Just double checking. I wouldn't want to get Win 8, really like it and then find that all of my stuff doesn't work on it.
Wow, that's borderline retarded. It's not even a quarter of a second. Really. And once it went to the desktop immediatly after boot up, not sure why though. The entire thing is really fast altogether.
Ugh, I always suspected the Metro desktop thing was a rushed last-minute decision, and between the Aero icons and not even replacing the Aero Basic theme, it's waaaaay too obvious.
How is it a last minute decision when it was available several months ago in the public releases? You gotta check your facts, dude :P
It wasn't. The release preview had Aero for the desktop, RTM is the first public build with a Metro desktop theme.
And? What I understand is: no matter how it's built, how well it works for your needs is what matters. I haven't had a single problem with those (usability, legibility, lack of organization...) I'd send it to hell and adopt Windows Basic style but I didn't. You have to understand, it's like OGG and MP3. While OGG is techically better, if the person notices no difference between same-size files, let they use mp3. If a person doesn't notice how something is better than the other is because the don't NEED it.
Oergg's right: This new remodeling has been in the works since at least December 2011! They just ditched the Aero version of the theme and left the Windows Basic one.
I'm not talking about the "graphics system", I'm talking about the desktop's visual theme, which prior to RTM was more of a brushed-up Aero than it was Metro. I'm saying they hurriedly redesigned the look of the desktop to be more Metro and in their haste, didn't change things like desktop icons (which are still Aero themed) and the Windows Basic theme (which hasn't changed since Vista). Yes, they may have worked on it longer - certainly bits and pieces were there earlier - but they didn't have a releasable version even three months ago for the Release Preview.
God damnit. Look at his second screenshot. It is *completely* identical. And if you disable transparency in the release preview, you end up with an almost completely identical interface. Their move was known 3 months ago, too. It went all over the press. What basic theme are you talking about? THAT, and I just rebooted, and it went to the desktop immediately. I don't know why it's doing that though.
The second screenshot is not identical. Windows 8 Release Preview shipped with the same half-complete Metro theme other versions did, which doesn't even have shit as basic as highlighted window buttons (minimize, maximize, exit). Note also the miscolored clock in the bottom right. It was very unfinished and the version that was actually used was an Aero variant. If you disabled transparency on it you got, uh, Aero without transparency enabled, just like every version of Windows Vista and 7 prior. See: Release preview. RTM. The shipping version of Windows 8 has a number of late changes to the theme. Announced, but not in the preview build, and thus presumably not finalized. The fallback theme in case DWM fails, visible in your VB6 screenshot. They did remove it from theme selection, but it's still visible in a number of places and clashes with the rest of the OS when it does appear.
I'd be interested in finding a way to make it work. I tried killing DWM.exe numerous times to get it to appear, no luck. Could someone extract the theme out of windows 7 mayhaps?
"net stop uxsms" in the command line doesn't work either. From what I've read MS pretty thoroughly removed all the various ways to disable desktop composition; even deleting dwm.exe just causes Windows to crash on boot. The old Basic theme appears in Windows 8 in cases like VB6 where you have windows-within-windows (and even then, even though it looks like the old Basic theme, it's still going through DWM). EDIT: It looks like someone in this Neowin thread managed to disable DWM on the Consumer Preview, but it did break a lot of shit.
I couludnt enable transparency on the window title either. I assume it's just a value in the registry, but I can't find it. ColorizationOpaqueBlend doesn't work. Composition value in the registry still exists, but does not have any effect.
Yeah but your argument was not "how well it works" but "it wastes resources". Which DWM does not, in fact, it saves resources versus the old renderer. And you can use the new system so it works the exact same way as the old (disable shadows, transparency, animations etc). The only difference now is aesthetics. And I'm not even sure if the windows classic theme is still in windows 8.
But as I said, most of the people notice their PC faster (when in heavier programs) without Aero enabled. I don't really know the comparison with the basic theme, though. On that article Guess Who posted it said Aero was better for scaling etc but I dindn't see anything as 'it's faster than Classic theme'.
My suspicion is that it's not the lack of Aero that causes the speedup, but the fact that you also turn off every other visual effect (under system properties -> special settings -> performance), that makes people see it as "faster". You know, it looks faster because when you minimize something, it won't show the animation, it just minimizes instantly. Incidentally the same place is also where you can disable the desktop composition engine. You can however just disable the special effects and still leave composition enabled. I have my machine set up like that, since I usually work fast enough that the intermediary animations would only slow me down. Aero Basic is just a version of aero with composition turned off. It should be minimally slower than the Classic theme, since even though it uses the same GDI engine, it puts a skin on top of it. Think of Windows XP with its custom theme vs the classic one.
It's MUCH faster for a lot of things. Try dragging a window across the screen - it has to constantly redraw the window when you do it (on old versions of Windows or on worse hardware, this is why you only see a dotted outline when you drag a window - old hardware couldn't redraw windows fast enough). On DWM it has the window stored in memory which means huge performance improvements on even basic tasks like that.
