Install StartIsBack > Disable Metro = Win 7 with all the 8.1 under the hood improvements

This man knows!!! 😀

I'd be happy to see the charm bar go. In windows 8.1 it is utterly useless, and it was nearly useless in 8.0. Give all the hate you want to metro - I don't think it's that bad. It could have been executed much better, but a lot of you who hate it are just incapable of experiencing change. Since I only use Windows for gaming, I can't say I'd be fond of the metro interface when it comes to a productive environment, but then again, even windows 7 annoys me when trying to do something productive.

but a lot of you who hate it are just incapable of experiencing change.

Metro fanboi Stuck record sentence Funny, most of us never had any problems with change coming from DOS > Win 7 Suddenly those of us who don't like Metro are incapable of change? No, we can just see it for what it really is, pointless and useless

It could have been executed much better, but a lot of you who hate it are just incapable of experiencing change.

I don't think it's that -- I just think people are incapable of seeing things that are outside of what effects them. Like Metro was obviously never intended to do much for a keyboard and mouse user. Coming from previous OS's it was a sidegrade at best. I can perform the same tasks on 8.1 then I can on 7 in the same amount of time. There were a few benefits and a few drawbacks. Overall I think it was slightly better then previous designs. The real benefit came for people with touch devices, whether that be laptops or tablets. The experience is significantly better there. Unfortunately most people here don't care about touch experiences or about how others use their computers. So they just write it off as "**** experience that's change for changes sake" when it obviously isn't. I mean yeah maybe Microsoft should have enabled an option to set it back but I think it's more about unifying the user experience. They want someone to be able to pick up a windows phone, tablet or PC and have the same experience across all the devices. They clearly have a ways to go in terms of intuitive design on the interface but I think they are making the right choices.

Install StartIsBack > Disable Metro = Win 7 with all the 8.1 under the hood improvements

Hardly. Have you tried removing OneDrive? Lock screen? Getting rid of the whole obnoxious monochromatic Ribbon-filled interface? And so on... Not to mention the under the hood improvements are noticeable only on computers with weak CPUs and HDDs for system.

One method that we heard about that stands out is having a button up near the window controls that once pressed, would reveal the Search, Share, Devices and Settings charms from the top of the window (there's no need for a Start Button for desktop users in the charms.)

Of course there is no need for a Start button if you turn Charms into Start Menu you twats. And people will applaud you.

Hardly. Have you tried removing OneDrive? Lock screen? Getting rid of the whole obnoxious monochromatic Ribbon-filled interface? And so on... Not to mention the under the hood improvements are noticeable only on computers with weak CPUs and HDDs for system.

Don't want to remove onedrive, if you don't like it, don't use it, it doesn't get in the way, but there are methods if you took the time to google it I like the new explorer UI Never seen the lock screen since I enabled automatic login Under the hood changes go way beyond helping slow-ass PCs

Of course there is no need for a Start button if you turn Charms into Start Menu you twats. And people will applaud you.

Mature

Metro fanboi Stuck record sentence

I am not by any means a fan of metro, or windows in general. I think there are plenty of legitimate issues with the interface. However, what most people don't like about it are not legitimate complaints - they just don't like things that are different. It's kind of like every change that ever happened to youtube. Most of them were great but people lost their minds. Related videos on the right side of the screen pissed people off. Why? It was a great addition. Google allowed infinite characters and other ASCII text, but people got pissed because it attached you to G+, which is hardly a drawback. Anyway, I would prefer the classic start menu over metro, but considering how little I use Windows and how little metro bothers me, I don't care to do anything about it. As someone who primary uses linux, I know very well when people hate something just because of change.

Funny, most of us never had any problems with change coming from DOS > Win 7 Suddenly those of us who don't like Metro are incapable of change? No, we can just see it for what it really is, pointless and useless

Funny how irrelevant that point is. First of all, you're talking about going from a CLI to GUI - interfaces so different they needed terminology to distinguish them. Second, even if for some reason there was a jump from DOS to W7, there were a lot of interface changes in the 16-bit era of Windows. The interface layout W7 uses has been pretty much the same since 1994, which is when MS really started gaining popularity. Third, the average home user didn't use DOS. Home PCs didn't get popularity up until Windows 3.1 came out. That being said, there wasn't enough public opinion to suddenly hate something that was different. It was mostly just tech-savvy people who embraced new things. I stand by my point - it's a common occurrence, in more than just the PC world, where people hate change no matter how practical or useless it is.

