I like new things. I like operating systems. And, apparently, self-torture. It’s for these reasons that I spent part of last weekend rebuilding my PC – something I’d been meaning to do for many months. The machine’s always been a trooper, but in the last few weeks it’s gotten grumpy. It needed a good hard formatting. I use this PC for gaming and work, but I keep everything mission-critical in a DropBox, so I thought it might be fun to switch the rig over to Windows 8.1 Consumer Preview at the same time.
This is the story of how I installed Windows 8.1 Consumer Preview and slashed my wrist, not in that order. It actually gets kind of gory so if you’re squeamish, clear off.
First of all, know that I’m pretty savvy when it comes to PC stuff. I’m not unbeatable, but my kung-fu is good. The kids would say I have skillz. Possibly phat, conceivably mad, not both, but they are indubitably skillz.
I’ve also had a run of success with Windows Consumer Previews. From the Windows XP Beta 2, still called Whistler at the time, I’ve been quick to adopt. Even in beta that one was so stable and so much more robust than Windows 98 it became a habit. A two-instance habit, but you know. I was willing to go to Consumer Previews, which Microsoft usually releases before a gold version of an OS, on the grounds that it would work pretty well and even if it didn’t, I’d be okay on account of the skillz.
I say “two-instance habit” because I’ve only actually done it twice – Whistler Beta and then Windows 7 Consumer Preview One. I skipped Vista because everybody skipped Vista; it was apparent well before the preview shipped that the OS was a disaster. I’d later upgrade to it specifically for DirectX 10 effects in STALKER: Clear Sky, and it only remained on my system long enough for the 7 preview to arrive.
You should also know that I’m not one of those people who despises Microsoft and all they stand for. In general my experience with their software side has been positive. I use Office every day. I find Windows – missteps aside – to be powerful and versatile, assuming you’re a person who actually wants to get stuff done versus finding weird satisfaction in recompiling your kernel to open a text editor. I like Windows, and I like Microsoft’s pricing strategy, which is eminently reasonable. No, listen.
Compared to Adobe’s suite, which I also use every day, MS is downright generous (if you call it M$ on my site I swear to Lucifer I’ll kill you and your whole family). They don’t release new versions of every eight months, and the price isn’t bad when they do release something. Seriously, $150 every three years for Office, with no compulsion to switch? I can live with that.
First I rewired the case. I built this PC into a Thermaltake Level 10 GT, a beautiful white chassis I bought as a peculiar treat to myself. Why I care about the enclosure I don’t know, but I really wanted this one. Back in 2009 or so, when I built this machine, I was a bit clumsy with the case wiring. It had always bothered me, but I kept on figuring I’d put it off until a nuke-and-pave weekend and then get the whole thing done at once. Of course, Windows 7 is so nice it rarely needs to be nuked – and so did four years pass before I unhooked everything and hauled the monstrosity out to the dining room table to perform surgery.
Surgery Performed, First on PC, then on Steerpike Flesh
So this was an undertaking. My PC could use an upgrade, I suppose, but it’s not so long in the tooth it can’t run stuff – Metro: Last Light was the first game to really chug at maximum settings, and while I’d love to drop a new CPU in there, I also remember the hell I went through getting the heatsink on in the first place. It’s a Scythe Mugen 3, bought in a fit of jealousy after Gregg brought his to show and tell. It’s glorious, but the thought of removing, cleaning, and reinstalling it makes me shrivel in my non-shriveling areas.
Two hours, 14 zip ties, three SATA cables, and one quart of my blood later, I installed Windows 8.1.
The quart of blood isn’t a necessary prerequisite to installing Windows 8.1. It’s not like they make you donate. Y’see, the Scythe Mugen evidently sensed animosity and attacked as I reached for the PSU power header thingy on the northwest side of the cooling assembly. Monofilament-thin silver aluminum fins keep a hot processor cool; they’re also good at delivering thirty-nine identical, parallel slashes along the inside of my wrist.
Anyway.
