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The Windows Incident – Day 0

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Re: The Windows Incident – Day 0

#71

Post by userbinator »

glennos wrote: post #43
easytiger wrote: post #16

There is so much stuff in Windows 8 that I have no idea how it got out of the building. Really incomprehensible. Clearly a cancerous culture in Microsoft ala BlackBerry letting small but insane design choices out the door

I used a Windows 8 machine the other day. I've used OSX the last few years, but used Windows for a couple of decades prior. I was so confused. It was difficult to work out how to open apps. I also got stuck in the full screen start menu replacement (whatever that's called) and I had to ask for help to get back to the desktop. Give me XP over 8 any day. Security issues aside, that was a gem of an OS. Seems like the Mi…

I think the security issues are exaggerated (MS certainly has a motivation to get people to buy their latest OS), especially for advanced users and developers who have a good idea of what their system is doing. A lot of the exploits being patched now are based on "user is tricked into doing X", and OSs are increasingly designed to be secure against their users.

XP is more hackable (in both senses of the word), but it also gives more freedom.to the user.

Re: The Windows Incident – Day 0

#72

Post by bane »

I both buy laptops like this and build my own machines. It's always befuddled me that, when I'm building my own computers and once the hardware is all assembled, the clean OS install usually goes really smoothly and on first boot there's usually no problems and the machines run great.

Get the latest updates and now the computer is running like a Swiss watch.

But whenever I buy a laptop, there's always something wrong with the way the OS was installed. Weird stuff like the wifi adapter drops every 10 minutes, or the left side of the trackpad doesn't work.

Sure enough, I'll just nuke whatever the system came with and install the OS from scratch and it'll work like a charm. It's almost like the manufacturers are trying to fuck up the out of the box experience.

It would be better for them 95% of the time just to put together the hardware and install the shipped OS and put it out the door.

Re: The Windows Incident – Day 0

#73

Post by icefox »

nfriedly wrote: post #70

This is really more of an Ausu issue than a Windows one. Asus makes great motherboards and video cards but the rest of their hardware is rubbish as far as quality control goes.

Asus is giving users a bad Windows experience so it very much is a problem for Microsoft to address. This is no different than Google going around and trying as much as it can to force the many companies releasing android devices to put out less junk and keep them up to date. In both cases all we the users know is we picked up a Windows or Android device and it was a horrible experience and so I will probably not do that again.

Re: The Windows Incident – Day 0

#74

Post by bluedino »

Too wrote: post #2

Consider yourself lucky you even got windows 8 installed. My lenovo laptop, with a big fat windows 8 sticker on it and win 8 screaming all over the purchase page, came with windows 7 preinstalled. Win 8 came with a bunch of dvds inside the packaging, the laptop does not even have a dvd-player.

We have to pay an extra $50 to have 7 instead of 8 on our Lenovos

Re: The Windows Incident – Day 0

#75

Post by teamonkey »

rtpg wrote: post #4

I wonder what the Surface experience is like, I can only hope it's better. This also reminds me of when I got world of warcraft CDs and had to spend almost 48 hours just to patch up to the most recent version.

My experience of the Pro2 was seamless, as you'd expect from a reference machine. Everything just works and is correctly configured out of the box. Set up your profile an go. If you already have an online profile it'll pull in your existing settings.

Re: The Windows Incident – Day 0

#76

Post by Sami_Lehtinen »

Nothing new unfortunately. Sluggish operation, Windows updates take forever. Updates fail, reverting changes, installing ~150 updates more after 8.1 upgrade. Random SDBUS BSOD, reboots, WiFi / 3G connectivity issues. It seems that everything is working badly and update installation failures and blue screens are quite random and common. Eventually after tens of reboots and installing all kind of stuff you'll get everything installed. If you're lucky. Then you'll install upgrades by the device manufacturer, which take long time and require multiple reboots etc. Luckily I'm able to install these in volume as well as tasks are rarely urgent. So I can put tens of tables on table and run updates, after a few hours I'll revisit those, see what the situation is and continue. Yes, it's not consistent, some tables and laptops in the batch can be much slower to install and other faster, others fail and some won't etc. It's just basically absolutely horrible experience. I feel and know very well the feeling you described. Suddenly touch screen is totally unresponsive, or doesn't work at all. You'll need to use USB-keyboard and so on. As well as the sleep mode (aka connected standby) sucks life out of the battery really quickly. Properly hibernating device automatically is made quite hard, but is doable after all.

Re: The Windows Incident – Day 0

#77

Post by nfriedly »

icefox wrote: post #73
nfriedly wrote: post #70

This is really more of an Ausu issue than a Windows one. Asus makes great motherboards and video cards but the rest of their hardware is rubbish as far as quality control goes.

Asus is giving users a bad Windows experience so it very much is a problem for Microsoft to address. This is no different than Google going around and trying as much as it can to force the many companies releasing android devices to put out less junk and keep them up to date. In both cases all we the users know is we picked up a Windows or Android device and it was a horrible experience and so I will probably not do…

That's a fair point here. But every single time I've bought Asus stuff like this, its had problems out of the box. Even things like monitors, that you would think they could get right, still have issues where it crashes - literally crashes - and you have to unplug it to reboot it.

So my general rule of thumb with Asus is: stay the hell away unless you can take the time to return/exchange it 2 or 3 times to get one that works. And never let Asus repair it because they break other things in the process, and they take so long that you can't even return it by the time you get it back.

Re: The Windows Incident – Day 0

#79

Post by nogridbag »

easytiger wrote: post #16

There is so much stuff in Windows 8 that I have no idea how it got out of the building. Really incomprehensible. Clearly a cancerous culture in Microsoft ala BlackBerry letting small but insane design choices out the door

I stepped into the Microsoft store yesterday - they had the Microsoft band front and center and it lured me in. Every time I go into the store I keep saying "this is cool!" at every station. But I still find myself struggling with the usability of Windows 8.

The final station I stopped at in the store was the HP Sprout PC which uses a digital projector mounted on top of the monitor to project a virtual touch screen input device where the keyboard would normally be. So it can appear as a piano, a drawing surface, etc. Once again I said "this is cool!". I've never even heard of this thing.

I used it for 5 minutes before I somehow put it into a buggy state where it stopped responding to input on the virtual touch screen.

Re: The Windows Incident – Day 0

#80

Post by mfisher87 »

xtrumanx wrote: post #29
nikanj wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I should start an online collection of stories like this, so I could refer people to it when they complain about Apple hardware being overpriced and/or only bought by idiots.

As one of those people who believe Apple's hardware is overpriced, this story doesn't change my opinion on Apple's hardware. I recognize the quality in Apple's devices but I believe the price point is way higher than the extra quality found in their products. I've even recommended a MacBook to someone recently. Mainly for 2 reasons; their needs aligned with what the MacBook Pro would provide them with and they weren'…

Not to mention putting together a collection of stories like this would give Apple fans a fallacious reference for why everyone should "just get a mac". Sorry, if a Mac doesn't fit my needs, I'm going to use a normal personal computer, not a walled garden. Doesn't matter how many obstacles I need to get through if I need a real personal computer, not someone else's ecosystem.
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