Windows 8 editions announced

[Janthran]

Windows 8? I haven't even moved my way up to 7 yet.

I'm trying to get with "it", I really am, but they keep changing what "it" is!

I skipped 7.

 

[Rydian]

the first thing i do when upgrading is disable all the fancy stuff. put everything in classic mode and adjust for best performance. I can't help but worry that things will be slower. speed is the main thing for me. Vista was so bad I downgraded back to XP, Win 7 is great tho. Not sure if it will be worth upgrading to win8. Not interested in fancy UI, just speed & compatibility.

Wanna' know what's ironic? Disabling everything makes it slower. The effects are there because they can afford to be there (on supported hardware).

DWM uses GPU acceleration to do all of those graphical effects: it requires less CPU work, as all of the work normally done by the CPU is completely offloaded to the GPU.

That's things like drawing the window border, handling window movement, etc. DWM uses DirectX, whereas disabling it forces GDI+ to handle it. Drawing a window border involves a number if bitblts to video memory under GDI+. Under DirectX, it's a single texture upload (done once) followed by a single draw command - then everything is done behind the scenes on the video card.

By disabling DWM's effects, you're basically pulling all of that work off the video card back onto the CPU, which would have otherwise been reserved for your apps.

(And before you even think about the impact to 3D apps: Rendering 3D to a back buffer is more or less free on most video cards, so there's little to no impact on performance due to DWM. Further, DWM automatically disables itself when a fullscreen 3D application is started.)

If your video card is weak, you can disable things like window transparency and shadows, but if you disable Aero entirely, you're using CPU-based effects and the GPU sits idle.

I'm worried that both OSes will just become too simplified. Making it more accessible to many, but much harder to use if you know what your doing. I wish both OSes had 2 versions for both types of consumers.

Can always just change settings? I mean even with all the changes in XP-7 from 9x, you can still tell 7 to treat your tray icons as bars and not icons, and show the control panel as individual icons instead of categories, and stuff like that. Want the File/Etc. bar in Explorer? Change a setting and you have it.

 

[Deleted_171835]

I'm not exactly sure about the Metro UI. I mean, it looks nice but it seems more suited for tablets and touch-screens. It doesn't work perfectly with a mouse. It doesn't matter anyways. I'll be using the regular desktop the vast majority of the time.

I've had Windows 8 for a while now.
Since.. Sometime last year?

Spoiler

>beta

EDIT: Dear lord, they're using the horrible new Office ribbon bar for the explorer windows? Can't just use the word delete can we. Have to have a giant freaking icon to go with it incase I get confused.

The ribbon is great in Office. Much better than the menus used in 2003 and is easier to navigate. Most of the people who complain about it are just grumpy that the menu shortcuts they learned in '03 don't work with the Ribbon.

That said, they shouldn't be bringing it into Explorer. The ribbon is used to make commands easier to access when they are a ton of options. Explorer doesn't have many options. Adding it in just makes the interface look messy.

 

[Supernova741]

I just got used using windows 7, not upgrading to 8 ;-)! I'll wait for windows X or something.

 

[Mantis41]

It looks to me as if we are giving away our peaceful, artistic desktops to be replaced by advertising billboards for MS and developers. Have you seen the crap you get bombarded with on the 360 console? Who would willing give over there personal desktop space for that collection of garbage?

Windows 7

Spoiler

Windows 8

Spoiler

 

[Guild McCommunist]

It looks to me as if we are giving away our peaceful, artistic desktops to be replaced by advertising billboards for MS and developers. Have you seen the crap you get bombarded with on the 360 console? Who would willing give over there personal desktop space for that collection of garbage?

I seriously doubt there'd be ads. They may take a Kindle approach though and offer a cheaper version of the OS with ads and a more expensive version without though.