I installed 8.1. I did it knowing the differences, knowing the complaints. I justified the upgrade in three ways:
- Curiosity
- A bite the bullet and get it over with mentality
- Staggering blood loss (this was the new one – see below)
The time was 9:08 pm. That was the first time the Windows 8 fish appeared on my screen.
At exactly 12:09 pm the next day, fifteen hours plus one minute, Windows 7 booted from its image and I was done with Microsoft operating systems until Windows 9.
Another weird thing you might not know about me is that – in addition to liking operating systems – I like interfaces. UX design interests me, and what I’d read about Windows 8’s new “Metro” interface was intriguing. Most pros who’ve evaluated Windows 8 declare it faster, more stable, and loaded with under the hood improvements… then they give it a five out of ten, and say Metro ruins the whole thing.
What nobody has said, to my knowledge at least, is how close Metro comes.
Quite honestly, if Microsoft sticks with it (always a question mark with them, they love to be fickle and drop support for stuff before it’s had a chance to mature), it should be the interface of the future. The icon-covered-desktop-and-Start-menu paradigm is still functional, but it doesn’t work as well as it once did. Speaking personally, my workflow is hampered by it these days, and I can see exactly how something Metro-like would ameliorate those problems. Not being a UX designer, honestly, I knew the icons-and-desktop model no longer worked, but couldn’t conceive of an improvement. This is it… almost.
The Metro concept reminds me most of Active Desktop, the doomed Windows 95 update the company launched just before the US government started anti-trust proceedings against them. Remember Active Desktop? Hyperlinky, webcentric, it was way, way ahead of its time. 1997 was just too early for a push-based OS shell that essentially demanded an always-on internet connection for full value. I was still on dialup in 1997, and would be for another three years. Most people were.
Ppeople were also suspicious of Push back then, too. It seemed like too many fingers for a company to have in your home computer. The idea of live self-selected content actively coming to you, rather than you having to pull it down when you wanted it, didn’t sit well.
And really Push is the basis of Metro, or at least, what the basis of Metro should be. Nowadays a Push desktop makes sense, and a regular desktop doesn’t make sense. Customizable tiles are the way to go. Slick, elegant, and living – Windows 8’s Live Tiles would be awesome if Microsoft hadn’t invented them. They created the interface of the future, one that’s as beautiful as it is ideal for modern workflows, and then they crippled it.
What’s really wrong with Windows 8? They want me to use it the way they want me to use it.
That’s the most fundamental no-no of UI design. I want to use it the way I want to use it, and they locked me out because they didn’t want their delicate (and admittedly lovely) aesthetics messed up. They restricted me. I can’t size or move tiles the way I want to. I have little control over them, really, and I certainly can’t customize my own to the degree I’d like; I can’t build them from scratch and imbue them with specific Push functionality. There’s no reason I can’t other than it won’t let me, which makes Metro – and by extension Windows 8 – a clumsy, frustrating experience rather than an elegant one.
I Won’t Tell. I Won’t! You Can’t Make Me! Okay Fine, “Klordane.”
Windows 8’s tagline should be “why can’t I.” Why can’t I set tiles to any size I want? Why can’t I create a garish color scheme if I choose? Why can’t I create and customize Live Tiles from a slick user interface that allows me to build functionality up from the ground?
And why, for the love of God, why would they glue Windows 8’s Metro interface on top of a tacked-on, frustrating, half-broken, Start Menu-less 7-esque desktop? Metro is ultimately a shell, not an environment. Most applications, even many Microsoft applications, don’t use it, but they want you in Metro all the time, so you’re constantly flipping back and forth between it – which you wind up never using – and the desktop, which is crippled. It could be made to work like Windows 7’s desktop, sort of, but without the Start Menu it’d have to be an icon-laden mess. Besides, Metro was designed to integrate with the future: with cloud storage, with Push, with compute-anywhere. A “desktop” like that which Windows pioneered just… isn’t designed for that. It can’t be.
