of known malicious sites or advertising servers to the file to block those automatically from being visited on the computer.
In theory, you can add any domain, host or website to the hosts file so that it is blocked on the system. Ghacks reader SGR just informed me that this apparently has changed in the Windows 8 RTM version.
While you can still add any host you want to the hosts file and map it to an IP, you will notice that some of the mappings will get reset once you open an Internet browser. If you only save, close and re-open the hosts file you will still see the new mappings in the the file, but once you open a web browser, some of them are removed automatically from the hosts file.
Two of the sites that you can’t block using the hosts file are facebook.com and ad.doubleclick.net, the former the most popular social networking site, the second a popular ad serving domain.
The strange thing is that even write protecting the file does not have an effect on it as entries are still removed once you open a web browser. Actually, any kind of Internet connection seems to be enough for that behavior. If you open the Windows Store for instance, the entries get removed as well automatically.
This could be a bug that is affecting only some high profile sites and services, or something that has been added to Windows 8 deliberately. We have contacted Microsoft and are currently waiting for a response from a company representative. Since it is Sunday, it is not likely that this is going to happen today.
It is also in the realm of possibility that the hosts file may not accept other hosts.
Update: Tom just pointed out that turning off Windows Defender, which basically is Microsoft Security Essentials, in Windows 8 will resolve the issue. It appears that the program has been designed to protect some hosts from being added to the Windows hosts file. To turn off Windows Defender press the Windows key, type Windows Defender and hit enter. This launches the program. Switch to Settings here and select Administrator on the left. Locate Turn on Windows Defender and uncheck the preference and click save changes afterwards.
Please note that this turns off Windows Defender, and that it is recommended to have another antivirus program installed on the system to have it protected against Internet and local threats.
If you do not want to disable Windows Defender completely, you can alternatively add the hosts file to the list of excluded files and processes. You do that with a on Settings > Excluded files and locations. This basically blocks Windows Defender from scanning or manipulating the hosts file in the operating system.
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If Microsoft really plans to get into the mobile space(and Win8 is all about tablets) this is not the way to do it. $600 bucks for a tablet isn’t going to fly when Andriod and Ipads are already established with superior featuresets already.
For a while there it seemed that Microsoft was going to do something spectacular which was going to give Android and Apple a real kicking and establish itself as a leader in the tablet market.
The rumour had been that Vole was going to release a subsidised Windows RT tablet for about $300 which was practically a giveaway. While this would anger hardware makers, it would establish Microsoft’s new operating system and lead to the company becoming a leader in the mobile market.
Unfortunately the rumour was based on the assumption that Microsoft would use common sense and its piles of money to make itself relevant again.
According to Extreme Tech, the rumour mongers had forgotten that Microsoft is a huge elephant of a corporation ruled by competing factions and overseen by Steve Ballmer. So far it has yet to come up with anything that is responsive or innovative to push itself into the mobile market.
Now, a leak has confirmed that Microsoft’s inability to come up with a decent business plan to deal with mobile is about to snatch another defeat from the jaws of victory.
A leaked slide from Asus says that its Vivo Tab RT, due to be released alongside Windows RT at the end of October, will start at $600.
This is more expensive than the iPad 3, and a full $200 more than the iPad 2 or Galaxy Tab 2 10.1. So to be competitive it should have some insane hardware specs – right?
Er, no. The Vivo Tab RT has a low-res 10.1-inch 1366×768 IPS display, quad-core Tegra 3 SoC, 2GB of RAM, NFC, 8-megapixel camera… and that’s about it.
Basically it is the Android Transformer which can be plugged into a keyboard/battery dock for an extra $200 and a docking station only costs $150.
Microsoft is assuming that people will buy the tablet because it has Windows RT on it. This attitude is rather arrogant because it forgets that people are doing rather nicely thank-you-very-much with their Android machines and do not really need Windows.
