Is 'Metro' now a banned word at Microsoft?

I bought XP, and I never regretted it. I bought Vista and I never stopped regretting it. XP was a great OS, Vista was a pain in the neck.
W7 is a great OS, so I just can't believe Microsoft was in such a hurry to cram Metro down our throats. Personally I hope W8 falls flat on it's Metro interface.

W8 badly needs an optional desktop interface and leave the Metro mess for the mobile devices.
Until they offer such an option, I intend to stay with W7 just like the XP users did with XP.

Maguscreed said:

They are going to fail dramatically at getting win 8 to catch on solidly with the pc market.
I honestly believe that, based on my own experience with it.

I used Vista on a few systems, and it wasn't all that bad. It certainly looked much better than XP, only because I'm into eye candy, and my system specs are usually at the higher end of the market.

Windows 7 had its problems too. There was a lot of negativity going around about the removal of explorer's ability to remember window sizes, positions and various other settings, just to name one.

For me, metro and the general unintuitiveness of the OS as a whole left a bitter taste in my mouth, the removal of Aero has sealed it's fate for me; No computer I own will ever run Windows 8, it's like going back to the days of Windows 98

The same bland, unintuitive, tiring interface is appearing all over micro$ofts products. So for some, we will be stuck, and this might be the pinnacle of our OS and App experience.

I too hope Widnows 8 is perceived as a failure, but fail or not, things probably won't go backwards. Eg. Has Microsoft ever reintroduced in windows 8 the explorer functionality that was around prior to windows 7?

whs said:

It's going and going like the Energizer bunny.

That's what she said about me...

Maguscreed said:

I remember vista being so problematic for me I was forced to dual boot for nearly a year.
If that wasn't the case for you, that's great.
It would be willfully ignorant of me to ignore my own experience at the same time though.

You fall into the rare category of those who actually tried it and had problems as opposed to those who never tried it but loved to jump on the Vista hate bandwagon.

I was also one of the lucky ones that had zero issues with Vista on release. It was stable and I had no problematic components/drivers that caused me any headaches. All through my time with Vista (2 different machines), I had no issues.

However I had nothing but trouble with 7 right up to RTM (shedload of bluescreens, whereas Vista was solid all the way through. All because of a sound card.

I replaced the card and no more issues in 7. Ironically, I'm now having similar issues with 8 because of the replaced sound card.

One component with crappy drivers = unusable OS.


As for this Metro naming backtrack, I'm surprised it took this long for the litigation monster to force MS to change their tack.

If there was no law suit, nor the bad PR - it would still be metro.

It's still the same dog. It doesn't matter what his name is.

Found this, and thought The Operating System Formerly Known as Metro was quite funny....The Brady Interface takes 2nd prize for me..................
A Few Unsolicited Suggestions For Renaming Windows Metro | Gizmodo Australia

Vista was good for the hardware makers since MS paid little to no attention to drivers working with it. w7 is fairly driver complete. I'm using a scanner and printer made for XP that had no Vista support but w7 does albeit generic drivers.

I'm sure dropping the "Metro" moniker will, in fact, make Win 8 a top notch OS.

jimbo45 said:

Run VISTA now on any decent piece of hardware say with an I5 or I7 processor and its performance is perfectly OK especially if you are using SSD's.

That's true, but now with Windows 8 that is not the problem, even better, Windows 8 is looking faster than Windows 7 using lower system specs... trully, that cannot be taken as an argument, just because the real concern is not the speed of the OS but its mode to handle tools, as the "Metro-now-changing-name" interface...

Vista had serious troubles with performance because needed serious upgrades in hardware (at least with many systems happened) and the worst part, Microsoft claimed it's OS was designed to run in at least 512 MB or RAM, which was NOT true, thus leading to lots of speed issues because the OS was having to acces paging file every single moment, while using 1 GB or more, solved that problem (partially, taking into account that proccesors and VGA's were not ready...)

jimbo45 said:

...whatever the detractors of W8 say it CAN (and I say CAN -- because if you start messing around with Metro while attempting to do traditional desktop like work your productivity will nose dive)...

Which, in terms of usefullness, defeats the entire purpose of using a new interface, Metro then is just a piece of plaything that gives nothing to computing...
When Windows 95 came out, everyone was freaked out because of the creation of the Start Menu and Taskbar, but the idea was usefull and added productivity, that was assimilated really fast (as I can remember so far...)

Metro should have the same fate, but it is not like that... it's slow, dumb and definetely not usefull, in tablets may be good, but is desktops is just a disaster to click everything to get the same result as with just hovering the mouse over something. And I suspect you got the same issue as well XD.

jimbo45 said:

Now I HATE the Metro or whatever they call it GUI -- but it's relatively simple to avoid using it by installing a small FREE 3rd party app.

People often say they shouldn't have to use 3rd party apps for this sort of stuff -- but people ALWAYS use 3rd party apps -- nobody complains for example when installing some rubbish 3rd party AV software (shouldn't SECURITY itself be a priority to be handled WITHIN THE OS itself anyway) or buying a sensible backup and restore program - and just about everybody I know uses VLC for playing DVD movies and Winamp or equivalent for music needs.

I tend to agree that the user should at install time be given the option of Full desktop including metro, Metro only (if on a phone / tablet or other mobile device that might be developed in the future) or Desktop only without metro for people wanting to use laptops etc in the classic manner.

I suspect that the "Classic Shell" 3rd party app will be exceedingly popular if W8 really does hit the masses...

...Bye Bye Metro. !!!

Cheers
jimbo

This is a nice solution, except that, using VCL or ESET doesn't harm (or they will likely not) your system, while stuff like classic shell, being a harmless system modifier, may cause conflicts with some stuff someday, but this is like gambling, may happen, may not.

The problem is that you need now to install a 3rd party program to be productive, instead of having a real OS that can improve efficiency at work and doesn't look like you are playing with big cellphone screen...

I can agree with you in your statements, but MS need to understand that this whole madness of Metro will not work on PC's, computers ARE NOT smartphones or tablets, that's why, whatever it happens, we will still need them, because a tablet will never replace the way you can create a book, edit drawings or create digital art or even gaming. Those devices work only to stay connected and to receive or send information, not to do real stuff. Windows 8 need to separate interfaces or it will fail missearably along PC users... And believe it or not, is the worst thing for an OS... Vista survived little just because the problem only was hardware issues and speed, but here, the UI itself is the problem, this is worse...

So, I agree with the last phrase: Bye Bye Metro!!!

smarteyeball said:

However I had nothing but trouble with 7 right up to RTM (shedload of bluescreens, whereas Vista was solid all the way through. All because of a sound card.

I replaced the card and no more issues in 7. Ironically, I'm now having similar issues with 8 because of the replaced sound card.

One component with crappy drivers = unusable OS.

Well, if you ask me, this is the same old story when upgrading to a new OS, it is normal (sometimes) to get a piece of hardware that will likely never work on the new OS unless you get new drivers, or replace entirely.

You remind to me an experience I had (really small) when I first upgraded to 7 in 2010, whenever I shutted down the system I was getting a BSOD, and in a fresh install, so, checking al my pieces of hardware I found that a somehow old 56k modem card was giving the issue, and since I was using ASDL, I just tossed away the card and problem solved.

This was somehow similar when in Windows 98 times, many hardware issues were found, just because they changed the driver model (as far as I can remember, I may be wrong though)... as I told before, this is teh same old story and at least people like us in the forum, are aware that everytime you upgrade your OS you may be subject to this kind of problems.