My first experience of Windows 8

[heiowge]

[heiowge]

[heiowge]

[heiowge]

[heiowge]

[heiowge]

[bobthebob1234]

This actually made me lol.
Well done!

[Paradigm Shifter]

To be fair, you searched on Google for a browser. Google are obviously going to put their browser first... it's even in the 'sponsored' box...

Although you basically summed up why I found Windows 8 to be less than worthless. I'll be using Windows 7 for some time to come, I feel.

[nelz]

Bing Is Not Google

[heiowge]

I used Bing to search because it minimised the amount of work I required IE to actually do. Had I gone to google.co.uk first, it would require an additional step and I wasn't sure IE could handle it!

[johnhudson]

Thanks for that - I like the user name; Janus was the Roman god who looked both ways at the same time - seemed rather appropriate.

[Paradigm Shifter]

Bing Is Not Google

I think I need to go to bed. I dunno why I said Google.

I meant Bing, and my reasoning was that Chrome seems to be rapidly climbing the rankings when it comes to browsers... somehow, that translated differently between my brain and my fingertips.

...

edit: Let's see if I can type this and make sense...

Been thinking about your comment on the first screen. Personally, I'm not too fussed about the 'dull' load screen... so long as I'm not staring at it for very long! That said, I do like a verbose boot; it lets me know if there are any issues.

[heiowge]

Thing is, that under virtualbox, the boot time is supposed to be faster than in reality. I found it about 20% slower to boot than Win 7 under virtualbox. Plus it froze on the black screen twice and went to that white one once then froze again. Out of 6 boot attempts, it loaded correctly twice. I even tried reinstalling, but had similar issues.

[Paradigm Shifter]

Thing is, that under virtualbox, the boot time is supposed to be faster than in reality. I found it about 20% slower to boot than Win 7 under virtualbox. Plus it froze on the black screen twice and went to that white one once then froze again. Out of 6 boot attempts, it loaded correctly twice. I even tried reinstalling, but had similar issues.

I've had a lot of trouble with Windows in VirtualBox. XP is OK, although boots slower than it does on slower hardware when it's got 'direct' access. Windows Vista is just a trainwreck from start to finish in a VM from what little experience of it I've had in said VM, which while it's nothing to write home about when not virtualised, it at least behaves itself... most of the time.

I admit I've not tried Windows 7 in a VM, but Windows 8 is a law unto itself. The Consumer and Release Previews basically seemed to work if they felt like it - for example, I couldn't get Windows 8 to boot in a VM without some oddball tweaks (none of which I can remember right now, but I'm sure I found them floating 'round the 'net) but a colleague couldn't get it to work at all.

I've not tried the RTM version, despite Technet giving me access to it back in August because I don't feel like using a license key up (Microsoft removed the 30 days activation grace period in Windows 8 ) for an OS that I'm probably not going to bother actually using. As I - and others - have said in the past... I'm sure Windows 8 will be great on tablet PCs (I'm debating getting a Windows 8 RT tablet to play with) but on my desktop I don't want fingermarks on my screens... even if they were touchscreens, which they aren't.

Perhaps I'm too demanding?

[bobthebob1234]

My Win7 virtualbox boots quicker than Win7 on the host hardware. Same with Win XP. never tried Vista. Have you enabled visualization acceleration on whatever cpu you are using? Or maybe its just cos I have an 8 core CPU and 16gb of ram. But then Win7 has access to that when it is booting not in a VM...