Lean in terms of system processes and services. Quite a significant amount of RAM can be freed from disabling unneeded stuff. Not implying that everyone absolutely needs every bit of memory, but I have an OCD to keep my system snappy at all times and I'm sure expert/power users would like that as well. Keeping the traditional UI would just take up at most few hundred MB of storage. You only have one running so it doesn't bog down the system at all.

Well in Windows 8 did just that. They combined a number of services together to reduce the memory footprint and reduced the overall number of services running. They changed memory handling a number of other things to reduce memory usage as well. + More accurate system timers so the processes finish cycles faster. I mean there is only so much they can optimize before it effects the wide variety of use cases of windows users. Like I'm sure there are things that you can turn off as a gamer that you find unnecessary but would heavily impact a business user. And honestly in this day and age I can't really see how turning off processes would have even a minor impact on performance.

Windows still has a long way to go before it's considered lean. I have Windows 8.1 running from a 20GB SSD (that I pulled from a laptop that used it as a cache drive) and I really struggled to get it on there due to how stupidly bloated the OS is, particularly the winsxs folder. That folder alone, without installing ANYTHING, uses up more disk space than both of my linux setups and my Windows XP setup combined, excluding media files and games. It also uses up more RAM than all 3 of those setups. And for the record, one of my linux setups runs KDE with compositing enabled, which in the linux world is really resource demanding. There is absolutely no reason for Windows to be this bloated. And MS wonders why nobody wants their OS on tablets...

Windows still has a long way to go before it's considered lean. I have Windows 8.1 running from a 20GB SSD (that I pulled from a laptop that used it as a cache drive) and I really struggled to get it on there due to how stupidly bloated the OS is, particularly the winsxs folder. That folder alone, without installing ANYTHING, uses up more disk space than both of my linux setups and my Windows XP setup combined, excluding media files and games. It also uses up more RAM than all 3 of those setups. And for the record, one of my linux setups runs KDE with compositing enabled, which in the linux world is really resource demanding. There is absolutely no reason for Windows to be this bloated. And MS wonders why nobody wants their OS on tablets...

Well first of all ram usage is meaningless. The perfect OS should fill your ram entirely and swap things in as needed without any hitching. Windows already does this with caching, it's the reason why idling now my machine is using 8GB of 16 of ram. At work I have PC's with only 2GB of ram running 8 and it runs fine. As for the diskspace thing Windows supports way more devices then linux does out of the box. You can argue that in an internet connected world that this is no longer necessary, but in the meantime I'd rather have that support then not -- especially when installing to new machines. Also the WinSXS folder is for storing old dll verisoning for compatibility to multiple apps. Again you can argue that Windows should just drop compatibility for older apps like most linux distro's do, but I along with most people would probably rather them maintain compatibility. And have you used a surface? Windows 8 runs great on it. Like I get that eats a good part of the partition but as SSDs increase in size it's becoming a non-issue.

I like the modern UI implementation and all of the improvements Windows 8 and 8.1 made over 7 a lot.

It's a rare thing to come across someone who actually likes Windows 8. ...The few... The proud.

It's a rare thing to come across someone who actually likes Windows 8. ...The few... The proud.

I like it? Most people at my job like it?

Well first of all ram usage is meaningless. The perfect OS should fill your ram entirely and swap things in as needed without any hitching. Windows already does this with caching, it's the reason why idling now my machine is using 8GB of 16 of ram. At work I have PC's with only 2GB of ram running 8 and it runs fine.

