My experience with Windows 8 so far

First a caveat: I’m no Redmond fanboy, but neither am I a hater and think the company’s products are always derivative crap (I use Windows Media Player and not iTunes for a reason).  Sure, the software and hardware is never as pretty as Apple’s stuff, but that’s what you get for having an open platform (in a way it’s a very democratic philosophy…).  And if you’re a professional you need to use things like Visio which are simply better than anything coming out of Cupertino.  So at the end of the day, I like to think I’m pretty objective, having seen how Microsoft builds software, both from the inside and outside.

Like everyone else, I had a so-so experience with Vista (it was ultimately better than XP, but painful to get there), and a great one with Windows 7.  I knew that Windows 8 was going to be visually very different as it was designed for touch, and there was no Start menu.  And I also knew that I don’t own any Microsoft-OS touch devices, nor do I plan to.  I’m perfectly happy with my reasonably-modern iPad, iPhone, and vanilla desktop and laptop.

But surely, after all those years of development, there would be more goodies under the covers – bug fixes, improved tools for those of us who are stuck in the dark ages of running actual applications (not apps) with a mouse and keyboard?  You know, to earn money and make a living?  Not all of us can sit around all day and consume pictures and websites and check email with a touch screen.  Maybe with the economy and all…  But I digress.

So yesterday morning I downloaded the Windows 8 upgrade ($40 seems like a good price, right?) to my one-year-old Dell 15z laptop and installed it.  I wasn’t about to try this on my desktop first, without knowing what would happen.

The installation process was smooth, maybe a bit faster than Windows 7’s.  Doing it via the download is pretty slick (although be sure to set aside an hour when you don’t plan to use the internet since it flooded the router while it downloaded the 2GB of files).

Here’s what I found:

The cons

1. After running the Compatibility Checker, I was surprised to find that Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate is incompatible.  That’s a $500 piece of software that just went to zero.  Good work Microsoft, looks like my days of Windows development are now permanently over.  Why you charge anything for your tools has always seemed shortsighted to me anyway.
2. My trackpad has been bugging out ever since.  I hope it is a software issue that can get fixed by a Dell update.  Dell had around a dozen updates for my hardware when I checked, but I don’t know if any of them are specifically for Windows 8.  In the meantime I’m forced to plug in a mouse to do anything.
3. Antivirus was another issue.  After the upgrade, it says my Norton antivirus (via Comcast) is turned off (despite the fact that it looks like it’s running normally), which had been reported.  Now this is wonderful, since the Comcast site where I am supposed to upgrade it says I now have an unsupported operating system.  I hope the Comcast tech guys are working feverishly on this.  Should be embarrassing for them – they’ve only had access to Windows 8 for six months!
4. Not having a Start button is going to be a major problem for me.  Not only do you access applications for it, but I use the search all the time.  Now in order to do those I need to go to the far right of the screen and find them there.  If you have a touch screen I’m sure it’s fine.  It’s considerably more work for a mouse.
5. I assume Office 2010 works fine but didn’t bother checking.  As far as 3rd party software problems, the first one I tried, WAMP, wouldn’t start.
   1. The first reason was that someone in an office in Redmond decided that it would be a good idea for Windows 8 to turn on IIS on port 80.  Uh, what?  Now everyone is running a local webserver by default?  But they’re actually not, as I then found out – http://localhost didn’t resolve, so I don’t have a clue what they were intending to do with it.  Seems like they started the service, hence reserving port 80, but didn’t actually configure it.  This seems like major oversight to me.  Anyway I have to find the Control Panel / “Turn Windows Features On or Off” and disable IIS.  Which then requires a reboot.
   2. Following the reboot, port 80 is back open and I try to restart WAMP, but it crashed immediately.  I was maybe a year old so perhaps I needed to upgrade to the latest, so I uninstalled and upgraded to the latest, which uses Apache 2.4, rather than 2.2 as before.
   3. My web app requires mod_rewrite and the PHP extension php_curl so I enable those.
   4. In httpd.conf I set the Directory tag and DocumentRoot to C:/path/to/my/docroot, and change “Require local” to “Require all granted” (the Apache 2.4 syntax) since I want the site to be accessible at a number of hostnames.
   5. Try to hit a page, and it doesn’t load properly.  After checking the error log I found that the PHP curl extension that ships with WAMP was busted as per this post, so I got php_curl-5.4.3-VC9-x64.zip from this page, and replaced the existing one.
   6. Upon restart my site finally worked as expected.

The pros

So do I have anything nice to say about Windows 8?  Well the file-copying dialog is much better than before: it’s pausable and you even get a little speed graph as it goes along.  Beyond that, in my time so far, I haven’t seen anything else that actually improves my productivity at work.

The verdict

I expect to spend as much of my time as possible in the “Desktop Mode” because that’s where my applications are.  I’ll give it another few days and see if any other benefits pop up.  For Microsoft’s and Intel’s and Dell’s sake, I hope they do, because there are a lot of people out there like me who actually use their computers to get stuff done, not just to screw around with while sitting on the couch.