Win 8 Question

[boom3]

OK, so Win 8 is a mess like Vista, like ME...

a buddy is taking an online course and apparently he has to install Win 8 (I have no idea why). I also am not sure how powerful his PC is (probably not very). It is probably not a touch-screen machine. He asked me which version of Win 8 would be "best". I have no clue since I am 85% Mac at home now and just run a dedicated Win 7 machine for a couple of critical apps.

Anybody know if there is a version of Win 8 that places the least demands on the PC? I think he is tranisitioning from XP.

Thansk in advance!

[germerikan]

I would suggest he download the Windows 8 update assistant

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/p/?LinkId=261871

Sorry I only have a link in German but the language should change automaticaly for him. Could be problems if transfering from XP not 100% sure though. 8 has simular requirements as Windows 7.

[DrWho]

You shouldn't need to install win8 just to take a class.....and if that's really the requirement, then I gotta question whoever is running the course....that seems like an overly intense requirement.

[Schu]

I haven't made the switch to 8 as yet, I really do not see the reason. HOWEVER, I highly doubt there is a "version" that is different... he will most likely have to configure post install to reduce the native functions so 8 is running with as little background functions as possible... do that is the control panel.

[JJkizak]

From what people tell me once you get rid of the "Cell Phone" interface it works OK unless you have a cell phone.

JJK

[Marvel]

I installed Win8 Pro on a dell dual core 2.83Ghz box with 4G of ram. I did 32 bit install. It is way faster than XP ever was on the box and I didn't have to download any newer drivers (Dell Optiplex 755).

The main start menu/tiles really works well, even without a touch screen. Sortof eliminates putting shortcuts on the desktop for all of your favorite programs, which may make it easier for use in an office supporting different PCs. Performance and installs of older Windows applications are working fine, and I've installed Office 201, Libre Office, PDF creator and our antivirus software. We use Radmin from Famatech for supporting users, and the current version runs quite well.

We haven't 'used' it enough to be able to judge how stable it is, but so far with the testing it is doing ok.

I can only imagine how fast this would be on a newer quad core/eight core cpu with better graphics.

Bruce

[boom3]

Thanks to all. I was the go-to guy for this friend in most matters computing for along time. But once you go Mac, you never go back (except for certain apps that refuse to evolve into the fullness of Apple) and I am just not current on Windows issues beyond the most generic stuff these days.

[Mallette]

Heck, with Tubes vs. SS going in 2 Channel might as well throw some gas on this... Rather than "Mac," or "Windows" I am just going to say "OS" as they are all the same in my book and equally inept, bloated, and designed to sell hardware and support.

Bruce's talk of "...just how fast this would work on an 8 core..." and other comments here raised in my mind yet again just how constantly backwards OS progress has been since about 1995.

OS should be transparent and introduce no significant latency to even the slowest system. If, for some reason, more sophisticated features are required by some enterprise or other users these should be optional. I'm not going to throw out a percentage, but the VAST majority of users do not use or need 90% of OS features. Further, the OS should never enforce a GUI on software running on it. While I actually hear people support the idea of a common GUI for software I don't comprehend this as it is the same to me as if a 747 were force to use the same dashboard as a Ford Focus. What a 3D modeling program has in common with a spreadsheet eludes me.

In the beginning of PCs we had several basic designs and 5 or so common OSs. The basic architectures were the IBM "off the shelf" Intel units that hardware customizable and suitable for business use as well as by innovators, and several "fixed" hardware varieties designed for specific uses like print, video, gaming, and casual general purpose home use.

Let's consider the C-64. Total system price was less than a couple of hundred bucks. I had a 50.00 bus extender plugged into mine with 5 slots for word processer, spreadsheet, and such in hardware. Select the one you wanted, push the power button and it was ready by the time your fingers got to the keyboard. While it MUST have at some time, I don't ever recall these things crashing. Granted, sometimes they just died...but at 75.00 it was hardly a disaster. You just ran down to KMart and grabbed another in a blister pack. Plug it in and you're good to go again. REAL "plug and play." A bit of color depth improvement and a network chip and one of these today would surf the web, Tweet, and handle the Forum just as fast and a lot more stablely than this dual Xeon beast I am using at the moment while costing less than the OS alone on this thing.

