Learning to use Windows 8

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I'd had to get a replacement laptop for some specific light duties around rashbre central. It came with Windows 8 and I'm still working out the best ways to tame it.

I use a regular and (touch wood) reliable Thinkpad with Windows 7 for much of my work, although my playtime systems are pretty much Mac.

I should confess that for the HP Windows 8 system I'm almost resorting to reading the manual (well if there had been one, kinda thing).

For my own sanity, I added a start button back onto Windows 8, but the overall W8 software has a few weird quirks. These seem to be geared to its dual use via its WinRT incarnation as a phone/tablet operating system.

One is that it keeps flashing up a full screen mode to ask me if I want to use Internet Explorer as the browser. I've answered Yes, but the next time I boot it seems to ask the same question again. I've tried selecting one of the other browsers offered as well (Google Chrome). It accepted that but then gave me...Internet Explorer.

It also goes into a full screen mode when it's looking for a wi-fi network. Like, "Don't try anything else at the moment."

Some of the software once maximised won't go back to a rescaleable size. It's all or nothing.

Get too close to the right hand edge of the screen when moving some software around and the software maximises.

There was a situation where, whilst unattended, it downloaded update software and rebooted itself but then changed the sequence of the password entry characters. It took me a while to figure that one.

And on this four core processor laptop, sometimes a scanning system will kick in and take over the whole machine, stopping everything else from running. Surely it could run in 1/4 of the machine instead of using all of it?

Individually they are minor issues, together they are something of a nuisance on what was a 2013 sealed box system onto which I've only installed a handful of regular programs.

The problem is that each of these things just interrupt the flow. They get in the way rather than adding to the experience.

I have, today, found a really good recent, comprehensive and positive article about Windows 8 on Techradar and here's the link.

The review is only a few days old, although I thought Windows 8 had been around for some months now. It does describe the ways to interact, but also draws a conclusion that the system works better with a tablet (I think it means a PC tablet rather than Amitriptyline).

By comparison, I changed my desktop Mac recently to one of those thin ones. It just asked if I'd like migrate my old stuff to the new machine. I said yes and after it had copied everything across the new system just works. No hassle, no reboots.

Just sayin'.