Living With Windows 8, Is It The New Vista?

After the initial lust affair with Windows 8 started in the Microsoft store, we were convinced to buy a Windows 7 PC and upgrade to Windows 8 Pro with Media Center.

Window 8 on The HP AIO
Windows 8 On HP AIO – Looks Great.

 

The initial installation to Windows 8 was the easiest upgrade I had ever done.  Literally just insert DVD , click three agree boxes and off it went.  The PC was a brand new HP AIO with a 23” screen.  The plan was to get a serial adapter and then use a second 22” HP screen we already had.

 

HP has been our choice for PC’s ever since 2004 when we returned our last Dell and compared Sony and HP laptops.  The Sony’s were better, lighter and faster, but no touch screen and basically the same price.  HP won out and we had planned to continue that tradition as we moved into Windows 8.

 

Our experience with HP includes: Two HP Touchsmart laptops, an HP Touchsmart 20” All In One or AIO desktop and three HP tower type desktops, all getting daily abuse over the last 9 years. I have been a little paranoid about desktop storage.  I once had an employee lose a years worth of work on a customers job because he failed to back up.  Now with auto backup every time they log into the office, we don’t have that problem. Apple has the same feature available with Timeport.

 

Because of my data loss paranoia, we now have a Buffalo Terra Station with RAID 5 at the office and a NetGear ReadyNAS+ at home with RAID 5 as well.  Eight TB each.  I don’t store anything on any PC ever.  We have tried iCloud, SkyDrive, and other “cloud” services too.  iCloud makes me crazy because you can’t see iCloud files in the Mac finder.  I assumed that Windows 8 would play along fine with our servers.

 

With the new MacBooks, they work very nicely with the servers but get confused every time they leave the office, and I have yet to find a way to auto reconnect the servers.  I assume this is because Apple wants me to buy their servers instead.  The occasional disconnects from the server have become tolerable and yet remain the primary reason all of our desktops at home and office have remained Windows 7 based PCs.

 

Windows 8 might just become the catalyst of change in our office, and not one that Steve Ballmer is going to be happy with.

 

After setting up the initial screen “Tiles” on Windows 8, we really liked the ability to see a snapshot of your world on one screen.  This is the perfect solution for a kitchen tablet, or shared family PC that isn’t used for work.  Much better than the small screen iPad.  With HP AIO computers starting at just $799 for the touchscreen models, it makes sense to have a 20” tablet in the kitchen for controlling lights and easily reading recipes.

 

This is also the failing of Windows 8.

 

Knowing there were major changes to the thought process and operation of Windows 8, I let a lot of things go in my two initial articles about Windows 8.  I assumed the problems I was having were simple user errors and I would learn how to do it right later.

 

Wrong.

 

The next thing I wanted to set up was our server access.  It took a while but I found a help file article to map network drives.  Already I found myself clicking on the “desktop” tile to return to a more familiar file finding method.  I couldn’t “Map” any of our music or photo folders on the server to the “libraries” on the PC as I could in Windows 7.  In Windows 7 it was a two step process of mapping a drive and then adding the folders in the drive to the library.  In iTunes it was worse.  Again I assumed Apple wants me to buy their toys.

 

In Windows 8 it can’t be done easily.  At least no way that I found.  Next of course was mapping the photos drive so we would have easy access to them for creating customer websites.   This is where the big problems started.  I still haven’t found media center, even though we bought “Windows 8 Pro with Media Center”.  What we found were tiled versions of pieces of media center, that wouldn’t allow mapping of our server for media access.  I tried the XBox music interface, and no luck there either.

 

Finally it was time to simply work.  We tried to Upload the latest non-cloud based versions of Office and Expression Web.  We also tried to set up mail.  POP is no longer supported.

 

Using iMap we were able to get Windows Live Mail to work.  We couldn’t get it to tile, only “fence post”.  I say fence post because it takes a full vertical slice of your screen.  Instead of a 3×3 tile or “window” that can hide behind a word document, mail is displayed as a 3” wide vertical stripe on the screen.  Even in “desktop” mode.  We couldn’t open a document, two browsers and an email window or tile on one desktop to do basic research and write copy for a web page.

 

After eight hours, we decided to make the vote final.  The result is a unanimous agreement that Windows 8 isn’t ready for business.  It reminds me of the release of Vista after XP.

 

Microsoft’s two major advantages have been price and seamless operation between home and work devices.  With a Mac at $599, a Windows 8 PC at Costco for $499 and the new Dell AIO at $1199, with the new iMac at $1499, the price gap is narrowing.  When you add the value of your time, I believe it was just eliminated.

 

Windows 8 will likely change the playing field in ways no one intended.  As an alternative to Apple OSX for the home, Windows 8 is a great information center.  As a tablet interface, Windows 8 is the best available.  As a phone interface.  Same.  As a PC in a work environment, it hands the keys to Apple, which is where I am going today.  Our first Mac will hit a desktop Monday.  I’ll let you know how it goes.

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