Agreed - no point in having RAM if you're not going to use it. But Windows 8 64 bit running on 2GB of RAM is still going to have less memory available to applications than an OS like XP or linux. Basically that's like buying a truck for the extra HP but if the housing uses an extra heavy metal for "durability", you waste a lot of that HP that you could have otherwise used for other applications. So, you could have just saved yourself some money and just buy something weaker that offers the same performance in the end. In another perspective, maybe if Windows applications weren't so bloated to begin with, you wouldn't HAVE to cache everything to get snappy performance.

As for the diskspace thing Windows supports way more devices then linux does out of the box. You can argue that in an internet connected world that this is no longer necessary, but in the meantime I'd rather have that support then not -- especially when installing to new machines. Also the WinSXS folder is for storing old dll verisoning for compatibility to multiple apps. Again you can argue that Windows should just drop compatibility for older apps like most linux distro's do, but I along with most people would probably rather them maintain compatibility.

No, it doesn't - Windows does NOT come with more drivers out of the box. It comes with the bare essentials and uses Windows Update to download the rest. Linux is a monolithic kernel and comes with as many drivers as it can possibly supply. All 3rd party drivers are closed-source or demand to be used in userspace. As for maintaining compatibility, the way Windows does it is a complete waste. The winsxs folder is basically the MS equivalent of /lib, and it completely fails because applications often come with their own libraries and don't even check winsxs. But, the folder is also relatively difficult to maintain and probably at least 60% of those libraries will never be used by the average person. While Windows supports symlinks and hardlinks, it uses them so scarcely. In a unix-like environment, all applications share libraries at all times (and if they don't you can force them to) and you only get the libraries you actually need/use. Since most libraries are only a few hundred KB on average, the wait to get them is hardly a drawback. I'd much rather download a library when I need it than spend $15 on SSD space on libraries I don't need.

And have you used a surface? Windows 8 runs great on it. Like I get that eats a good part of the partition but as SSDs increase in size it's becoming a non-issue.

I'm sure it runs fine, because the hardware is sufficient. But coming back to my original point, other ARM based platforms only have maybe 1GB of RAM. An OS like android or iOS can handle this just fine, and so can linux. But try getting Windows RT on there (assuming the drivers exist) and you'll be using up the paging file in no time. Considering the hardware you own, you'll never really relate to what I'm talking about. If you've got $1000 to spare on a PC, then most of my complaints are irrelevant. But I personally like to have an efficient and optimized system and I don't like wasting my money on things I don't need.

schmidtbag, look at MY specs.... I'm running Windows8 just fine. I could pull half my ram out and still run it just fine. For "day to day" tasks, Windows8.x is just as responsive on the system in my specs as it is on my folding rig. I also run Win8.x on a laptop with a dual core Celeron 1007U with 4GB of ram and it's still just as responsive. Windows does in fact come with more drivers "out of the box" than Linux. Linux doesn't actually come with any drivers "out of the box". Just ask Canonical's devs. Or the devs working on the Fedora Project. Ubuntu and Fedora are operating systems based on Linux. Linux itself is nothing but a kernel and as such comes with no drivers at all. Linux based operating systems have a very limited assortment of supported hardware. Android is based on Linux..... Android runs better with more ram, as do the various Linux distros (which recommend creating a swap partition for better performance). That's why Android smartphones are coming with 2GB and up.

schmidtbag, look at MY specs.... I'm running Windows8 just fine. I could pull half my ram out and still run it just fine. For "day to day" tasks, Windows8.x is just as responsive on the system in my specs as it is on my folding rig. I also run Win8.x on a laptop with a dual core Celeron 1007U with 4GB of ram and it's still just as responsive.

Uh... your RAM specs are better than mine. My system runs fine too, I'm not saying Windows' performance is bad. You're acting like 4GB is small, and if you are, you kind of just proved my point. Depending on what you do, 4GB isn't enough. But 4GB for the average user and gamer is plenty. 2GB is enough for the average user, as long as they don't have a bunch of adware and other crap running.

Windows does in fact come with more drivers "out of the box" than Linux. Linux doesn't actually come with any drivers "out of the box". Just ask Canonical's devs. Or the devs working on the Fedora Project. Ubuntu and Fedora are operating systems based on Linux. Linux itself is nothing but a kernel and as such comes with no drivers at all. Linux based operating systems have a very limited assortment of supported hardware.

