On Tue, 11 Mar 2014 10:52:34 -0400, Wolf K
wrote:

It's reassuring to know I'm not alone in my opinion of the new tiled
screen. Lots of other computer users apparently think the same way.
Windows 8 and computers that have it preinstalled are not selling in
the quantities hoped for. This must mean something.

Rod.

It means that Win8 does not offer the kind of obvious advantages or cool
factor that a casual shopper will see when playing with a demo unit at
Staples, etc.

Some of us are not casual users. Some of us downloaded the evaluation
version of Windows 8 several months before official release and
installed it on spare machines, just to see what it was like. Some of
us thought "Oh well, maybe the final version will be better than
this". Then we downloaded the evaluation version of 8.1 in the hope
that the widely publicised concerns of millions had been addressed and
that the necessary improvements had been made. They hadn't. Then some
of us bought laptops installed with the final version and found to our
dismay that yes, it really was like that, they really meant it and it
didn't look as though they were going to change anything after all.

The majority of improvements are under the hood: faster start/shutdown,
better security, some tweaks on folders, more automagic stuff such as
connecting to wi-fi (set and forget), etc.

If only they'd simply made those improvements and left alone the
things that were already as good as they needed to be.

The desktop PC on which I'm typing this has Windows 7 installed on a
solid state drive. It boots up in about 17 seconds, and no application
takes longer than 2 seconds to load. That's a huge improvement on the
previous one and good enough for my present needs. If anybody thinks
it can be improved further I'll be interested to look into it, but if
the cost of a few seconds off the startup time is that I have to
re-learn how to use a computer just to continue to do what I've been
doing for a years, then I'd rather keep what I've already got.

Rod.