While I lived through the years as a computer professional, watched the current mess evolve, and understand how we got to where we are I remain somewhat puzzled as to why people seem so OK with it all and get irritated with those of us who remember faster, stabler machines with OSs that did what an OS should do, handle basic input/output and be neither seen nor heard.

I run Linux at home for most things as it is right priced, fast (though not as fast as it should be), stable, and does 95% of what I need to do. However, it's also been heavily influenced by the two dominant systems and represents mainly a lesser of evils.

None of them preemptively multi-task correctly, none are truly stable, all enforce constraints on software designs that create efficiency and user experience problems that are totally unnecessary, drastically limit competition, increase expense massively, and foster constant need to "upgrade" even though the tasks one uses them for doesn't really change.

Let's just take one. Why won't Word 2003 open a Word 2010 "docx" file? Enhanced use of verbs? For the life of me I can only find reasons related to raiding my wallet.

I don't get involved in OS debates as I don't like any of them and see not a dimes worth of difference. Hundreds, thousands of dollars, yes. A dimes worth...No.

I note with a sigh the press and publics "if it makes us safer.." roll over with Microsoft's latest lockdown of autorun from USB drives. Oh....not totally locked down. You can pay MS, SanDisk, and the other host of companies that have sprung up to help you spread your virus.

"Reduced expectations" doesn't begin to describe the PC business today. Given the increase in CPU speed and all components in general zero latency should have been the norm for over a decade. Instead, the very concept is unknown to any but us old timers.

Dave

[Don Richard]

I don't think that Win8 is much different than Win7 except for the touch screen interface. Just another Microsoft effort to empty your wallet on another senseless OS upgrade

[Mallette]

I don't think that Win8 is much different than Win7 except for the touch screen interface. Just another Microsoft effort to empty your wallet on another senseless OS upgrade

You win, Don. Took me way too many words... []

Dave

[Cal Blacksmith]

From what I have played with on 8, it is one "upgrade" I fully intend to skip. The touch interface is hokey and it really isn't much differnent than 7 from all I understand about it, In my book, it ranks right up (down) there the same as win ME. (a looser of a system if there ever was one)

[Marvel]

Dave, you missed my point. Win 8 seems to be faster on the old Dell Optiplex 755 than Windows XP and Windows 7. Plus, I didn't have to dig around for other drivers than what came in the install. That's a win for me (no pun inteneded).

I believe docx uses xml, which whould make it easier to open with other software, but not necessarily older software.

Bruce

[boom3]

Users can make their own compatibility by saving in earlier formats. I still use .doc and .xls and .ppt for stuff and they works just fine across a number of flavors of Windoze and Mac.

As far as price/performance, I sidestepped that by having a PC custom-built for me that uses Win 7 (my builder refused to install XP, alas). It is expressly for running two apps: WordPerfect and Corel PhotoPaint. It's on a KVM switch with the Mac, and they can see each other's directories (for data only). I use WP for all personal writing, and PhotoPaint has certain tools that are superior to those of Photoshop. Photoshop has some better image controls, so I use both in my workflow. This dedicated PC is not used to connect to the Web, and it only prints to our networked laser. I have "auto update" for most apps turned off. I do have Office 2010 on the PC, but it is strictly as back-up for the Office suite on the Mac.

I have contemplated a dedicated DOS machine running good ol' WP 5.1 (I know people who have them) but I simply have no more room in my study for yet another minitower.

My main complaint about personal computing these days is that hard drives just don't live very long. Sure, it's wonderful to have a screamin' Terrabyte in one box, but if you get 3 years out of a drive you are pushing your luck and you better have back-up. My "help desk" tells me that the problems with today's drives are usually not the drives themselves, but with the drive cases, which is a factor for me because I have a Mac Mini and I have multiple HDDs pugged into it.

[Mallette]

It wasn't a critique, Bruce. I find myself saying the same things from time to time. My point was we are all brainwashed into saying "COOL" to things like a few seconds gain in boot speed and such when boot should be nearly instantaneous as it once was and shut down just as fast.