If you asked someone at Microsoft those “Why can’t I” questions they’d have answers, but they wouldn’t satisfy you, partly because Edelman – Microsoft’s PR firm – would provide them. I’ll tell you the real answers:
EDELMAN’S ANSWER TO ALL THE QUESTIONS REGARDING INTERFACE: the Windows® Modern User Interface Experience®™ maximizes positive Windows® functionality through full cloud integration with Microsoft® SkyDrive™ technology, Live Tile™ integration, a vibrant Microsoft® App Store™, and a variety of features suitable for today’s discerning computer user.
THE REAL ANSWER TO ALL THE QUESTIONS REGARDING INTERFACE: they want you to use it the way they want you to use it. Which is a terrible answer.
EDELMAN’S ANSWER TO ALL THE QUESTIONS REGARDING THE DESKTOP: Backwards functionality through a familiar Blackcomb©®-styled Windows® Desktop Experience®™ ensures complete usability as customers migrate fully to the Windows® Modern User Interface Experience®™. Exciting new functionality such as the Charms Bar™ and Type Start Search Applet™ energize the desktop experience in new and innovative ways.
THE REAL ANSWER TO ALL THE QUESTIONS REGARDING THE DESKTOP: they likely couldn’t get Metro working across the board, in which case they should never have shipped the OS, and/or they got scared and hedged their bets, in which case they should never have shipped the OS.
I was already having doubts before Windows 8.1 booted up and began its litany of horrors. First of all the computer’s main technical problems hadn’t gone away, they’d gotten worse. This wasn’t really 8’s fault (I haven’t ruled out the the possibility that some of my blood is shorting the motherboard), but it didn’t improve my evening. Then the Modern User Interface Experience®™ began, and that’s where it really went downhill.
Like everyone else, I do have a “Microsoft Account.” But I don’t use it for anything, nor do I want to. It’s tied to an email address I haven’t touched in more than a decade, and the system won’t let me change that, insisting that it doesn’t matter since you can connect as many addresses as you like to that account. I don’t care. I don’t like it. I want to change my primary email address. I like things tidy. When I got my first email address nobody told me to pick something sensible like “msakey” or “matt.sakey” or whatever. They said “pick a word you’ll remember.”
This was The Past. I was eighteen years old. It was 1993. Things were simpler. I didn’t know it would brand me forever. I just picked a god damned word I knew I’d remember. While stoned out of our gourds in our dorm room that afternoon, my roommate and I had watched a Chip & Dale: Rescue Rangers marathon. So I picked a character’s name. How was I to know that it would follow me for the rest of my life, courtesy of Microsoft? How was I to know that my University alma mater’s domain name would be a lot less suitable when I’m a 38 year old professional?
Similarly, like everyone else, I don’t use Internet Explorer as my default browser. Microsoft needs to get over this. Let it go. Crippling the OS by making it impossible to create website-driven Live Tiles unless IE is your default is the kind of thing that gets you investigated by the Justice Department, yet there it is.
Oh, and then there’s the fact that 8.1 supposedly “brings back the Start Menu.”
It really doesn’t.
Clicking the button just swaps you back to Metro. Right clicking on it summons this offense:
Which I assume they’ll gussify a little before the actual 8.1 launch this autumn, but it’s not what people had in mind when they asked for the Start Menu back. When they asked for the Start Menu back, they wanted the fucking Start Menu back, you knob-goblins.
It’s a Virtue
Recalling that I went through a similar layer of confusion with Windows 7’s compulsory minimalism after the pleasant chaos of XP, I resolved to be patient. I got Steam up and running.
Now there’s a delightful piece of engineering, Steam. You know what you do to resurrect Steam after a nuke and pave? Not a god damned thing. You start Steam. If you keep it on a non-boot drive like I do, it announces that something weird has happened and it’s confused, but don’t worry, it’s fixing itself. Then it does. Presto.
I installed the Office 2013 trial (I told you, I like new things). Typed some stuff. Made a slide or two. Intelli-filled some spreadsheet cells. Another demand for my Microsoft Account information. Meh.
