Agreed. My mom and best friend both have Windows 8... I hate almost EVERYTHING about it... every little aspect with using the OS requires relearning how to find/use just about everything. Vista to 7 was a very easy, SUPER positive change... with just about ZERO learning curve. 7 to 8... over the course of my time trying it out... I don't even know how to view internet connection properties on W8... WTF? This should not be difficult!?!?!? To hell with 8. I hope that 9 is a step back in 7's direction.
Didn't these complaints already happened since the huge change Windows 3.1 had against Windows 95? Many people complained about the new design (although the complaints weren't overcrowded because internet wasn't that big and accessable as today). I guess it's just a matter of time to get used to a new style, just like we done before.
Less people used computers back then. 95 happened, then the dotcom boom, and then the mass computerization of almost every industry possible (almost all hardware using derivatives of the 9x UI for the user interface. Probably thanks to, y'know, almost every office computer in existence using Windows). The shift from the 9x styled GUI to Metro is simply on a much larger scale than 3.1 to 9x.
Also, 95 was an improvement. Metro isn't, especially if you don't have a touch device (as the majority of Windows 8 users don't).
Well until I get a GPU to replace my current HD7970 that supports Direct X 12+ I'm probably aint making this jump. Still nice to see it'll finally be more user friendly to non touchscreen users (aka everyone ever)
You realize OpenGL is far ahead of the curve with the specs than Direct3D(yeah, why do they say DX 10,11 or 12 when the only change is in D3D?), and it runs everywhere, including Windows XP 32bit, Linux, OS X and soon some Android devices would run the pure 4.4 instead of the ES version. The things D3D12 promises have been already supported by OGL on AMD/NVIDIA cards for years. Most of the features I read about were reducing CPU overhead, and rarely addresses the actual GPU performance.
To be honest I'd love to switch to Linux, gotten used to working with it and the only thing keeping me from doing more than just a dual boot is the support for games (which despite progress is still pretty awful). As far as Windows is concerned, I probably would rephrase my comment and say I'll upgrade when I replace my GPU with something that requires a newer OS to run at max potential. Considering I bought my Matrix Platinum HD7970 only last October/November and I'm only using one 1080p monitor that will probably be quite a while.
That video card supports DirectX 11, right? I'm pretty sure that Microsoft noted that DirectX 12 runs on DirectX 11 capable GPUs. In particular, I believe it was GCN AMD cards that are supported, which I'm pretty sure is what you've got seeing as it's a 7000 series.
It sounds like everyone's going to be forced to upgrade to Windows 8.1 within a month's time. I'm a little worried, 'cause... well, it's given a lot of people a lot of shit, from the sound of it. Some have failed the installation several times, others have spent all day rebooting their computer over and over again, and some have even lost all of their desktop programs, documents, and everything except the absolute most basic, bare bones programs needed for the computer to run and had to reinstall everything. Anyone here had these problems? I'm a little worried about losing all my shit. ...Anyone?
Only problem I had was as above, losing my UEFI dual boot for ubuntu and having to run a live disk to repair it (which really annoyed me at the time)
I only had a few issues, most of which I ironed out. Originally I was going to upgrade from 7 to 8 then to 8.1, because I really didn't feel like moving my files out of windows.old with a clean install, but it failed every time I ran the upgrade, so I had no choice but to do a clean install if I wanted my fancy multi-monitor features. (Yes, I've tried third-party EVERYTHING for multi-monitor stuff. They're not all that great.) This also happened, which boggled my mind; but after I resolved those issues in the image (by uninstalling them), it only happened every other attempt. The only issue I have as it stands now is bluetooth related. It's oddly specific, too. If I have TeamSpeak 3 running while connecting a bluetooth device (wii remote in this case), my left speaker and ONLY my left speaker (out of 6 physical speakers in my headphones) would go out. Then once I'd start dolphin, or anything that would begin transmitting information, TeamSpeak 3 would crash, and can't start back up until the device is disconnected. And to fix the speaker problem, I had to unplug the headphones and plug them back in (USB). It was even worse before I installed the toshiba bluetooth stack; my audio would screw up regardless of whether TeamSpeak was running or not, and trying to fix it without unplugging the headphones would often result in BSODs. Other than that really oddly specific problem, everything is working just fine. I'm sure I'll manage to fix it one day, and I almost have a feeling it's TeamSpeak conflicting with a driver. It's not the first time either. I had this happen with my tablet drivers on Windows 7 of all things for it to conflict with.
Standard advice - make sure you have a backup of EVERYTHING before you try it, and then just do it. If it works, great! If it doesn't, you've not lost anything except time.
Pretty much this. I keep regular back ups of my photos, music, videos, ROMs, emulators and any patches for programs or games, along product keys I purchased and original discs for old games. I've not bothered to try Windows 8. I've heard nothing but bad things about it from most people. It runs good under the hood, but is a pain to learn. I want something that doesn't take 2 months of my time to learn. A change here or there, fine. But a major one with a bunch of them is too much at once. I'm very happy with Windows 7 for the most part, other than some issues with old PC games not running or broken or missing EAX (surround sound) in others. I've tried running some things, but don't like it as it's not transparent (virtualbox) or something still isn't working. I wish someone would Patch Sonic R and make that freely available and Valve would get the Surround Sound working for the steam ports of Half-Life, (the WON versions run with work arounds, but Surround sound is either absent or just flat out glitchy).
In my case, I was lucky enough for the upgrade to successfully restore everything each time it failed, and the clean install only meant I had to move files from windows.old (it wasn't "erase my hard drive" clean). I'm pretty bad when it comes to backups because I don't really have anywhere to back up my stuff to. Certainly still a good idea if you can manage to, though.