Your favorite Windows 8 function???

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My favorite function is cloud calender, i have calender in my Nokia 5230 but when i switched to Xperja J i discovered it google calender because is run on Android i also learned that i can merge Windows 8 Calender with Google Calender and thus my Phone Calender can i say it's greatest thing since sliced bread but if you ask me i prefer not sliced breed.

Needles to say i have all the birthday of my Facebook friends, in fact i put in calender all my closet friends and family, so myth of aspie memory is grosly overrated But if you ask me about history for example American Revolution , French revolution, American civil war, Crimean War, Russian-Japan War, World War I and II the Especially Warsaw Uprising and V-2 and Space Race i'm all yours

I'm Library Science student at Wroclaw(Poland) university now i don't have assignment so i borrowed book about Chinese circumnavigation of World in 1421 so i'll can be expert in this too

A little deviated from topic I'll writing about why cloud Calender is the best thing in the world

I love new Windows but i still miss my old friend the Start Menu maybe i wrote eulogy for the start menu (1995-2012) we still miss you

Power off. If you can find it - even something that simple is obfuscated and hard to do.

Theres probably a few.

1. The Off Button.

2. cmd > shutdown -s -c "Right now please, you epic ntkernel hunk of crap."

charm bar>settings>power>power off.
or just hit the power button on the computer, win8 doesnt care about not being powered off improperly

And before you say its so much worse than beefore its still the same ammount o clicks and movement as before. I dont get your obsession with bashing win8 over things that arent true.

Anyhow, my fav thing is actually the start menu(metro) thing. It allows me to get all my basics very quickly. I can see the weather, news, mail, facebook, calendars, etc all from the same screen.

Probably my favorite W8 function is one you hardly see - Defender. Saves me the trouble of having to install an anti-malware, anti-virus, anti-whatever internet security suite. Excellent firewall, too. W8 works smoothly because of it. I can surf even dangerous sites. I also like the built-in virtual disk drive/image mounting bits. Works like a charm for some of these huge multi-disk game images I d/l from time to time.

W8's AntiROP is very shakey. DEP is not particularly secure either, and has already garnered a couple of Zero-Days against it. HiASLR ( a reimplementation of Address Space Layout randomization, which itself was very unrealiable) has equally garnered a couple of vulns against it. I would not call Defender any more or less reliable than a well built iptables firewall with some handy SEL policy.

That will actually power it off properly - the power switch just tells Windows to shut down and power off.

What isn't true about my experience? I'm a new user who is struggling with the interface because it's harder to use and everything seems to take longer and be more obfuscated than in the past.

Win7 - Start / Shutdown ... that's it

Win8 - completely log off and use power down button on logon screen (more obfuscated and takes longer)

Any simpler way isn't "discoverable" to the casual user. (I did find the command-line way of doing it the other day.)

The charm menu is a bunch of inscrutable symbols. I tend to tune it out because of that and ignore it.

so in other words its not that win8 doesnt have the features you want, its that you dont know how to use them. I think its just important to emphasize that win8 isnt a continuation of 7, vista, xp, etc in regards to how its used. If anything its a lot easier to use.

I've been reading some different reviews and opinions about Win8, and they are sharply divided. Some people like the new interface, and others hate it. What bothers me the most is the obfuscation - I should not have to throw away decades of knowledge with Windows to learn a new user interface, especially when the replacement is not an improvement, and is not "discoverable" to the casual user.

The computer industry seems to have run out of innovation, and is caught up in change for change's sake. New versions have to come out, but no one can think of anything new, so the changes are just churn. Firefox shuffles its menus. Gnome 3 cripples virtual desktops. Win8 gets rid of the Start menu. None of this is an improvement, it's just change for the sake of change.

And, now, the masochist inside me is going to install Win8 Server and SQL Server 2012.

On your point about change, I certainly agree. From a technical perpsective, Microsoft hasnt really innovated anything on the desktop since the XP release (and really it was just an upgrade version of Win2k, likely the root of their most significant innovative move).

The Linux world is trying to emulate (at least on the desktop) the things that microsoft and apple both are doing, and the result is that the well known DE's try more to emulate stuff thats already out there, rather than innovate what they have already. When I think of Linux Desktop Envoirnment innovation, Enlightenment is really the only one that comes to mind.