I'm aware Linux is a kernel. I'm aware you're capable of compiling the kernel without involving drivers. But it isn't an OS when it's just a kernel. When you treat Linux as an OS (in other words, when it has a user-accessible shell and login prompt), just about every distribution has a massive collection of drivers. On the note of asking devs, ask the Intel or AMD devs how they handle drivers. They'll tell you that they must be compiled at kernel level. Meaning, merging it with the kernel when forming the complete OS is a necessity. Obviously, that doesn't matter if you're on a platform like MIPS - the beauty of having an open source platform is not being forced to ship everything at once. Anyway, when people refer to the USAGE and installation of Linux, they're referring to it as an OS, otherwise, they explicitly mention "the Linux kernel". In most cases, there is no need to refer to the kernel by itself. If you really think something like that matters, then you should have referred to it as it's "proper" term, GNU/Linux.

Android is based on Linux..... Android runs better with more ram, as do the various Linux distros (which recommend creating a swap partition for better performance). That's why Android smartphones are coming with 2GB and up.

I'm aware... I wasn't disagreeing with that. What I'm saying is even if Windows, relatively speaking, puts the available memory to good use, it still uses up more RAM than necessary and leaves less room for applications to use. When that happens, your performance drops. Android runs so smooth on 2GB because it doesn't need much. Try running 64 bit Windows on 2GB and you'll likely get some stuttering in your web browsing or games.

It is when it's an annoyance, unneeded, and bloats your software

that's your opinion, lets say there is people who like it, I like the consistency between my windows gadgets, but there is something I like even more called "options" if only Microsoft could understand that...

Uh... your RAM specs are better than mine. My system runs fine too, I'm not saying Windows' performance is bad. You're acting like 4GB is small, and if you are, you kind of just proved my point. Depending on what you do, 4GB isn't enough. But 4GB for the average user and gamer is plenty. 2GB is enough for the average user, as long as they don't have a bunch of adware and other crap running. I'm aware Linux is a kernel. I'm aware you're capable of compiling the kernel without involving drivers. But it isn't an OS when it's just a kernel. When you treat Linux as an OS (in other words, when it has a user-accessible shell and login prompt), just about every distribution has a massive collection of drivers. On the note of asking devs, ask the Intel or AMD devs how they handle drivers. They'll tell you that they must be compiled at kernel level. Meaning, merging it with the kernel when forming the complete OS is a necessity. Obviously, that doesn't matter if you're on a platform like MIPS - the beauty of having an open source platform is not being forced to ship everything at once. Anyway, when people refer to the USAGE and installation of Linux, they're referring to it as an OS, otherwise, they explicitly mention "the Linux kernel". In most cases, there is no need to refer to the kernel by itself. If you really think something like that matters, then you should have referred to it as it's "proper" term, GNU/Linux. I'm aware... I wasn't disagreeing with that. What I'm saying is even if Windows, relatively speaking, puts the available memory to good use, it still uses up more RAM than necessary and leaves less room for applications to use. When that happens, your performance drops. Android runs so smooth on 2GB because it doesn't need much. Try running 64 bit Windows on 2GB and you'll likely get some stuttering in your web browsing or games.

Yes, I have 8GB of DDR3-1866.....running in Single Channel mode. On average, I use 1.5-2.5GB of that 8GB. Fedora comes with nothing but basic drivers. Same for SuSE and OpenSuSE. They require access to repositories to obtain drivers. Xandros (now de-funct Linux distro from way back) also lacked drivers (and hardware support in general). RedHat only came with basic drivers. Pretty well every Linux distro requires access to repositories for drivers. That's the exact opposite of "out of the box" support. I have yet to see a Linux distro that actually contains half the drivers the Windows install media does. They typically include generic drivers that provide basic functionality. Hardware specific drivers are downloaded from repositories.