I installed the Creative Cloud trial (look, I’m running out of ways to say it). Downloaded some creative clouds. Applied a gradient to a stroke in Illustrator, which probably doesn’t excite you much but lemme tell you, it made me fizz – actually fizz – with joy. Gradient strokes! Can you imagine?
I visited the Windows App Store, which is a chaotic mess of crap tools by eleven year olds, and installed some . I tidily set up my Metro “desktop” according to my whims, if not precisely how I wanted. And I started poking around in Windows 8.1’s innards.
By about 4:00 am the writing was on the wall, but I was undaunted. For every retarded design decision (yeah, you can set it to boot straight to the 7-like desktop, but I’ll give you a buck if you can find that checkbox without Googling it), 8 or 8.1 included something really nice, like a massively revamped Task Manager. “I could get used to this, eventually,” I thought.
The sun was coming up when the computer froze for the umpteenth time – again, I can’t really blame Windows 8 for this, my PC is messed up and I don’t know why, skillz or not – so I went to bed.
Several hours later I hunkered down, booted the machine, and stared blankly at Metro. My brain had hit a roadblock; I couldn’t remember the “best” way to access my C drive. Or, in fact, any way. In truth there is no “best” way to access the C drive, because Microsoft wants you to forget that the C drive exists, Microsoft wants you to store everything on its SkyDrive®™, so conveniently linked to your granite, unchangeable-as-the-tides Microsoft Account. But I wanted something from my C drive and I was damned if I could remember how to get to it.
“Hell with it,” I said.
About 45 minutes later:
Yeah, it’s weird and chaotic, and yeah, it’s still not working right, and yeah, my workflow isn’t compatible with it any more, and yeah, it’s not a long term solution because things change and eventually I’ll have to change with them. The irony is that normally I don’t mind the change.
And thus ended my fifteen hours with Windows 8 – fifteen hours I have no plans to ever repeat. If Valve pulls the trigger on the rumors and releases a Steam OS, I’m there.
In the meantime, I’ve seen the future, and it could be Metro. It could be. Windows 7 is still perfectly acceptable, and I haven’t looked back, but it’s true that Windows 7 just doesn’t cut it today the way it did four years ago… any more than Windows XP cut it at the end of its life.
Interface for workflow. I know what I want, but it’s not possible in 7 and tantalizingly close (but similarly impossible) in 8.
Tools like Rainmeter exist, I guess, but if you’ve ever tried to use Rainmeter you know it’s more a piece of performance art than a useful solution. It’s so hard to use, so venomously obtuse, that every tiny action is incessantly one step (or one line of Lua code) out of reach. Even efforts like the Omnimo skin, which is pretty damned amazing, don’t come close to being acceptable. Not close. The idea is there, but you need the engineering prowess of a… of a Microsoft to realize it. Sadly they didn’t bother.
Windows 8.1 isn’t going to change any minds. I have seen the future, I say. I have seen the future, and it could be Metro. But not until someone starts thinking about it correctly. Not until they let me use it the way I want to use it, not the way they want me to use it.
Click this tile to email the author at steerpike@tap-repeatedly.com.
“The way you want to use it”?
That won’t do.
This is Microsoft we’re talking about here. Bill and Steve. B & S.
You’ll take what you’re given and be glad of it.
“Why can’t I close apps or run more than two at a time?”
Wait, did I read that right? If I’m working on a paper in Word and consulting a PDF in Adobe Whatsit I can’t fire up Strange Adventures in Infinite Space for a bit of procrastination? I can’t have read that right, can I?
You read it right, Matt W, but.
BUT “apps” refers to Metro applications, not the usual Windows apps; they are more like mini-programs and because Microsoft hates flexibility they set it up so you can only run two (maybe four?) at a time in 8.1 and there’s essentially no way to close them. This is largely irrelevant since nobody uses Metro because it sucks the way it’s built.
They took away stuff people like and want, and put it stuff people dislike and don’t want. Overall I agree, we could do away with a permanent taskbar, but it needs to be replaced by something else, some visual clue of what’s running. The idea of Metro is brilliant, it’s the execution that’s flawed. Their loss.
