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Author Topic: Microsoft rumored to be preparing to make Windows 8.1 freeware Leo Enticknap Film God Posts: 7474 From: Loma Linda, CA Registered: Jul 2000 posted 03-01-2014 12:22 AM                        Story in the Daily Wail Executive summary: Microsoft is said to be considering giving away a free version of Windows 8.1, which is to be called "Windows with Bing", along with restoring the proper start menu and desktop (in effect, relegating the "Metro" screen to an optional extra that desktop users could ignore altogether), in an attempt to persuade more people to upgrade from earlier versions (and I suspect, to stem the loss of desktop market share to MacOS and Linux). This strikes me as yet another blunder. My understanding is that around 99% of copies of Windows are supplied preloaded onto PCs, and that only a tiny minority of geeky users would ever try to upgrade an existing computer to a later version. Therefore if MS did start to give away Windows, the main beneficiaries would be the big hardware manufacturers, and I feel safe in predicting that they would not pass those cost savings on to their customers! After all the bad reviews Windows 8 has had, I suspect that only a tiny minority of owners of W7 computers would contemplate trying to install 8.1 on their machines, even if it was offered to them for free: not least because that tiny minority are precisely the people who will have educated themselves as to how bad W8 is. The other thing that strikes me as ominous is that if they are going to produce a specific free version that is separate from, but marketed alongside the paid-for one, this says to me that the free version will probably be laden with crapware, locked down in various irritating ways (e.g. it won't allow you to install any browser besides IE) ... you name it. I can't believe that they're seriously contemplating doing this. But there again, I couldn't believe that they'd produce a version of Windows with some of its most popular, intuitive and easiest to use features stripped out and replaced with ones that are the exact opposite. But they did.  |  IP: Logged Steve Kraus Film God Posts: 4094 From: Chicago, IL, USA Registered: May 2000 posted 03-01-2014 08:49 AM                    Is there any serious market loss to Mac or Linux? Perhaps just enough to keep them from being labeled a monopolist. Too bad they don't just sell XP to someone who, for a small fee, could keep security patches coming.  |  IP: Logged Mark Lensenmayer Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1605 From: Upper Arlington, OH Registered: Sep 1999 posted 03-01-2014 01:54 PM                     The problem with Windows is not an exodus to Mac or Linux...it's more that people just don't see a need for a new operating system, and they don't like what they see in Windows 8. Just read an article this week from a Windows expert. His living is made by writing books on the subject. He says he can not recommend Windows 8 to either experienced or inexperienced users. I was seriously looking at buying a new computer this week, but am holding off because I do NOT want Windows 8 as my main system. There are a few manufacturers out there who will install Windows 7, but not on the configuration I was considering.  |  IP: Logged Leo Enticknap Film God Posts: 7474 From: Loma Linda, CA Registered: Jul 2000 posted 03-01-2014 02:19 PM                        My laptop (2007 vintage) is now getting a bit sluggish, and so I'm looking into a new one. The bottom line - the current range of models simply aren't available with 7. I even went into Office Depot and tried to haggle with an assistant there. She was prepared to negotiate on all sorts of things, but not a downgrade to W7. Everyone asks that, but sorry, she can't offer it. Basically, I'm either going to have to wait until MS sees sense and does a version of 8 that gets rid of the tile screen shite totally for its desktop/conventional laptop machine configuration (i.e. non-touchscreen), or buy one with 8 preinstalled, shell out another $100 for an OEM 7 license and install it myself. I'll probably give it another couple of months before deciding. I have 7 and Ubuntu installed on separate partitions on my computers, and use Ubuntu most of the time. However, there are a few things that I just need Windows for (Adobe CS, mainly), and therefore abandoning Windows altogether isn't an option for me, annoyingly.  |  IP: Logged Joe Redifer You need a beating today Posts: 12859 From: Denver, Colorado Registered: May 99 posted 03-01-2014 02:30 PM                        I think Microsoft is the only one who actually still SELLS their OS, which is stupid. Apple offers their OS for free. Linux, well, yeah it's always been free. Now MS looks like a bunch of retards selling an OS weaker than the other two. Making it free is a good way to cub some of that. I think more people would upgrade if MS didn't release a new OS only once every 4 or 5 years or so. New OS from Apple happens about every year. New OS from Linux happens probably twice every day. What's even worse about MS is that their OS is friggin' EXPENSIVE! And they offer a whole bunch of different flavors like Home, Student, Employee, Server, Enterprise, Professional, Ex wife, etc etc etc etc. WHY? There should be a standard edition and maybe a more powerful server edition and that's it. Also Windows 8 sucks nobody wants that.  |  IP: Logged Frank Cox Film God Posts: 2234 From: Melville Saskatchewan Canada Registered: Apr 2011 posted 03-01-2014 02:41 PM                        Have you (i.e. Leo)considered Virtual Box for your Microsoft program needs? I'm currently using it to play with the RHEL 7 beta, which I installed a few days ago. This computer actually runs Centos 6, but with Virtual Box I can boot RHEL 7 and run it (the whole operating system) in a window on my regular desktop. Using the desktop, installing and running programs works just the same as if it was running on a real (non-virtual) computer. You can actually install just about any operating system into a Virtual Box image; just tell Virtual Box where to find the install disk (iso, whatever), boot 'er up and install. The virtual hard drive is just a (big) file on your actual hard drive, so if you want to back it up or give someone else a copy of your virtual drive, just make a copy of the file. Virtual Box is absolutely free, too. Incidentally, if anyone is interested in my impressions of RHEL 7, here they are: I could live with Gnome 3 if I really had to but I don't like its rigidity. I'm also not a fan of the "overview" system for selecting programs and documents. I think the Gnome 3 guys have spent too much time looking at Android tablets (especially with gnome-clock and the like). I tried KDE 4 and while it's a bit closer to what I'm used to in a desktop it's not what I want either. I had all sorts of hassle with setting up plasmoids and even found one (Alarm Clock) that would somehow cause all of my desktop panels to disappear every time I dropped it onto a panel. Plus, oddly for a system that appears to be configurable in all kinds of ways, there doesn't appear to be any way to put a usable drawer onto a panel to hold a selection of programs. I kind of managed to create one to hold documents and the like, but then there was no way to change its icon to anything other than a standard folder. Ultimately, KDE 4 didn't turn my crank either. I also installed the Mate desktop from the Fedora 19 repo onto my RHEL 7 test image and finally I had a desktop that (a) I understand, (b) looks normal, and (c) I can configure so I can spend time doing what I do and not fighting with the desktop. The basic graphic desktop concept and layout hasn't really changed since the days of CDE, Amiga and Atari ST, and I really don't understand why the Gnome guys (and KDE folks to a somewhat lesser extent) suddenly think it needs a complete re-design. Sometimes stuff that hasn't changed in years isn't stagnant; it just works. The basic layout of the drivers seat, steering wheel and pedals in cars hasn't changed in years either and for much the same reason. It works, and everyone who needs to operate it understands the layout. Maybe I'm old-fashioned in what I expect to see on my computers, but after giving Gnome 3 and KDE 4 what I consider to be a fair trial, I think I'm merely sane. My final (and possibly best) desktop trial was Cinnamon. Now that looks pretty damn cool. I'm thinking that it looks like a reasonable compromise between the old-style desktop and the new-fangled thing that I don't really understand. The only thing that it seems to be missing (that I've noticed so far) is panel drawers. I want to have a number of drawers on my panel and that doesn't seem to be possible for some reason. If I ultimately decide to use Cinnamon I may have to write a few launcher-menu applications for myself so I can add them to the panel. Kind of the long way 'round the bush if I have to do that, though. My ultimate choice of "modern desktop" will probably depend on what the EPEL guys decide to package; so far it looks like they're planning to provide Cinnamon for sure and Mate remains to be determined. Ultimately I won't be forced onto Gnome 3 or KDE 4, which suits me fine. As to the rest of the RHEL 7 beta release, what I've seen of it so far looks pretty cool, but I haven't really put it through its paces yet since I've been fiddling around with desktops up to this point.  |  IP: Logged Dennis Benjamin Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1445 From: Denton, MD Registered: Feb 2002 posted 03-01-2014 04:11 PM                        Well. I am 100% Linux. Pretty much all the Windows programs I use can run through Wine. I have restored a few laptops now that were running Windows 8. No one that I know likes Windows 8. I don't think they will even be able to give it away for free. My impression here is that there must be something built in to Windows 8 that the U.S. and other governments really like (if you know what I mean). Microsoft will probably get a kickback for this.  |  IP: Logged Justin Hamaker Film God Posts: 2253 From: Lakeport, CA USA Registered: Jan 2004 posted 03-01-2014 06:40 PM                        Like Mark, I've been considering a new laptop, but won't buy one because of Windows 8. I haven't really looked into Windows 8, but from what I've seen of the interface, I'm not interested. I use Windows 7 on my office computer, home computer, and laptop. I am perfectly happy with Windows 7. Like XP, it seems to be stable OS which is very easy to use once you get used to the differences from XP.  |  IP: Logged Steve Guttag We forgot the crackers Gromit!!! Posts: 12814 From: Annapolis, MD Registered: Dec 1999 posted 03-01-2014 06:58 PM                     quote: Joe Redifer I think Microsoft is the only one who actually still SELLS their OS, which is stupid. Apple offers their OS for free. Linux, well, yeah it's always been free. Wait a minute...when did the MacOS become free? I missed that one. It never used to be. I know the version I'm running now (10.6.8...aka Snow Leopard) wasn't free. I checked the Apple store and sure enough 10.9 "Mavericks" is listed as free. Then again, people are bitching about it too if you read the reviews. Win 7 has been about $100 to $150 depending on where you shop and if you want Home or Pro...I don't think that is an unreasonable price for the software that runs the computer and for a company that has to support it for years. I have definitely played with Linux a bit...it is free and not worth a penny more to me. It is the most annoying thing I've worked with. If Joe doesn't like the variations of Win 7 ... he must hate all of the different "Distros" of Linux with the various GUIs. I've played with several...Ubuntu, of course, and a couple of the other distros. On top of Ubuntu I've played with the likes of LXDE and Mint for GUIs to get away from the "Unity" desktop Ubuntu comes with...they all suck though Mint seemed to have nicest desktop...the programs I was working with just didn't work with Mint...but they did with Ubuntu. I guess people just like free and expect others to work for free for them. How does one make a quality product and provide support for it for free? I understand hobbies and people doing things that they love doing for free...that is great but one cannot support themselves on free. Ubuntu comes with a bunch of free programs...the Libre Office suite (a MS-Office knockoff) Firefox (many people's favorite browser) and several others. It comes with what you need to get going. I've been using it for a couple of years and still find it very frustrating. But hey...if all I wanted to do is surf the web and use knock off spreadsheets and documents for free...I guess it would be great. The fact of the matter is, software developers...particularly specialized software...they don't really test it or test it fully on Linux...they seem to just port it there if they have a Linux version at all. Those that love it...more power to you...it just isn't for me (except in purpose built applications...where I think its real strong suite is). I find that the MAC OS remains the most productive over the years and I have always had Macs for personal use at home (well since 1987 though I did work on an original 1984 Mac right after it came out because my boss at the time bought one). I use Windows for work because that is what the programs are written for. I've used MS-WORD since version 3 on the Mac (1987) so I've been very familiar with it and have rolled with the changes though version 5.1 on the Mac was the best by far in balancing features/speed and layout. Microsoft seems to change things for the sake of change itself without regard for the grief it causes by not improving the work flow and now requiring knowledgeable people to relearn what they already knew. I guess they are trying to mimic Apple in that they have also reinvented its OS as it has moved along and also moved away from things like floppies and now CDs first but their moves have been more logical and evolutionarily. Rarely has it been ...yesterday we do it only this way...tomorrow we will only do it that way. The biggest change really coming between OS9 and