Windows 8: My First Impressions

I've been living with my new Windows 8 laptop for a little over a week now. It's an ongoing process to learn the new OS and configure everything the way I want. Here's my impression so far . . . .

Short version: Not hatin' it.

Longer version:

In the words of Gunnery Sergeant Thomas Highway, “You adapt. You overcome. You improvise.” Adaptation is necessary for survival. If we fail to adapt we become irrelevant and eventually extinct. This also applies, to a degree, to adapting to new computer technology. In order to remain technologically relevant and adept, we must adapt.

My previous laptop was an Acer Aspire AS5251-1805 with an AMD motherboard and CPU, and 3 GB of SDRAM running Windows 7.  It was a pretty decent budget laptop that I purchased while attending Capital Area Technical College. I upgraded the CPU, RAM, hard drive (HDD), and OS while I had it (I may address that in later posts - how to do it, that is). It recently died after 35 months of faithful service. I started a malware scan one night before bed and it wouldn’t boot the next morning. I determined that the power supply unit on the motherboard was fried. I pulled the hard drive and pitched the rest.

I spent a couple hours researching laptops on Amazon and found a reasonably-priced, well-equipped Toshiba Satellite C55T-A5247 laptop. I went with an Intel system this time. Intel motherboards and CPUs seem to me to be faster than AMD. I was torn between another Acer with Windows 7 or the Toshiba with Windows 8 and a touchscreen. Acers are pretty decent budget laptops, but the price and features of the Toshiba got my attention.

I'm not an early adopter by any means. I toyed with the idea of Windows 8 for about a year before I finally decided to take the plunge. Besides, as an IT geek I figured that I'd have to learn the new desktop OS soon, anyway. And, since the interface is similar to Windows Server 2012, it seemed even more logical from a professional development standpoint.

Windows 8 was developed to be lighter weight, so to speak and use less of a CPU and RAM resource hog. MS originally expressed the intent to develop a single Windows OS that could be used on the full spectrum of computing devices from smart phones to tablets to laptops to desktops to servers. They sorta kinda maybe almost came close with Windows 8, but not quite. But, that's why Windows 8 is less resource-intensive than it's more recent predecessors.

My first impression of Windows 8 is that it’s FAST compared to Windows Vista and 7. Granted, it's running on a brand new laptop with 4 GB of RAM and an Intel i3 2.4 GHz dual-core CPU, but everything runs faster – even when I imported my documents, photos, music, etc, from the USB-connected HDD from my previous laptop.

The new tile interface (tile; metro; whatever the name du jour is) will definitely take some getting used to, but any shortcomings I’ve seen so far are fairly easily overcome. One of the first things I did was learn to open the Desktop and installed the Classic Shell start menu. I'll talk about that more in my next post.

The surface, or façade if you will, of Windows 8 is a major overhaul that resembles the Windows Phone OS; however, there are more similarities to Windows Vista and 7 than you might think. I'm taking advantage of that as I learn and adapt to the new OS - and more important, adapt the OS to me.

If you prefer the Desktop environment like many of us are accustomed to, you can install and configure Classic Shell to skip the Start screen and boot into the Desktop. If you like certain icons on your Desktop, you can configure it just like in Windows Vista and 7. In other words, don't let the tile Start screen scare you away - you can either learn to love it, or bypass it altogether.

By the way, rumor has it that when the Windows 8.1 update is released, it'll have the Start menu again: Windows 8.1: The Start button, half-fulfilled.

There is a wealth of tech info available on-line to guide us through the process of learning Windows 8. I'll try to bring that information to you as I work though learning Windows 8 myself.

My next post will address some of the issues (for lack of a better word) that I encountered during my initial boot up and configuration.

Please feel free to post comments.