Hmm, well I guess I’d need to see it in action to figure out what that means in practice. Mysterious.
Wow, that blood shot was shocking.
I remember the days of Active Desktop. I HATED Active Desktop. Of course I was still a kid, so when I got fed up, I tried to uninstall it by force and ended up accidentally breaking a lot of computer functionality in the process.
Gosh I absolutely LOVED this Steepike. Brilliant stuff. I’m looking for a new laptop at the moment and almost purchased a Windows 8 one. Thankfully I’ve read this 🙂
Yes, sorry about the blood. I debated it, but in the end I decided, what do people visit this site for, if not to be sucker-punched by shots of my blood?
B positive, by the way. Ironic if you know me at all.
Lewis: I suspect in the long run, Windows 8 will be a bit like the Office Ribbon – you hate it at first, and then eventually you get used to it, or at least learn to tolerate it. Had I stuck with the thing for a while longer I’d probably be fine, but there were things I really didn’t like, such as the expectation that I tie it to my Microsoft account, and there was a sense that I didn’t feel like getting used to it. The OS isn’t broken or awful or anything, it’s just… it’s just not very comfortable, especially for a person like me who really knows his way around the old way.
Thanks for the bloody details, Sakes. Hopefully you put some frozen beer cans on that to help stop the bleeding. I’m getting a new laptop soon and was pretty sure I was steering clear of W8. Now I know for certain. I think I’m going to end up with a Macbook Pro dual-booting into W7. Curious to know if anybody here has any experience to share playing PC games on a Mac running Windows…
Oh man! Another Steerpike story to be amazed (and horrified) at. I can relate to your above words in so many ways. First of all, this message is being typed on (you guessed it!) a Vista PC. I’ve owned and put up with this monstrosity for 5 years now I think. It is a total piece of crap that just freezes at random (thank you Vista) multiple times per day. It is now getting to the point that I think it could die at any time, so I took advantage of a Frys sale and purchased a cheap laptop PC to use as a bridge until I decide which gaming PC I want next (and can budget for it). Bad news is, all the major vendors only put Win8 on all the PC and laptops now. Since I wanted just a cheap laptop, I couldn’t use a boutique vendor. So, what do you call a person who moves from Vista to Win 8? Me! I’m just a lucky guy I guess!
I don’t mind that Win 8 exists. It seems to serve a purpose for those few that are buying the Surface Pro or the touch screen laptop hybrids. I just really don’t get why M$ (err I mean Microsoft) was so willing to move quick and bury Win 7 which got so much right. I hardly ever got to use it myself except at work, and it seems to work good. Very similar to XP in interface and usability and seemed stable. The move to force everybody to a tablet style OS and interface regardless if they owned a tablet, laptop, or desktop is just supremely stupid. So while I am resigned to suffering through Win 8 on a laptop, I know right now before I even use it that I will not like it.
Sorry for the late response, I’ve been installing my SSD, transferring data from and formatting my secondary drives over the last week as well as helping Luke build his new computer — which now has Windows 7 — so this post is quite topical! He even received a free copy of Acronis True Image as well.
Yeah, Adobe have seriously taken the piss with their pricing up until the Creative Cloud, what with the expensive, frequent and questionably slight updates. Thankfully, my new job has given me home access to it so I can be up to date all the time and not a penny down. CC seems like a much better prospect though, rather than buying software outright that will be superseded in 6 months or so. It’s still costly and given that you can’t select the apps you use the most for a custom bundle, you’re torn between subscribing for the whole lot, or specific products individually and neither are good value in that sense.
That PC case Steerpike… Yikes. Beautiful? O_O It looks like something out of Buck Rogers! I think you’ve got the Scythe Mugen 3 as well Steerpike, as it looks narrower than mine. Here: http://www.pc-max.de/sites/pc-max.de/files/images/n331e7bf6081b32792191317e624be10e.jpg Mine is the hulking behemoth on the right, yours is similar to the one on the left. Either way, they’re both amazing and absurd and I can vouch for those fins being super sharp– your poor wrist!