The original concept of OS was simply an interpreter for software. Software was developed specifically for the purpose in served...not to conform to a "once size fits nobody" system.

Directories once displayed immediately. Frankly, I've no idea what's going on when I ask to view the contents of a drive that takes any appreciable time. Deleting files shouldn't require seconds of "discovering items." I've already discovered the items and simply want to get rid of them.

"Virtual memory" is absurd in a day when gigabytes of RAM is common, and if it is needed it should be transparent like some of the RAM emulators for other systems of the past. I once had one that allowed me to tell it, for each software package, whether to use only system RAM, system RAM then virtual (HD based) RAM, virtual RAM then system RAM, or virtual RAM only. Totally reliable system that completely eliminated RAM shortage. Of course, everything slowed down a lot when it crossed over to HD RAM...but it completed the task and that was a big plus in a time of expensive RAM and limited sizes.

"Multi-tasking" should be just that. My program should freeze up when I attach something to an email and haven't sent it. That should be a separate task altogether. Same for most functions. Perhaps the most aggravating is trying to carry out instructions from a help file and finding the program won't respond while the help window is active. WTF??????

There's more to things a 21rst century OS should do, a lot more, but rather than continue to list those things let's consider hardware.

It's no secret that Wintel hardware architecture is a result of IBM executives order to throw something together NOW without significant R&D. The basis for the Windows platform was pulled from existing "geek" tech of the day and has never recovered. It was a hacked and cobbled platform from day one and survived only by virtue of IBM's name causing adoption by the business world early on and then Gates expert market manipulation and stamping out of competition. Only a TINY fraction of home users chose IBM/Windows in the first decade over the far more user friendly and cost effective alternatives until it became necessary to have "compatibility" with the workplace. The first IBM PC I saw cost a couple of thousand dollars and feature monochrome graphics, two floppy drives, and 128k of RAM. Compared to the VIC-20 I had at home I thought it was completely insane...and it was.

Graphics, audio, drive interfaces, and such should be completely integrated and most systems should need no internal expansion slots of any kind. On my deathbed I may well curse those who consigned me to Lord knows how much lost lifetime hunting for drivers. Ridiculous. I still have some perfectly fine hardware for which drivers are no longer available as part of this system whose players have expertly learned how to continually pick our pockets by making us believe in something called "product life cycle."

By now, we should have a variety of "computers" specifically designed for home, technical, business, and a wide variety of other applications that work intuitively, reliably, and until destroyed or otherwise physically disabled. The needs of a teenager doing their homework, Facebook, Netflix, music, and email have absolutely NOTHING in coming with video editing, CAD, or much of anything else. Fundamental emulation to allow intermachine functionality is not rocket science and the only reason it doesn't exist is greed, inertia, and public brainwashing.

How many file types do we need for email, memos, vector drawings, video, and audio? I submit that ONE of each is adequate and that feature differences can be carried just fine as baggage. One of the better OS of old had precisely this schema. A word processor software OEM could add proprietary features, but the basic file HAD to be compatible with all other word processors such that these features were ignored by those who didn't support them, but the file could be read by all. Worked beautifully. Same was true for graphics, audio, vectors, etc.

Today we have functionally three OS choices. Linux is certainly the best performing of the bunch, but suffers being stuck with the utterly ancient Wintel architecture. Apple has a few of the features above, but not many and was forced to follow the MS bandwagon to avoid being squashed that, even though they could actually really improve things now if they wanted, they too are completely sold on the constant upgrade and keep'em buying bandwagon. It's a vertical monopoly and intends to stay that way.

There are changes beginning to show up. TVs are increasingly adding features and may well become home computers in the not too distant future. I'll get my son a new system for his room next year as he enters junior high that will be an app TV also used as a computer monitor. Right now I am figuring on Linux Mint as the OS for him as for browsing, homework, etc that distro offers complete Windows compatibility with much lower cost and higher performance...and at the same time will offer him at least some exposure to something other than "Big Brother."

Phones and tablets are also showing signs of independence.

However, none of these trends will put us where we might have been technologically but for the "dark ages" of Microsoft monopoly. Sometime in the the late 80's I recall seeing young Gates on TV proclaim "I'm going to change the way American computes..."

