Win8 upgrade experience

z3r010 said:

ThrashZone said:

Start8 looks like a winner although I only briefly looked at it

I found start8 the best of all and use it on most of my PC's, however on my laptop I recently reloaded it with 8.1 update 1 with no added start menu, after using it for a week while on my holidays I think I could happily live with the standard functionality and I doubt I'd use start8 the next time my main PC is reloaded.

It is the best by far, I tried a few myself. I do prefer having it installed as opposed to the native W8.1 option though, while the one pictured isn't anywhere near as fully populated as my W7 yet, I do use the Start Menu a lot.

W8.1



W7

z3r010 said:

ThrashZone said:

Start8 looks like a winner although I only briefly looked at it

I found start8 the best of all and use it on most of my PC's, however on my laptop I recently reloaded it with 8.1 update 1 with no added start menu, after using it for a week while on my holidays I think I could happily live with the standard functionality and I doubt I'd use start8 the next time my main PC is reloaded.

Good info John,
I haven't used start8 much just started no pun intended
30 trial so it's just a quick way to access items now,
I did finally see the little arrow on the bottom left on the metro screen which did take me to all control panel... listings,
That silly big arrow pointing to the bottom left and top right were most likely blocking it earlier dag-nabit


On another note,
After switching the default os to win-7 and time to 5 seconds the boot time has greatly improved to access win-7 Yea
Nothing between 5 and 30 seconds kind odd but good enough for me I suppose

If the search icon is on Start, you have 8.1.1

A few notes I forgot in my original thesis

I had some hidden WU (Silverlight, Binge, etc), but they disappeared after 8.1 - they were not installed as far as I can tell. I did see something with those updates mentioned, but I don't recall what or where it was - it didn't jump out, I was just looking around and saw a file and looked at it. Not important enough to go find it, just a note.

Defrag after Win8.1 was extremely fast - too fast perhaps. In Win8, there were 10-12 passes, but Win8.1 screamed though in less than 2. I installed Piriform Defraggler and that reported 18% fragmentation (over 450,000 files). Hmmmm - one of them is wrong.

I notice that my mouse and IE refresh are slow when this spindle (5400 RPM) gets even slightly fragmented (1-3%), so 18% was horrific.

New note: Win8.1 is only about 18 GB, whereas Win7 was about 23 GB. Pretty much the same configuration (no hibernation, no RPs) and 3rd party programs installed.

@Mike: I'm not trying to talk you out of putting a 3rd party shell on your system. I'm only trying to help you get past the initial "What! Where is..... How do I...." stage.

@Anyone: I get a kick out of folks commenting on Start - the same way I get a kick out of XP folks commenting on Win7. I've used so many operating systems that these things don't bother me - they might frustrate me as I learn them. I never really did get MVS , but I had a working knowledge - never liked it, but that was a long, long, longggggg time ago.


Hmmm, I'll have to look in task manager now - defragller finished and there are still a few fragmented files.
Scheduled Start
and
Scheduled Start with Network

I wonder what they are and what else is scheduled.

Thanks I hear ya,
After unlinking outlook.com things are already better,
I hate having messengers..... always operating,
I've always accessed these items from outlook.com or Hotmail.com it's just the way I roll easy to sign in or out and into another account without worrying about Onedrive or Skype...... coming along for the confusion,

Everything else is on my homepage sitting doing nothing but waiting for me to go to the site
I've never been a fan of constant feeds so that's a very annoying feature of win-8..

I'm going to test start8's search and see what it's like,
Metro's search didn't even come up with snipping tool

Thank you John much appreciated

ThrashZone said:

Thanks I hear ya,
After unlinking outlook.com things are already better,
I hate having messengers..... always operating,
I've always accessed these items from outlook.com or Hotmail.com it's just the way I roll easy to sign in or out and into another account without worrying about Onedrive or Skype...... coming along for the confusion,

Everything else is on my homepage sitting doing nothing but waiting for me to go to the site
I've never been a fan of constant feeds so that's a very annoying feature of win-8..

I'm going to test start8's search and see what it's like,
Metro's search didn't even come up with snipping tool

Agreed, the instant gratification never impressed me. Automatically syncing systems / data is nice, but I like to know when things get done, so that if an issue crops up I have an idea of what just changed. Same thing for WU - check, but let me look first.

All it takes is a click to fire up an application and put things in order.

I think I mentioned this earlier, Turn off the live tiles (right click). How do you know which ones are live tiles? Kill anything that moves on Start (news, weather, Mail app, Bing....) - I just right clicked everything and if it offered "Turn off live tile" I did.

Snipping tool??? I did a search and it returned right away. Did you search Everywhere (drop down chevron on the search icon)?

I think it's still Windows search, but Bing desktop comes into play somewhere.

Are we having fun yet? You bet we are!

Bill
.

Yea Bing desktop/ Bing bar and Silverlight are all optional updates I passed on no different than win-7,
All other optional updates got loaded though and of course important ones
Interesting I came up with a blank on top right/ search all,
All I got was search online ?

z3r010 said:

I've just spotted that a few of you guys only had new member access over at EF - that should be sorted now