Windows 8

We have two cars in our household. A Toyota and a Volkswagen. Apart from their obviously different purposes (a 7 seater MPV and a small family car)  there are slight differences between them: the windscreen wiper stalk works the opposite way around, the reverse gear is in a different place, the fuel filler cap is on the other side and the VW has a dash switch for the headlights whereas the Toyota has it on the indicator stalk. However, other than that they are both very conventional to drive – it’s not as if the clutch and brake pedals have been reversed or the steering wheel replaced with a joystick (because that works on planes) or the starter motor replaced with a kick start (because that saves space on a moped). It’s quite easy to effortlessly switch between driving the two. I wish someone had explained this to Microsoft.

I’ve finally got round to replacing my old Windows XP desktop with something new. After some deliberation I went with Windows 8.1 as it is likely to have the longest shelf life (up to the mid-2020s with any luck). I had heard various reports about how MS had sacrificed the “Start” button to favour the tablet market. However, what I hadn’t expected is that they would have made the whole damn thing work like a tablet. The problem is, I don’t have or want a touchscreen. I’m very happy with my big monitors, mouse and fat-hand friendly keyboard. For the first couple of hours I ended up searching for how to actually operate a touch-screen device that you can’t actually touch.

Bit by bit I did start to work things out or, more accurately, find out how to switch off or hide various options so that I was left with something that looked and behaved life a desktop computer. I’m still working at it – I opened a pdf document a few minutes ago to find that it filled the screen tablet style and prevented me from both reading and writing on the same screen. It’s just so damn clumsy! I am finally getting everything working and eventually I should end up with a very ergonomic system again. It’s just that when all these annoyances can be accounted for why didn’t Microsoft just have an option on the initial install asking what kind of device was being installed and what the user’s personal preferences are?

The sad thing in all this is that Windows 8.1 is a very impressive piece of engineering. The install was the simplest thing I have ever some across: I had expected to spend hours loading up software and updates, new drivers and fiddling with old hardware to make it compatible. As it was, I put the new hardware together (and my eyesight is really not up to that these days) and inserted the install disk. After entering the keys and some basic user info I left it and had dinner. When I came back up the whole thing had installed perfectly. Every device found and configured, aside from a quick trawl of the internet to check on the latest updates the whole thing was a done deal with everything from the printer to the TV set readily recognised. The operating system itself is fast and slick. The endless bloat that has plagued Windows for years has gone – this feels like a racehorse rather than a donkey. It’s just a pit that they have dropped the ball so badly with the interface. Anyway, I will rebuild the old desktop as a Linux Mint server – I’m interested to compare the two.