Windows 8 Upgrade

[dave]

Me oh my. I've spent the last few days up to my eyeballs in Windows 8. Struck by a momentary insane thought to upgrade my XP sp3 to Windows 8, and egged on by the special deal of $39.95 if bought on line before January 31, I followed through with the craziness.

No babe in the woods, I carefully read the preparatory material, which said to run a special evaluation program that would download and look all around my system and prepare a report for my perusal dealing with any anticipated issues. So I let it whir and gig around in there and the net result was that Microsoft through their software told me not to worry, the only thing might possibly go wrong is that my DVD recording software might not work. Since I hardly ever use it, I looked forward to an uneventul up-conversion.

In retrospect, that was pretty stupid of me. To trust Microsoft, let alone their software. Windows 8 came in like a crazed theif, serial murderer and genuinely ill mannered guest and tore up my PC something fierce. It destroyed my Thunderbird mailing system. It threw most of my applications overboard, it shot dead my favorite fonts and it didn't even bother to explain itself. There doesn't appear to be any Help. Luckily after I got FIrefox back up an running (Internet Explorer came through fine, of course, but not Chrome or Safari for Windows) I got on line and started Googling all of my answers. The benefit of getting the scoop from fellow users is you don't have to put up with Microsoft Help's tone deafness ... "what happened to my fonts?" ... "Microsoft is not responsible for" ... or"Have you sought help from your user community?" ...
The down side of getting help from other users is the possibility of getting an answer like, "Well, I haven't tried it, but my brother in law says to go into the registry ...

Win8 has it's own "start" page instead of the familiar Start list in the bottom left hand corner. It's like a Speed Dial that scrolls left and right, very colorful, and loaded with THEIR choices which take you to their profit centers. And you'd think they forgot there is a right mouse button, since it seems to help explain things a lot less in Win 8.

I did finally get my mail back, by the way. All the files were sitting in a root file they never mentioned, windows.old. That's where they dumped mostly everything they didn't like. To give you an idea of how much Microsoft didn't like, my windows.old is 20 gigabytes large!

PLUSES
All the network stuff came right up, no problem. And so did the devices, except for my SoundMax card. The card came up ok, but I have nothing but a slider for master and none for Wave output or different audio inputs.

Even though Win 8 didn't like many of my old programs I use for radio work, when I tried to run an incompatible program, it coughed, offered to run a compatibility evaluation and when successful marked the program to run in compatibility mode. That's pretty nice.

I DO like the new Start thingy, even more so when I finally discovered how to switch back and forth between it and the mostly normal old style desktop with icons.

I hated moving from XP's file manager to that of Windows7. Win 8's file manager has a few neat tricks, including the ability to select multiple folders instead of just multiple files. It searches much faster, too, than XP and a bit faster than Win7.

There's more, but I'm tired of thinking about it. And writing about it.

[clarencebunsen]

I considered doing an upgrade on my XP machine. The upgrade adviser came up with a few issues but I thought I could deal with them. The deadline for ending XP support is fast approaching & I need to do something. Then I considered that what I was contemplating was putting a shiny new operating system on a machine with a 10 year old hard drive and an equally old power supply, mother board, CD drive, DVD reader only & a floppy drive. Then I considered that I could get something with higher specs all around for about $300. The end result is that I have done nothing yet.

My wife has a Win 8 notebook. The first few days were a struggle. I bought her a book but she refused to open it (gotta remember to return it & get my money back). She figured out most of it on her own & when stuck took the easy way out, asked me to figure it out. I went through the tutorial installed on the machine, downloaded Firefox and I think I have most of the basics figured out.

[Clipper]

What will actually happen to those of us with XP machines? What do they mean by "no longer support XP?" Does it mean that on that date my machine will quit working and that I HAVE to load a different operating system before that date? When IS that date?

I think that just about covers all the questions from this resident "computer challenged dummy."

[clarencebunsen]

April 8, 2014

Your machine will still work but after that date MS will no longer supply updates, patches or technical support. No more security fixes. Since about half the PCs in the world still run XP events in the next few months could be interesting. My guess is that many companies will offer third party support but that a majority of them will be scams.

www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/endofsupport.aspx

[dave]

Even as a voracious reader, I agree with your wife, CB, and would not delve into a book on Win 8 for a variety of reasons. Other than some are written by know-nothings, much of the info is out of date by the time you get the book. Besides reading about this stuff is deadly boring. It always seems faster to just step into it, with the aid of google anyway.

