Windows 8

I've spent the last while testing Windows 8 Developer Preview and I thought I would share a few thoughts with you.
I'm sure you have seen some screenshots of the new Windows Metro look.  That look is a leftover from the Windows Phone software which was a miserable failure to begin with.  I guess MS didn't want to waste the investment so they carried it over to Windows 8.  Among the first thing I did was remove the Metro look.  At first I left in the Ribbon Bars that are used extensively in W8.  I have found then quite convenient in some of the other Software like MS Office.  Microsoft over-used them this time and they are now gone as well or at least gone in the sense that I had to do a lot of hacking to get a standard menu bar back and just not use the Ribbons at all.  I also had to do a lot of work with IE 10 which is used in W8 and I must say that no matter how much you do to IE 10 it is still fraught with problems; but more on that in a later post.
Of course when you are modifying an operating system to get it working the way you want; you are bound to mess up and have to restore once in a while.  The first tendency is to go to good old System Restore.  It's bailed me out in the past.  Alas MS manged to turn that into utter crap as well.  The onlt recorded restore points are from the Windows updates.  Whats the next step?  Well we now have a new one called System Refresh so lets give that a try and see what happens.  I got suspicious at the first step when it asked for the install disk and sure enough my suspicions were well founded.  Any 3rd party software you have installed will be gone.  That is of course if it came from someplace other than the MS Apps Store.  Oh yes; I forgot to mention that MS decided that Apple had a better plan and they have adopted the store approach.  I've avoided Apple products primarily because of that thought process and that may also be on the agenda for Windows apps as well.  Now after the System Refresh was completed they were at least kind enough to leave an HTML page on my desktop that listed everything that had been removed.  Anything saved on your computer will be removed unless you have saved it in a personal folder.  Never save to your desktop as it is not considered to be a personal folder by Windows.  Put the files safely away someplace like your Documents folder.  Of course after everything was redone I discovered that it was a Windows Driver update that had broken the system to begin with and a simple Driver rollback would have solved the issue or at least the part where it was throwing erros at shutdown.  The actual driver involved was the audio driver and of course the system still has no sound.  I'm used to that since that has been a consistant issue with every new Windows release.  Before you ask; the Windows 7 drivers will not work for the AC97 audio and I'm doing all my testing on a notebook computer so I don't have the option of playing with other audio cards to see if anything will work.
One thing my Windows 8 Experience has given me is a lot of practice at cloning drives.  I do that after every shutdown as long as everything is working at that point.  Then all I stand to lose is whatever I have done since the machine was started.  See my post about Active Boot Disk; it is the best way I've seen yet to be sure I have the system properly backed up.
Forget about having a Start Menu as you have come to know it since Windows 95.  That is gone unless you disable Metro and even then it's not as functional as it was in Vista and Windows 7.
After making several changes to W8 I have ended up with what resembles a very fast Windows 7.  That in itself is good but I don't understand why MS thinks people prefer eye-candy over performance.  Was there something wrong with the concept of leaving the UI alone and just improving system performance?
If I was asked right now to rate Windows 8 on a 10 point basis then I would give it about a 2.

This is just the first of what I hope will be several installments about Windows 8.  I will continue to post these topics as long as I am able to stand working with an operating system that drives me crazy everytime I try to do anything with it.
As for the Windows App Store, I've written it off as just another money grab and I will not use it now or at anytime in the future.  Since I also do some of my own software development I'll continue to use those apps that I've written and I will continue to do it whether or not Microsoft objects.  I really suspect that after all my testing on that machine is finished I will be installing Linux on it;  I've used it before and did get used to it's idiosyncracies as well.  I've always been a Windows fan but there comes a time when you have to consider changes and this is the time as far as I'm concerned.  Too bad since I've been using Windows since 3.0 which is also the time when I switched all of our systems from the old Apple 2* series machines to PCs.

Great software find...Active@Boot Disk.

Active Boot Disk is primarily a compilation of several tools, a few of which I had already tested and found to be extremely good for the advanced user so I am going to post some of the information here.

Active@ Boot Disk is a bootable CD that gives you a lightweight Windows 7 (WinPE 3.0) environment with disk image, data recovery, password resetting, data erasure and network access tools.  The tools available are;
•Active@ Disk Image *** Works very well when I have to replace a drive.

     Imaged-based data backup and restoration tool
•Active@ File Recovery
     Deleted data recovery software
•Active@ Partition Recovery
     Lost partition recovery software
•Active@ Hex Editor
     Tool for editing disk in a binary format
•Active@ Password Changer
     Windows password resetting tool
•Active@ KillDisk *** Excellent for those times when I need to zero-fill a drive
     Secure data erasure and disk wiping software
•PC Disk Partition Manager *** Saved my backside when I accidentally deleted a partition.
     Add, edit, delete, format and manage the partitions in your computer
•Active@ CD/DVD Data Burner
     CD/DVD burning software
•Network operations utilities

1. Map Network Drive
2. Remote Desktop Connection
3. Web browser
4. FTP Client
5. Telnet Client
6. Network Configuration Utility

 •Other Utilities *** perhaps of lesser importance but nice to have.

•  File Explorer
•  Task Manager
•  On-Fly Drivers Loader
•  Display Configuration Utility
•  Notepad
•  Command Prompt shell

 All-in-all I find the utilities to be excellent and well worth the cost to have them in your toolkit.

There are also free versions available of several of these tools but each is restricted in some way and I personally recommend that you use the full versions instead.

The Details can all be found here.

http://www.livecd.com/

More crap from Microsoft

Well it has been a while since I bothered to post anything here but the time has come again.

Microsoft has exceeded all previous attempts to screw up something that was starting to look promising and I'm talking about Internet Explorer 9.

All they had to do was bring IE up to meet current standards; primarily HTML5.

Instead of that they had to mess with everything including the user interface.  Are they ever going to listen to users?  The answer is a resounding NO!

They don't care what you and I think about anything they do, after all they are Microsoft - Kings of the jungle so people will take whatever garbage they want to push our way.
Try the "New" search feature in IE 9.  I don't know about you but when I search for a term I want to see what I searched for show up in the search field of my preferred search engine (certainly not BING) but instead they have to send it with the URL encoding.  Is that serious?  No but it certainly is annoying.  I know what %20 means but does everyone else?  No they don't.  Do search engines understand plain text without the encoding?  They certainly do or they would be long gone.  Fortunately I only installed IE9 on one of my operating systems, Windows 7.  After an hour of trying to customize it to work the way I want it to I spent 2 minutes ripping it out by the throat.  Forget about sending feedback because they are not accepting any more comments from the users, unless of course you like it.

The above is only one example of several things I found to be irritating.  Now don't get me wrong here.  There is no such a thing as the perfect browser and I'm not yet ready to go with something because it's prettier and I certainly don't intend to install any of the current "geekware" browsers.  I'm just going to stay with IE 8 for now even though it's not HTML5 compliant.

This did draw something I have been considering for a while to the forefront though.
I've toyed with the idea of dropping support for all Microsoft software from my web site.  I think it's a good time to start working on that.  I will be replacing it with pages where you can vote on a User Experience index based on what you think of any individual piece of MS software by version.  I'm probably not going to make it so you can leave comments there but the votes will continually be tallied and charted so they are displayed on the pages.

I can see where I won't even stay with Microsoft software for much longer.  Each generation seems to get worse and with Microsoft making a move towards cloud computing it will soon be time to make the switch.  I've never had a problem working comfortably in any OS so for me it's not a problem to make the switch in fact I very often use a linux distro to fix Windows issues.