OSX. But as someone that has seen it from the beginning...a 1984 Mac user would be at home pretty quickly in the modern OS...things like the dock (and color) would be some of the bigger differences. Long gone are the "INIT Parades" but I don't know of many that would miss them. With Windows...the jump from Win 7 to Win 8 is just annoying. We are changing the computers at the office...they will all be Win 7 machines. Win 7 has been a winner for Microsoft...it has generally been quite stable as compared to its predecessors. People familiar with WinXP can normally find things pretty easily in Win 7 though there are some changes. Microsoft should have just run with Win 7 while developing the next big thing and bring it out when it was needed. People don't want to go about changing their OS that regularly.  |  IP: Logged Bobby Henderson "Ask me about Trajan." Posts: 10973 From: Lawton, OK, USA Registered: Apr 2001 posted 03-01-2014 07:31 PM                     Here's my 2¢ on Windows 8. It's not as good as Windows 7, but it's not all that bad either once you work past that damned "Metro" front end on it. We have three computers at my workplace running Win 8 Professional now. Note: we haven't installed the free upgrade to Win 8.1. I'm gun-shy about that, based on some stories I've read about installation issues. Win 8.1 doesn't really restore the "start" button. It just puts a Windows key icon on the desktop task bar. I can already hit the Windows key on the keyboard to jump back and forth between desktop and metro modes. My work desktop PC runs great with Win 8.1. It boots up very fast, quite a bit faster than my notebook running Win 7 Ultimate. The only hassles I've had to deal with involved networking, not with the other machines running Win 7 or Win XP, but networking between the three machines running Win 8 to make them see each other on the network properly. I also had to deal with an issue in shared file/folder permissions. It wasn't easy to get the OS to have all the files and subfolders in a shared folder to inherit the permissions of that shared folder. With each release of Windows Microsoft makes the networking setup more and more complicated. My suspicion: Microsoft is pulling this shit so IT businesses can make more money doing more service calls setting up people's PCs rather than making so the customers can set them up on their own without calling the fucking Geek Squad or whatever. In one respect I think it would be a GREAT idea for Microsoft to make its latest version of Windows free to download and install. They ought to do that. Everyone else does. However, Microsoft is fooling themselves if they think giving away Win 8 will cause lots of people to upgrade out of old but still working PCs. That's not going to happen. When you buy a new computer you not only have to buy that new computer you must also buy a shit load of new software. Depending on the software you use that could easily double the price of a new PC purchase. Lately Microsoft has been making each new version of Windows very incompatible with older versions of software. When I got my new work computer a little over a year ago I had to sign up for an Adobe Creative Cloud account. My old CS4 Production Suite software wouldn't run on it. I have Adobe Master Collection CS5.5 on my Win 7 Ultimate notebook and I'm going to keep using that until my notebook bricks itself. CorelDRAW X5 wouldn't run on Win 8, so I had to upgrade to version X6 (which actually doesn't work as well as X5). We had to spend $1000 to upgrade to the latest version of FlexiSign software when my coworker Valorie got her new Win 8 machine, along with getting another Adobe Creative Cloud account. Customers are wise to this shit. They don't feel like getting bent over a barrel and wallet raped when they have to buy a new computer. We're long into the zone where people no longer see "magic" in new PCs and want to get new computers when the latest CPUs are released. Now people only buy when their old computer breaks and can no longer be fixed. I'm pretty happy to see the smart phone and tablet industry now entering that zone. If Microsoft wants more people to install whatever latest version of Windows they release it might help if they make that new version of Windows a little more backward compatible. At least Windows XP was pretty good at that.  |  IP: Logged Justin Silverstein Film Handler Posts: 10 From: Northport, NY, USA Registered: Feb 2014 posted 03-01-2014 07:57 PM                     I've always been utterly baffled by all the "Win7 is great, Win8 is terrible!" sentiment that I hear from casual users and professionals alike. It literally makes no sense--Win8 is Win7, with a bunch of speed, stability and security improvements added. The one and only reason to dislike Win8 is the Metro/tile interface, but that can be effectively banished from your computer in a matter of minutes. Just install Classic Shell or any of the similar equivalents, and make sure all your default programs are the non-Metro versions. Done and done-- you'll never see Metro again, and you'll basically be using a souped-up, much-improved Win7. Casual users can certainly be forgiven for not knowing this, but it drives me nuts that professional advice-givers can't grasp it.  |  IP: Logged Leo Enticknap Film God Posts: 7474 From: Loma Linda, CA Registered: Jul 2000 posted 03-01-2014 09:46 PM                        On the "MacOS is free" issue, my understanding is that it isn't - rather, the price of the OS is bundled into the price of the computer. Unlike Windows, it simply isn't sold separately from Apple hardware (apart from version upgrades). As with PCs that come bundled with Windows, when you buy an Apple computer, tablet or phone, part of the price is paying for its operating system. The difference is that if you choose to, you can build a computer from the motherboard up using individually sourced components and then buy a Windows license to put on it, but Apple doesn't let you do that with MacOS. In many ways, Microsoft have a much bigger software engineering challenge than Apple. Apple only need to ensure that their operating system will work on a very small range of hardware, all the components of which they design or select themselves. So there are a small number of compatibility variables, all of which are totally under Apple's control. Microsoft, on the other hand, sells Windows to anybody who wants to buy it for use on a huge potential number of motherboard/processor/peripheral combinations. Furthermore, much of the hardware driver software is written by third parties. Personally I don't think that $100 a license is that unreasonable for the extent of the flexibility and compatibility that gives me, especially for the better versions of Windows (2000, XP and 7). Justin's points are noted, and I'd certainly have no problem with experimenting with 8 if and when the XP/Vista/7 start menu is available on it, and the tile screen can be totally disabled.  |  IP: Logged Frank Angel Film God Posts: 5305 From: Brooklyn NY USA Registered: Dec 1999 posted 03-01-2014 10:02 PM                        quote: Justin Silverstein I've always been utterly baffled by all the "Win7 is great, Win8 is terrible!" sentiment that I hear from casual users and professionals alike. That's incoirrect: Win8 AND Win7 are both terrible....WinXP is great. Except of course for the security issues.  |  IP: Logged Justin Silverstein Film Handler Posts: 10 From: Northport, NY, USA Registered: Feb 2014 posted 03-02-2014 12:18 AM                     Well, liking XP and hating *both* Win7 and 8 is at least consistent, so I can give you that. And, Leo: check out Classic Shell - it's totally free and allows you to do everything you need, including bypassing the Metro mode at startup and bringing back the Start Menu. You can even customize the Start Menu to resemble *any* previous version of Windows, not just Win7.  |  IP: Logged Bobby Henderson "Ask me about Trajan." Posts: 10973 From: Lawton, OK, USA Registered: Apr 2001 posted 03-02-2014 12:20 AM                     In my experience, Windows 7 Ultimate is the best version of Windows Microsoft has released to date. I've had ZERO to complain about in using Win7 Ultimate on my Dell XPS notebook computer. But like Justin said, Win8 is really a great deal like Win7, but with some notable improvements. It does indeed boot faster than Win7; it's practically an instant-on kind of thing if you're using a PC with a solid state cache or SSD. Win8 has some security improvements over Win7. The "Metro" UI is the most obvious turn-off. It only takes clicking the Windows key on the keyboard to jump past the Metro UI into the familiar desktop mode. Or you can go farther by installing Classic Shell. I haven't done that. But I see no problem clicking a key on my keyboard to get into desktop mode. My biggest complaint with Win8 is the fucking lack of backward compatibility with computer software. If you're running Adobe Creative Suite, Microsoft Office or basically anything else more than a couple years old you're probably going to be forced into buying the newest version of that application. I think that's a far more serious problem than that damned tiled Metro front end, yet the Metro UI is all I hear the technology press bark about. What about the extra hundreds or thousands of dollars a customer will have to spend on new software when he buys a Windows 8 PC? What about that!!!????  |  IP: Logged

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