It's my understanding 8.1 restores that start menu as well, and doesn't cost anything.

There's a $5 product called "Start 8" that puts the start menu
feature back into Winblows 8. It doesn't do anything for the apps

There's a $0 product called "Linux" that makes the computer usable again.
Installing it now. I was hoping to capture the preloaded Windows Phone for PC install and shrink it down into a VM but the included Norton Microsoft insisted that other operating systems are viruses.

Dec 26 2014 5:40am from fleeb @uncnsrd (Uncensored)

It's my understanding 8.1 restores that start menu as well, and
doesn't cost anything.

Mp[[2~[2~Nope - not in 8.1 and won't be in 8.anything.
WinBlow$ 10 is the one to watch (they're skipping "9").
Or not.

 

The most horrible thing is, that they restructure the config dialogs. Some of the functions are in the old System Settings stuff, parts of the functions are hidden in the new dialogs. For example, most of the networking and wifi stuff is where it used to be. But if you want to forget a wifi network (and its password), you need to do that via the new widget that flies in from the right side of your screen. It is like linux, but far far worse.

Microsoft, from major version to version, shifts things around such that all the crap you carefully learned from previous versions of the operating system are tossed into the wind, and you have to learn something completely different.

So, with that in mind, I don't really think of it as such a big deal. Or, at least, no more ridiculous than what they've done every other time they've had a major shift in OS.

Everyone hated the gummy bear crap they did for XP. Everyone hated Vista for shifting everything around. Now they get to hate 8.0's shifting of everything around, oh and the fucking Metro (retro?) UI.

But, honestly, this is nothing out of the ordinary. If you elect to stick with Window, get used to it.

It's particularly frustrating that they still have all these different screens that do the same thing. Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Server Manager, Computer Management, and whatever that botched abortion is that shows up when you start Windows Phone Server 2012.

On the desktop side --- after careful consideration, I have reached the conclusion that Windows 10 is an unusable piece of crap and should not be used. (Ok I haven't actually seen it yet, but I wanted to be the first to arrive at that inevitable conclusion.)

The only problem with that is, Microsoft still got paid.

They didn't "earn" anything; they merely captured revenue from a source where they didn't earn it.

So I did something awful this week.

Tired of dealing with my poorly performing Windows VM, I wiped my laptop and installed Windows 7 directly onto it. It was getting to be tiresome, so I swapped the host and guest roles.

Here's what I've found. This is coming from someone who hasn't run Windows as a primary desktop operating system for almost 20 years.

* In the Windows environment, you don't have to worry about whether a particular program or device is compatible. Everything "just works."
* ...until it doesn't. Linux can be a pain in the ass to get certain things working, but it *stays* working. Just a couple days in and I've already had to contend with the desktop taking several minutes to boot, with the all-Microsoft software stack misbehaving, hanging, and generally being of low quality, etc.
Why is Outlook rendering email illegibly when it's a Microsoft client talking to a Microsoft server running a Microsoft email system on supported hardware with the latest drivers?
* Linux behaves better inside a virtual machine than Windows does. This is more apparent on a desktop, where things like sound and video move cleanly down the stack and *never* screw up.

Speaking of which ... if anyone is in a similar situation, I found that VirtualBox performed *much* better when I gave it a dedicated partition on which to run the Linux, instead of using a virtual disk image file. The driver support for that is fantastic but it requires a special incantation in order to make it work. Basically you have to use their command line tool to create a virtual disk file that merely references the partitions you want. It's quite good: you can tell it to give the guest OS access to the entire disk, or only to selected partitions. In the case of a Linux guest, I gave it a 200 GB root and an 8 GB swap on partitions 3 and 4. When you do this, the guest has access to the selected partitions; it *sees* the other partitions and the MBR, but any attempt to read from them returns all zeroes, and any attempt to write to them is silently ignored.

So I installed my Linux onto /dev/sda3, telling it to write the GRUB boot loader onto /dev/sda3 instead of /dev/sda, and it boots right up. With all the correct drivers loaded, X11 in seamless mode is *fabulous*.

As everyone figured out a long time ago, people still think Outlook is the "best" mail client because Exchange is really awful at serving up email to any client which dares to use open standard protocols.

My company is beholden to Microsoft for its e-mail solutions, which is rather a shame. I lack any clout here to get them to migrate to something sane.

My average uptime has plummetted since reversing my operating systems a few weeks ago (Linux running as a VM within Windoze instead of the other way around).

You know what really grinds my gears? "Windows has installed updates and will now reboot in <countdown> unless you push the 'Postpone' button." Maximum postponement: 4 hours.

4 hours. Perfectly calculated so that when you're away from your desk having lunch, you miss the pop-up and it does an unattended reboot, destroying everything you had open. Followed by "Windows is installing update 1 of 99999999, please do not turn off or reboot your computer."

Srsly? Compared to APT, this update crap is still in the stone age.

I think there's a way to tell windows not to automatically handle its setup crap. Maybe.

Tap the Windows key, type 'update', choose 'Windows Update', click on 'Change Setting' in the left hand column, and under 'Important updates', change the dropdown to whatever you want (perhaps 'Never', but 'Download' might be the better option for a more controlled experience).

These steps assume you're using Windows 7. Dunno about 8.

"8" can be told to download updates but not install them.
Or - give you a list of pending updates and you then decide to download/install.
Or - just let the machine do it when it wants.