No question he succeeded beyond my wildest nightmares! Not only that, but he managed to destroy all competition and turn Apple, the one he allowed to live in order to protect himself from monopoly charges, into a clone.

Okies, lots of time wasted on this...but, hey, I've met all my pre-holiday deadlines, my staff has gradually been melting away all week, and had some time to waste! []

Dave

[DrWho]

Hey Dave, I think if you took a look at the history of image processing that led to different file types, that you will quickly understand why we have so many different image formats. In fact, I would contest that there is still a need for the various image formats we have today...

As far as Win 8, I am excited to see a step in the direction of a hybrid touch screen / keyboard + mouse interface. There are things I do on my cell phone because they are easier there, but there are other things that are easier with a keyboard + mouse. Having both together in a tablet/laptop type interface is really going to be a game changer - although it's going to be a few more years yet before all the software gets up to speed. And even then, it'll be another 10 years of really crappy software implementations. At least having it implemented at an OS level will force some cohesiveness between software platforms.

Btw, I just wanted to point out that while our current day software programmers could be writing way more efficient code - it actually takes way way more development time to do it. Time to market is a real cost to a software company - both in salary and lost opportunity. At the end of the day all that matters is that you meet the customer need - and I would argue that all the code optimizations to which you refer wouldn't actually result in much benefit to the end user.

For example, I only boot my machine once a week - the time it takes to boot is easily filled with other tasks that I need to complete that don't involve my computer. Or learning how to use a piece of software is a one-time learning curve - after which my productivity wouldn't change drastically with a "better" interface. My point isn't that there would be no benefit, but the amount of potential gain is relatively small in my opinion. I'm open to specific examples that prove otherwise, but I would expect major areas of user productivity increase to be high on the roadmap priority for software.

[Mallette]

Mike, I've lived "image processing history" since I learned to edit spaghetti (Super 8 film). Having met you and spent time with you I've enormous respect for your knowledge...but in this case you've drunk the kool-aid. Let's just disagree...

Same for software. Art Departmeent Professional from the 80's did the majority of what Photoshop does today and was written by one guy. Extremely compact and robust. Batch processing of morphs and animations was easy. I spend a LOT more time fiddling with and waiting on Photoshop and After Effects than I did 20 years ago with machines with 100th the power.

None of that is overstatement or LSD flashbacks. It's a fact. I still have a few files of effects I did back then that take WAY longer to reproduce now.

I will go so far as to admit that part of it is our being stuck with vector based graphics for video and simulations. That's a byproduct of winding up using machines originally designed for word processing and spreadsheets to lay out print and produce videos and simulations. It's technically absurd. In a non-monopoly situation there would be far more raster based PCs in use than vector...or, with the progress we've made technically, machines doing both. We built one at ARCO Technology Transfer Group back in the mid-90's that ran Mac, Windows, and Amiga OSs simultaneously and it was awesome. You could use each tool for what it did best and switch with a couple of key strokes, read your file into the next OS and work with it there. If one crashed, no problem...didn't bother the others at all as they were all just "tasks."

Handling video, a raster medium, with vectors is nuts. "Inefficient" doesn't begin to describe it and the lost of tools like color cycling, blitters, sprites and such remains a huge time and cost factor. Handling vectors in a raster medium is equally nuts. We need both and it was not a user choice that we are stuck with only one.

Dave

[boom3]

Dave, your observations are well taken. Have you ever tried (a recent version of) Corel PhotoPaint? Its masking tools are superior to PS. I've always been bothered by PS directions that say, "First you make a layer.." Why? You do what any other than a rank noob would do, save the file under a diif name in case it gets messed up, and keep intermediate copies for really complex projects. Yes, you can combine layers, but you can also do that with sep files. Also, PS's semantics seem to be intentionally opaque (secret words in our Photoshop club). PhotoPaint is very user friendly. Don't know if there's a version for Mac. Corel also owns WordPerfect these days and refuses to issue a Mac version.