Dont depress yourself by installing the most recent windows server release. I hated it, and the security audit I had to do on it was quite particularly messy.

The project went surprisingly well today. I installed Windows Server 2012 in a Virtual Box instance (installing the Guest Additions was a bad idea - made the screen go black and I had to start over), and installed SQL Server 2012 and brought an instance up. I kind of fumbled around, since it's been ages since I enabled TCP/IP for SQL Server, but I muddled through. I got the Management Studio installed on a Win8 client, and I only had one snag. WinServer2012 has a firewall that is enabled automatically and blocks the SQL Server port (1433) by default. As soon as I disabled that, I had connectivity. (I'm just a developer installing this on a LAN, so I didn't do any security.) Now I just have to read a 1300 page book about SQL Server 2012, and I'll be good to go

Putting a tablet touch interface on a server is a strange thing. I almost set up the server in "headless" (non-GUI) mode, but the pain of learning SQL Server command-line install and tweaking made me decide against it (plus learning the command line way to bounce a service). The good news is, once I set everything up, all I'll have to do is start and stop the VM. I won't have to use the GUI on the server itself.

All in all, I got set up much faster than I had anticipated and the process went smoothly considering I am not a Windows expert and normally use Linux.

This is no different than when apple went from their previous System X lineup into OSX. It changed the most basics of how apps are opened and other things like that. Yet I dont recall anyone complaining.

Also on the improvement bit. there has been quite a lot of improvment, its just very subtly done. Especially in win8. As a way to not alienate everyone that used windows in the past they included the desktop interface. But win8 is taking us into what the future of personal computing will be with all its touch support and interface made for touchscreens. Just look how awesome it is to run your fav .exe programs on your tablet while still keeping the things that make a tablet great. The only reason i hadnt bought an tablet years ago was silly ios and android. I didnt want a glorified phone, I wanted a computer. Win 8 allows that. If thats not progress then i dont know what is

That's a good point about what Microsoft is doing. Apple did creative disruption to create their OSX and iOS ecosystem, and it worked. MS has stuck with the basics of Windows for a long time. (I read Richter's system programming book in 2010, and the APIs were basically the same as in the late 90s when I worked with Windows.) MS needs creative disruption to survive, and I think they were inspired by what Apple did.

What I don't like is how Microsoft crippled what already worked and messed with a decade-plus of people learning how to use a computer and developing ways to get work done. If WinRT/Metro had been a separate tablet product, I'd have been delighted with it.

But the loss of the Start menu isn't too disruptive - I use fewer than a dozen programs, and can pin them to the taskbar.



I generally agree that touch is the future, and will be ubiquitous soon, but I've been really disappointed by both Microsoft and Dell offering what amount to $1200 netbooks. The future of computing needs to get cheaper.

I think its because at the time apple did their new system they were not very big in the market, so changing everything was more doable as youd be more likely to increase market share then lose it. Windows as the market leader is more likely to lose than gain from similar tactics. But its something they have to do to compete in the future. It was going to happen eventually and they honestly made the best move by starting the trend slowly. By win10 I expct there to be no remains of win7> style of computing.


most of those 1k+ tablets including the surface pro (a bit under 1k) are actually very powerfull laptops with the tuchscreen on the topside. latest gen i5s, 4+ gigs of ram and decent sized SSDs. I consider that much better than a netbook. Now if you jump to the 500-800 bracket those really are netbooks. They all have the same processor, same ammount of ram, same ammounts of SSD and similar screens. The only real difference is what they can be hooked up with. Im looking at the ASUS vivotab smart. It is not only the cheapest at 499 (under the cost of the RT version) but also has 64gb ssd compared to others with 32gb. Comes with the bare minimum in plugs, but includes a microsd slot (which id use for windows readyboost). At a price similar to what a base model ipad goes for. And it is x86 meaning it runs full win8 and not RT. Its also a very trusted company. I think its the tablet deal of the year.

None. I dislike the OS and will remove it from my computer (which came pre-loaded with this twisted abomination. I don't socially network (unless you consider being on WP social networking), have no desire to move things to "The Cloud" and I see no utility in flinging birds at pigs in an unusual homage to the Swine Flu (the story behind the inspiration for the game), therefore, I have no use for Windows 8. I like my Office 2007 (which still has one more download remaining), which already has PowerPoint, Excel and Word, the programs I use the most.