Yes, I have 8GB of DDR3-1866.....running in Single Channel mode. On average, I use 1.5-2.5GB of that 8GB. Fedora comes with nothing but basic drivers. Same for SuSE and OpenSuSE. They require access to repositories to obtain drivers. Xandros (now de-funct Linux distro from way back) also lacked drivers (and hardware support in general). RedHat only came with basic drivers. Pretty well every Linux distro requires access to repositories for drivers. That's the exact opposite of "out of the box" support. I have yet to see a Linux distro that actually contains half the drivers the Windows install media does. They typically include generic drivers that provide basic functionality. Hardware specific drivers are downloaded from repositories.

Not sure what you're referring to as "basic drivers" but that involves literally thousands of chipsets, which can involve tens of thousands of devices. If you're referring to proprietary drivers for stuff like wifi and GPUs, those are pretty much the only exceptions that you usually have to go out of your way to install. If you consider that a lot, I'm not sure you're aware how many drivers are involved to make an OS functional to an end user. What Windows shows in device manager is only part of it. If you personally use something like fedora or Ubuntu, I'm really curious how you could have possibly needed to manually install more than 2 drivers. Anyway, pretty much every distro uses the same drivers that have proven stable by the kernel release. Many distros are picky about licensing, so they use open source drivers, which cover most hardware. These days finding a wifi adapter that requires closed source drivers or ndiswrapper are pretty rare. Broadcom and Ralink are pretty much the only ones who are consistenly a pain about that. In Windows, however, you STILL need to go out of your way to get proper video drivers, and for my particular setup I had to wait for Windows Update to download roughly 15 drivers for my system. With Linux, the only thing I installed was a color laser printer, because it involves closed source drivers. I'm using Arch (which is more stripped down than others like Fedora). Such devices I use that worked out-of-the-box in Linux, but not Windows, were: * RAID controller * Label printer * USB 3.0 ports * PCMCIA reader * The original xbox S controller (have fun finding drivers for that in Windows 8 64 bit) * wifi Windows will automatically download and install a lot of drivers for you, and sometimes I prefer windows update to get them because then I don't have to deal with the crappy utilities that often come with drivers. But you don't want the default video drivers it acquires and in some cases, like mine, the audio drivers it gets don't work properly (I use SPDIF which Windows for whatever reason couldn't use without the official drivers).

Everyone I know including me disables the fraking "charms" bar anyways. Not to mention everything else you have to do to get a desktop OS and never see metro again. You know Microsoft has it's collective head up it's collective ass when you have to spend a hour fixing the UI (restore the start menu, disable boot-to-metro, disable hot conrers, etc.) just so the user can actually use the OS. Perhaps now they have finally managed to pry their collective heads out of their collective ass? We've only been asking for this since Windows 8 launched: Give us a real start menu, throw out Metro, throw out the charms bar, get rid of the hot corners, and stop trying to make everyone get a "Microsoft Account" to force everyone to use their useless apps store. The underlying OS engine is great... faster boot times, more secure, better task manager, native support for more hardware, etc. But the Metro UI experience on a keyboard-and-mouse PC was like a hot mess spread on toast and offered up as if it it was fine dining. To make Windows 8 successful all they needed to do it keep the UI the same as Windows 7 while updating what is under the hood. If they must insist on being an also-ran in the tablet market then fine; launch Metro on tablets only and call it Metro or some other clever name the boys and girls in branding can come up with. But no, no they tried to force EVERYONE to use the effing Metro. FAIL!

thing with linux is it can run on anything. old machines to new machines. windows 8 was designed with new machines in mind and wont install on older machines due to processors. but this is a killer right there. forcing people to buy new machines so they can get windows 8. tsk. 8.1 worse because people with dells that are 5+years old can not run it because the video card that in it doesnt have 1.3 drivers. even though win 8.0 ran with the drivers just fine. and the stupid window media center key not working with 8.1. tried explaining to my dad that he cant activate windows 8.1 media center with the key that was used on 8.0. and he still did it anyway and deactivated the system and couldnt get the system to reactivate.:bang: why the fu** dont people listen to me? microsoft trying to get rid of their past and force everyone to do the same thing.