Having said all that, PS does have some interesting image controls like Shadow/Highlight which I use a lot, and of course there are scads of plug-ins. I keep a 13 x19 printer around, but that's the end of the line for printer aspirations. Next year I hope to buy a dedicated "digital picture frame" of at least 32 inches. That will be my "printer" for just about everything graphical except greeting cards. Anything else that needs to be put on paper I'll just contract out.

[Marvel]

Boom... I used PhotoPaint for years and found it very user friendly. Still, Adobe pretty much owns the market these days. Very powerful software, but most of the control is hidden (and I barely scratch the surface for my own needs and wants).

If you know anyone who needs photo editing software, give a try to Paint.net. The program is obviously Windows only, since it requires the .net stuff, but works really well and is free. I have it installed on my wife's PC, along with Libre Office, and it handles all she needs.

Bruce

[Jeff Matthews]

In reply to Dave's comments, I have an opposite view. Apple has tried, unsuccessfully, to implement single-standard software. Obviously, closed-architecture is a good thing for stability, but in terms of improving on it, it sucks eggs. That's why Apple is learning, as MS did 30 years ago, that open-architecture is the only way to go.

Had we stayed in the dark ages, we wouldn't have object-oriented programming. Without OOP, where would we be today?

I, too, remember the old days when you had to do everything (mostly) at a command prompt. It was really, really fun when you typed a 60 character command and made a mistake. Then, you had to type the whole thing over again. Then, they came up with add-ons that would let you "up-arrow" through previous commands to find the one you want and use or change it.

I remmber the old DOS-based Word processing, where you would put all the codes in to get bold, italics, justification, etc. Then, you had to preview the doc to see what it would look like. Glad we've come to the age where you might preview your document only once, if at all, before you send it to the printer.

I remember the database days with fondness because databases were so, so simple. Now, they are not. You can still use some simple ones if you want, though. However, what has improved is the maintenance of a single database file to store data in tables. We used to have 20-30 dbf files because the technology only allowed for a single table per file. Not to mention each index for a dbf was, itself, a separate file. What fun! What fun!

I remember when you could only open 1 app at a time. The ability to have unlimited apps open simultaneously is probably the single greatest productivity improvement in our history.

I remember when networks were hard-wired with cards that had jumpers, plus settings in a config.sys file. God, those were hell to install! You never knew just which settings might result in an IRQ conflict.

Open-architecture has been such a boon for software development that the population is literally bored to death with software. The number of choices out there is insane. True, compatibility problems arise and drivers need upgrading and changing with frequency, but that's the nature of the beast.

I much prefer that than going back to the 1980's. Apple had it wrong for a long, long time. That's why they called Jobs back in. Apple was dying. What did Jobs do to save Apple? He came up with a cell phone! That tells you everything you need to know about Apple computers. Closed-architecture is doomed for failure.

[Mallette]

Have you ever tried (a recent version of) Corel PhotoPaint? Its masking tools are superior to PS.

b3, I don't doubt that a bit. Corel always made great tools. However, it's still a "paint" program in a vector environment. What I note in this thread is the difficulity of understanding how that simply cannot work well no matter how well the program is designed.

In the 80s and 90s Deluxe Paint was the dominant paint program. Doing complex animations with perspective changes, pans and zooms, and such was literally childs play and things that take hours with Photoshop or current tools could be done in minutes. About 1994 I did an animation of Academy leader in about 10 minutes. If you recall, that's the old count down from 10 seconds with the rotating wipe that was standard mopics film leader back in the day. It required about 350 frames. On a raster computer of that time there was no latency in loading 350 frames simultaneously and accessing, and working on, any given frame by number or scrubber access at will. All I had to do was produce the final screen and first screen, put the countdown numbers on key frames every 30 seconds (30fps), then tell the program to fill in the frames in between with the rotating bars and such. Preview was full screen and completely smooth and glitch free. If somebody can point me to software that will duplicate this feat on a Wintel or Apple PLEASE let me know. BTW, that program was ported to the PC...and became just as hobbled for bitmap editing as all the other because of the limitations of vector based GPUs.

Frankly, I don't think many believe me on this. So be it.

What I am saying is we are missing a key component in PCs, not that vector isn't best for some applications. We've just been "one size fits all'd." And it doesn't.

Dave