Another thing I didn't consider was that I'm really strapped for hard drive space, and now I'm right up to my teeth. I'll get enough of it back when I can' finally get rid of window.old, but I still should probably have bought a new hd before I did this. I suppose an ancillary drive will do me for now. I really don't need to upgrade this old Lenovo, so I'm sticking with it. I bought is used for from IBM for $179 and it's a 3.2 GHz machine with 2G memory. In fact, I have a spare with only 1 G membory, so in case I have a hardware problem, I might use that. If I had another flat monitor, I'd consider running 2 machines, but I really don't need two.

[clarencebunsen]

External hard drives are fairly inexpensive. I bought one for my machine 2-3 years ago. It's amazing how cheap memory has gotten. I remember when I had a 20 Meg (not Gig) hard drive and spent every Saturday doing file maintenance and backing up to floppies.

Now I have a Word document just for jokes which is over 1 Meg and is backed up on a Microsoft server somewhere.

[dave]

Yes, I've considered getting an outboard hard drive. I think I have a lot of stuff that doesn't need to be speedily accessed. USB ports are not all that fast. I like the the wifi'd hard drives, too, for our two netbooks and desktop, but that might be too slow. When I did the measurements to see if putting a whisk on my router antenna helped (it did!) I was surprised how much the wifi network slows down transmission.

[chris]

I still have WindowsXP on my main PC (desktop) My netbook came with Windows 7. I am like Clipper with the questions. For my PC I think when push comes to shove I'll just get a new computer. Not sure if I'll need to do anything with the Netbook. it's only usd for surfing and nothing more. No mail or files on it.

[clarencebunsen]

Vista, Windows 7 & Windows 8 are all continue to be supported. From what I've read Win 7 should be supported until 2020.

www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/microsoft-quietly-extends-consumer-support-for-windows-7-vista/4529

[strikeslip]

I've upgraded my windows machines to a flavor of Linux called Ubuntu, but set them up to dual boot so I can still use my old windows software too... im given a choice of operating system on boot up. Ubuntu is FREE! You can also burn a "live" CD or put the operating system on a USB stick and try it out before installing it. It takes a bit of getting used to, but I've been using it for a couple years now and the system gets better and better and I use windows less and less. Shut downs are much faster than Windows. Software is installed from on-line repositories. A lot of windows software has Linux versions... and if you cannot find a Linux version there is often something equivalent. My 10 yr old dell became virtually useless with the sp4 xp upgrade. Ubuntu gave the machine new life. If you want to try it out go to. www.ubuntu.com/

[dave]

My son has been using Ubuntu for a few years. And there are other versions of Linux that are popular. I'm trying to think of the one Jon Hynes used and recommended. It came rather late on the scene.

I had toyed with the idea of dual booting Ubuntu with Windows, which I understand is slower than a native Ubuntu. And in fact sometime during my Win 8 upgrade I said to myself, "why don't I just throw this damned software out the window and make it a Linux machine?"

But the bottom line is I seldom have very many problems with Windows (up to now,) and a lot of my radio software (radio control programs, audio filters, demodulators for radio teletype, phase shift modes, etc.) is Windows based. Rebooting all the time to use them doesn't sound like much fun.

Still, Ubuntu would be fun to try. I did just set up a 350 gig external drive, so I could boot it from there, I think. I will put it off, however, until I get through this Win 8 introductory phase. I'm in the middle of solving some conpatibility issues at the moment. But otherwise, it's going OK. I have found one thing I like about Win 8 and that is its file manager (File Explorer.) You can select multiple FOLDERS to copy. Don't think I ever tried it on Win 7 with my netbook, so I don't know if Win 7 has that featuare, but I couldn't do it in XP. And of course, like Win 7, searching for files in File Explorer is a lot faster than XP.

Microsoft's concept of a new Start Panel leaves me cold. Why the hell would I want to scroll sideways through a bunch of icons when on a desktop I can see them all at once and quickly move my mouse pointer to the one I want. Plus, Win 8 start icons are stylized and to my eye all look the same. Finding the icon for the program I want is quite tedious. Thankfully, Win 8 affords the option of using either the Win 8 Start or a normal desktop.

[clarencebunsen]

Strikeslip,
A reasonable suggestion, one I've considered & one I may take. To date I haven't been willing to "bite the bullet" and make that switch. I think I've been afraid that I'll let myself get distracted by the technical details instead of just doing what needs to be done. Over the past year I've been transitioning to making my Win 7 notebook my main machine but I still use the Dell XP almost daily. There is no way to make a notebook, a netbook or a tablet as comfortable to use. Perhaps a dual boot would be a good solution for me.

Dave,
Another Linux distribution many people seem to like is Mint. Is that the one you are trying to remember?

[dave]

Yes, it was indeed Mint. Jon had used Ubuntu, but said he liked Mint better. Of course, I have mentioned elsewhere that Jon sometimes had screen resolution problems when logging into forums. And my son tells me Ubuntu will have some limitations for anyone used to Windows.