And you know, the real start menu doesn’t exist in 7 because it has that super annoying ‘All Programs’ button which just opens this big mess of folders and files in a small corner of your screen rather than splaying them out across your screen neatly, column by column. I just can’t work out why that’s supposed to be better. When I first installed 7 (having skipped Vista) I downloaded a Classic Start Menu shell that restored the real start menu and I was happy for a while but with my fresh install of 7 this week I’m trying to use the new start menu, with the pinned apps and what have you. I’ve warmed to it greatly but that damn All Programs button… yuck.
I like 7 but I think I still prefer XP because it didn’t badger me as often and there were certain functionalities that are totally absent in 7. The biggest two are bulk ‘Open With…’ when you want to open a bunch of JPGs in Photoshop for instance (you can only ‘Open With…’ on single files now), and window positions and sizes not being remembered so you have to constantly resize and shuffle things around when you’re trying to streamline your workflow.
As for Illustrator and gradient strokes: count me in with the fizzing. Why in god’s name have Adobe left it so long when InDesign has had it since forever? I hate expanding strokes just to apply a gradient only to realise the stroke needs to be slightly thicker or thinner later on but because it’s been expanded its thickness can’t be edited easily without applying an Offset Path effect and dicking about with hundredths of a pixel to get the right size. Jeez Adobe.
I can’t wait to hear what Valve are up to. They’re game changers and I’m all ears.
And I didn’t know you had the same video card as me! MSI Twin FrozrII for the win!
For those who are buying or thinking of buying, I feel compelled to reiterate: all accounts I’ve read insist that Windows 8 is fast, stable, and features some nice stuff power users will like. It’s just the interface and layers of unnecessity are grating. Even the touch focus didn’t bother me, precisely – I could’ve gotten used to mousing to screen’s edge – for me it was two things:
1. Disorientation (inability to find stuff I’m used to)
2. Metro’s flaccidity (I wanted Metro to be what it ought to have been, not a glued-on half-solution. Even though it’s touch-friendly, tiles work fine with the old M/K. It’s swipes and edge hovers and stuff that don’t. Sadly Metro is well-meaning but too limited. It doesn’t do the things I hope to see it do one day).
Speaking as a person who hates Adobe but cuddles with Illustrator late at night, any new features are delightful; and the goodies that Illustrator’s CC edition gets are downright touchable. But until my company migrates to it, you won’t see me ponying up that sum. Heck, I’d never have upgraded to CS 5 if work hadn’t forced me to. The cost is crushing for someone who uses all the programs.
Gregg! I was looking and not only are we awesome studs for having twin Twin Frozrs, we’re also savvy purchasers. Apparently the 560Ti outperforms lots of cards in the 600 and even low 700 families. Unless you want to buy a Titan for a thousand bucks, there’s not much to upgrade to… surprising given mine is at least 18 months old.
And it looks like I do have a Mugen 3, judging from that photo. I thought for sure it was a 2… either way, the god damned thing was a bitch to put on.
I have a new career for us: taking the “English” translations of motherboard and cooler instructions and translating them again into readable English. That are attach with fin to agree end of board and accomplish fate of cooling my ass.
Oh yes there will be blood! I have 8 on my work computer (i.e. I don’t own it, but it’s a sweet ultrabook with a touchscreen). It works fine and all, but the whole Metro thing is just too clunky to be compelling. I sort of liked the apps, until I realized that you can only bring them up on your primary display. I typically use two or three displays and that limitation alone (unless there’s a way to do it I’m not aware of) was enough for me to switch back to the good old desktop programs.
Really the only thing I use the tile display for is to anchor apps I don’t necessarily want pinned to my taskbar. As Steerpike said, it’s perfectly stable and responsive from a technical standpoint. But the touchscreen wanna-be stuff just isn’t very good.
@lakerz1 (and anyone else buying) – if you are determined, you can still get a Windows7 PC if you dig around enough. HP, Dell, and Lenovo all have Windows7 models, but you have to look into the dark corners of their websites. Dig into the “computers for business” area or find the detailed search options which include the OS.