My Thoughts On Windows 8

Today’s image is just a different take on a vintage baseball shot I did a few weeks ago. Rather than color I went for a sepia tone and put a texture on the image.  But, today’s post is my thoughts and opinions about my experience with Microsoft Windows 8.  Daily I have people visiting the Gallery from Microsoft.  It started as a trickle (visits from Microsoft in Hialeah, Florida) and has grown so there are now visits from Microsofties  from coast to coast and as far away as Japan.  I’m happy for the support, love to see you “guys” taking an interest in The Kayview Gallery and hope you’re enjoying what you’ve been reading.  Something tells me you won’t be quite as enamored with my experience with MS Windows 8.  Hit the “Read More” to checkout my opinions of Win 8 "on my machine".

First let me talk about my desktop computer.  I ordered it the day Intel Core i7 processor was introduced.  It’s a Core i7 920 running at 2.67 GHZ.  It has fifteen gig of RAM.  Yes, 15 GB.  It came with six one gig sticks and I saw a sale on twelve GBs  a couple years back [three four gig sticks) and went for it.  The i7 920 uses three channel memory, so the memory has to be multiples of three.  There’s now three one gig sticks and three four gig sticks.  Right now I running a 120 GB Intel SSD, running only the OS, Adobe Photoshop CS6 and Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4.  All other apps are on a secondary, internal one TB hard drive.  The Photoshop scratch disk is a separate, internal, one TB hard drive.  I also have five external HDs with a combined total of a little more than seven TB capacity.  I use a Wacom tablet with touch/gesture capability.  The “weak” point in the system is the display adapter.  It’s an ATI Radeon HD 3400 Series.  It has 256 MB of memory, which wasn’t bad when I bought the computer but is somewhat undersized by today’s standards.  I don't do anything 3D so there isn't really a call for a more powerful card.  It isn't a weak overall machine.

Now about the OS.  I’ve used Microsoft Windows since Windows 286.  Yes, that’s before the “breakthrough” product of Windows 3.0 or 3.1.  (Obviously, that wasn’t on my current computer.)  I’ve updated through every version of Windows on the first day of every release.  I’ve never had a system crash, never seen a blue screen of death, always put in every update, and have never had strange or bizarre things happen using one of my own computers. 

Until Windows 8.  My Wacom tablet?  It was recognized by Windows 8 and ran fine, for about two weeks.  Then?  It stopped working.  No warning dialog box, no nothin’.  One day it was there and the next day it was gone.  Called Wacom support.  They couldn’t figure it out.  Removed all traces of everything Wacom, apps, drivers, the works.  Had to abandon the pen and tablet input device.  Bad, bad bad.

Web pages showed up scrambled.  The Kelby Media sites behaved weirdly.  “Sign in” dropdown dialog boxes would drop behind the advertising pieces.  Description boxes did the same.  What should have been a string of buttons across the top of a page showed up as a vertical set in the middle of the page. 

F-Stoppers web site has mostly videos for their “news”.  Everytime one was opened, the screen showed up black.  Voice and music came through, but no video.  It happened on other websites also. 

My printer, an Epson Stylus Photo 1400, would cycle the carriage, cleaning the heads (wasting ink) randomly.  It was bizarre.

The “solution”?  The “fix”? The “last resort”?  I went back to Microsoft Windows 7.  Everything works as it should.  My Wacom tablet was immediately recognized and works fine.  Videos run fine.  Website buttons are where they’re supposed to be.  Everything is right with my computing world.  I’m not going to give up updating Operating Systems.  I’ll undoubtedly get the newest OS on my next hardware upgrade (buy a new computer).

It’s not like I’m bad with computers.  I’m a retired Intel guy and at Intel I was thought to be a geek.  Ya gotta fool a lotta folks to have people at Intel think that way.  I claim I'm a very heavy computer user, not a geek.   I do have some chops.   I use the snot out of the applications I use.  I do "tricks" with the applications other people didn't even know were there.