I like the start screen. It is much more useful than the start menu (don't know why people hate it so much) and with version 8.1 I'm sure it feels even better now (still running version 8 myself because of issues I have with 8.1)

The start screen is awesome. With that I am presented with the stuff I need to access right away and nothing else. I have customized it a little so the store and stuff like that have been removed.

What kind of issues are you having with the win 8.1?

I copied some 2900 MP3s from my player's micro-SDHC (or SDXC or what they're called now) to my Win8 convertible last evening.

Did the same thing on my Win7 computer two weeks ago because my car radio will not take micro-SDHC and I'm tired of fiddling that tiny thingie into the adapter every time. So I copied the whole lot to a normal-size chip.

The source chip isn't particularly fast (not needed for playing back MP3s anyway), specced at 25MB/s read (manufacturer's dreams, as usual).

Win7 starts copying SDHC-to-local-disk at 20MB/s and slowly degenerates to 16MB/s average over time. Whole process took 18 minutes.

Win8 starts copying SDHC-to-local-disk at 20MB/s and keeps this up for about 15 seconds. It then drops into a read-16MB-write-sync-sleep mode. The very detailled copy dialog alternates between 1-second periods of "20MB/s" followed by 1-second periods of "0 bytes" with a second or two of transfer rates in the hundreds of kilobytes in between. Whole process took well over 2 hours.

The Win7 machine is admittedly a desktop computer, but according to the "Windows performance rating", the convertible's SSD can very well keep up, and the convertible was running on AC power all the time (so, no, it didn't go to power save mode in between!).

After putting in the other SDHC (which normally serves as the secondary disk) again, Win8 told me there was "a problem" with the disk, and it wanted to "repair" it. The disk had been removed properly, and there was no fucking problem with it at all. The chips is as good as new, too. It had about 22% of its capacity written once.

Good job Win8 doesn't tell you what "problem" or "repair" means either (probably means running checkdisk or another useless utility for 2 hours). So instead of "repairing" it, I put it into the WIn7 machine. Win7 accepted the chip without complaining, all data was accessible. Inserting it into Win8 again gave the same error message, but it works flawlessly.

The problem is that you shouldn't need stuff like classic shell to make the OS usable, the touch interface is still very flawed.

Aye. This.

What's wrong with Windows filesharing other than being closed source and without a functional non-Windows implementation?

Other than the lol, I'd say the fact that it never works when you need it to and when it does, it only works one way. And don't tell me that's the user's fault. It's not.

SMB surely doesn't work perfectly, but the "only one-way" thing doesn't really bother me. I wouldn't want to share files with another computer anyway (and I can imagine few cases were anyone would really want that). What I want, what I need, is something that lets me access files on a server (like, a NAS) via a network cable. It's mighty fine if that is one-way only.

SMB kind of does provide that, with the restriction that the only implementation of SMB that you can get your hands on is Samba, and Samba is one terrible piece of software. It works badly when it works, and it freezes the server when it doesn't. And all it takes to freeze the server is accessing a few too many files at a time. When you're lucky, you can still SSH into the server and kill Samba when you notice that it's starting to hang, but most of the time you can't do anything but pull the plug from the wall, which isn't precisely my preferred mode of shutting down a running system.

So yeah, Windows filesharing does suck insofar as there is no freely available version (or generally, no available non-Windows-based version). But is this Windows' fault alone? I mean, admittedly, having had to reverse-engineer a totally undocumented protocol is somewhat of a challenge, but does that mean your software has to freeze the server?

The problem is that you shouldn't need stuff like classic shell to make the OS usable.

This, a million times over. A common flaw in all of the previous Windows 8 discussions both here and elsewhere is that whenever anyone says "just install classic shell" they're totally missing the point that you shouldn't have to.

Startup times don't matter a damn - even if it took 5 minutes, you still spend 5 minutes starting your PC versus hours using it. That's akin to an optimization problem in programming - do you optimize something that runs only once outside of your main loop, or do you optimize something that runs for each iteration inside your main loop instead?

Personally I've used Server 2012 more than I've used Windows 8 but I'm used to the UI by now; it still has annoyances (like not having the Search input box or Start Menu/Screen visible at the same time as other running programs) but overall it doesn't bother me so much any more. What does bother me a lot is the thinking behind it when MS launched it first. It seems to me that this was an OS that nobody (outside of Microsoft) actually wanted, and an incremental upgrade to Windows 7 (7.1? 7.5?) would have been more welcome. A lot of good work was done with Windows 7 and it's just bizarre that a decision was made to throw that good work out rather than build on it.

From what I read on various sources (e.g Thurrott's) it seems that 8.2 is going to go a long way towards undoing the damage, but it seems a shame that we all had to be dragged through a messy experiment that failed in order to get there.

it seems that 8.2 is going to go a long way towards undoing the damage, but it seems a shame that we all had to be dragged through a messy experiment that failed in order to get there.

"... as requested, our new software is full of bugs so users will have to upgrade for years to come."

I apologize if this has been beaten to death previously.

I feel like Windows 8 has gotten a bad wrap, generally.

Aside from the touch-centric "metro" stuff, I feel like Windows 8 is a pretty solid upgrade on Windows 7. Using the desktop mode, it seems to be much snappier that previous versions, and a bunch of utilities, like taskmanager, seem to be much improved.

NOTE: I use Classic Shell to disable most of the Metro bullshit http://www.classicshell.net/...

I actually use the metro bullshit nowadays for most of my stuff. It's worth exploring it, even on desktop. Takes some getting used to, but you made your first step: stopped the hate on the os. now stop it on metro, too, and you might actually like what you find. Not necessarily, but it sure is worth exploring it.

I actually liked using Surface Pro, and am looking forward to having Surface Pro 2 on sales in Taiwan.

It's a bummer that Microsoft haven't announce the data of release.

Damn, that Surface Pro pen...

"Hey, you should ditch Windows 7, install Windows 8, then install a 3rd party app to get it to look like Windows 7!" No thanks.

For me, it's the metro style apps that make it worse than Windows 7 on a desktop. For something like a touchscreen laptop or tablet, it's fine, but for a multiple monitor desktop, the default-take-the-whole-screen metro style apps just don't make sense. The new task manager is nice. The revised file transfer dialog is also nice, but seems to have some superfluous bits. What's the point of the horizontal line when all I really want to see is the current transfer speed, what is being copied (and where it is being copied from and to), and the historical transfer speeds. It just seems like they could have done a better job if it. I've also managed to break it on one occasion, as it kept showing a cancelled transfer, and it wouldn't go away no matter what I did.

Also, I realize there are performance reasons for it, but shipping the OS with thumbnail images disabled is also a bad idea. What's the point in having a large icon size if they still all look the same?

What kind of issues are you having with the win 8.1?

Most of the same issues other people have noted. But mainly the fact that Windows 8 in general has bad issues with external hardware. I bought a pc with a dvd drive and it won't read dvds. Which leads to my other issue. Microsoft is trying to go exclusively cloud based. I do believe that if someone were to create an efficient architecture for cloud based operating systems (google is trying hard) then all of these tech companies would try to link all your computers up to the cloud.

When people say "Post PC era" they aren't talking about "Post Windows computer" era. What they really want is "Post PERSONAL computer" era.

It seems Microsoft wants to suck you into their ecosystem (they are desperate as their commercials clearly display) so that it will be harder to get out. They heavily integrate Bing search into the search functions now (I don't like Bing and it just isn't accurate as google). I will be trying out this new Blippex search engine though:

https://www.blippex.org

Main reason I say Linux is looking better. But as even Linux proved, you have to have support in order to be considered relevant.