My wife needed a new computer and we decided on the HP Pavilion TouchSmart 11. It’s a nice little budget laptop with touchscreen but … it comes with Windows 8. Don’t get me wrong, my wife prefers Windows (I’ve been trying to convince her to switch to Linux to no avail), but she really doesn’t like Windows 8 and I have to agree.
Metro Modern UI might look great on a phone, but despite all that extensively advertised fanciness, most work you’ll do on a day-to-day basis will still be in the old desktop-oriented graphical shell. And the combination of these two environments does not really work. “Old style” applications are 2nd class citizens on the start-screen at best, while Modern UI apps aren’t accessible from the desktop. An example of what that leads to: for mail (and specifically to see notifications of incoming mail), Veerle now uses the Modern UI mail app on the start-page and Windows Live Mail on the desktop. 2 mail applications on one OS, seriously?
My wife finally got so frustrated that she decided to install the preview release of Windows 8.1! Based on the decreasing frequency of sighing and frowning on her part, things seem to be somewhat better already (the return of the start-button on the classic desktop UI was a big relief), but I feel as though there still is a lot of room for improvement. But I’m sure at least Windows 9 will be gr8, no?