Vole is basically charging what it always does with its licences, and has no plans to relax the “Windows Tax” to push itself into the mobile market.
via Microsoft prepares to stuff up tablet plans – Asus leak shows Vole’s own goal | TechEye.
So the flagship productivity app doesn’t even work fully with the new flagship OS. The last time we saw this? Vista.
With Windows 8, Microsoft has created an operating system that is, at least in part, genuinely usable with nothing more than fingers. While it took the company a long time to recognize that finger-based touch systems were more approachable than stylus-based ones, and that touch-based software needed to be designed to accommodate the imprecision that fingers imply, Microsoft has its finger-based platform at last with the new Metro-style interface and new Metro-style applications. Office 2013, however, isn’t a new Metro-style application.
Instead, the suite contains two Metro-style Office apps: a new OneNote client (that will work alongside a regular desktop version) and a Lync client. Everything else is a desktop application, which poses a problem. Office is an important product for Microsoft and makes up a significant part of the Windows 8 sales pitch. Windows RT, the ARM variant of Windows 8 that will be used on the company’s Surface tablets, will ship with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, and the presence of these applications will be one of the big things that sets Windows RT apart from the iPad. For these programs to have any value at all, they have to be touch friendly.
So how did Microsoft do?
Ready to touch
Historically, the Office team never made any concessions to Microsoft’s broader tablet ambitions. With the exception of OneNote, the Office apps have never been comfortable for pen users, and it seemed that the Office team was happy with that. That’s no longer the case with Office 2013. The suite contains a range of improvements to make finger access better. Across the board, menus created in the main UI are given wider spacing when invoked with fingers. The same is true of the hovering formatting toolbars in Word and Excel; when touching the screen, they’re much larger and easier to manipulate.
The sizing of the rest of the UI is controlled by a new “full screen” mode that changes the interface to better accommodate touch input. In theory, the applications will use this mode by default when installed on tablet hardware (though they didn’t for me on a mouseless Samsung tablet); otherwise, the applications all have a full screen mode button next to the minimize button.
Enlarge / Above, Outlook 2013′s ribbon in touch mode. Below, the ribbon in normal mode.
Hit this button and a few things happen. The ribbon, title bar, and quick access toolbar all disappear, replaced by a strip along the top of the window with a “…” either in the center (for OneNote) or on the right-hand side (for everything else). Tap that strip and the ribbon and status bars reappear. The status bar also disappears and similarly reappears when the “…” strip is touched. Windows 8′s standard “swipe from the top of the screen” gesture doesn’t bring up the ribbon; I think it would be more consistent if it did.
Word’s floating toolbar in touch mode, above, and normal mode, below. The same buttons in the same order, just spaced out a little more.
When the ribbon is displayed in this mode, its spacing is altered to make the targets a little bigger. This is especially apparent on the various menus that can pop up from the ribbon; these are normally quite tightly packed.
As well as these spacing adjustments, the applications now respond to two-finger zooming. This mainly performs a conventional zoom, but in Outlook’s calendar view it does a semantic zoom, allowing you to zoom right in to a single day, or all the way out to a month at a time. To this, Word also adds a tap-to-zoom feature when in Read Mode, to allow tables, images, or other objects to be zoomed in a similar fashion to touch-based browsers.
And… that’s about it, the full extent of the finger support that Microsoft has added to Office 2013. If it doesn’t sound like much, there’s a good reason for that: it isn’t. For stylus users, the company says that accuracy has been improved, particularly in OneNote, but using the software with fingers is problematic.
via Why bother? The sad state of Office 2013 touch support | Ars Technica.
This type of thing only serves to reinforce my opinion that windows 8 is going to be another Vista…maybe even a bigger disaster. it may be on par with Windows ME.
On the eve of the Windows 8 launch, its no surprise that Microsoft is revealing its next Office suite. What may surprise you is that Office 2013 is not really designed for Windows 8. Its a suite with many remarkable enhancements, but it is not finger friendly.
via Microsoft unveils Office 2013 – Gadgetbox on NBCNews.com.