Windows 8 (Desktop) worth it? Are you using it?

[speedlolita]

That's got nothing to do with Windows then. The recovery mechanism would be designed by the manufacturer also.

Not that I'd touch an OEM install. Dat bloat.

[EvilBoris]

I did a recovery from the initial boot menu without a disc.

If you've properly lost the ability to boot to the OS in Windows 7 you needed a boot disc to even access the command prompt didn't you?

[JSR]

I think what we're talking about here is that OEMs used to put a recovery partition on the PC so if you knackered your boot drive you could boot form that and attempt a repair.

Which they still do, but now you're no longer able to access it outside of Windows.

I did a recovery from the initial boot menu without a disc.

What boot menu? How did you access it? Holding down Shift is useless on all the preloaded laptops I've set up.

[Brad]

Re: Windows 8 (Desktop) worth it? Are you using it?

Ah ok. I'm not really familiar with that type of pc. Every one I've used has been a manual os install. Ignore me.

[EvilBoris]

The boot menu actually came up by itself after something had gone wrong.

[85 78 73 81 85 69]

Upgraded today from XP on our iMac, very rarely need Windows these days but it was sort of cheap and sooner or later we'll need it for something.

Seemed to take bloody hours especially with downloading all the updates, first for XP then W8. To be fair there was quite a few for XP also which shows how often we need to use it.

Really confused with it at the moment so I feel for anybody who has to use Windows on a daily basis which means they'll need to completely rethink the way they do stuff.

I might sit and just mess around with it later.

It's clearly designed for multitouch surfaces and although we use an Apple touchpad W8 doesn't naturally use the "natural scroll" where you treat the screen as a physical object so when I try pulling the screen down with my fingers it scrolls up. I believe there's a third party download to deal with that though.

Everything else seemed to work perfectly using Apple's Windows Support Tool, W8 even has an Apple Update app which keeps everything up to date while you're using it.

I quite like the look of W8 but it's really going to take some getting used to.

Using a trial copy of Paragon NTFS for Mac which means that which ever OS I'm using the other shows as a hard drive on the desktop and I can drag and drop files between them. Got a free code for Media Centre which I'll use next time in W8, didn't realise it wasn't included for free normally as it's apparently chargeable after 31st Jan for some reason.

Got DropBox, SkyDrive and 1Password with cloud sync set up on both so that's simplifying things a bit.

May try accessing our external iTunes folder in W8 later, not used it in Windows for years but I believe it doesn't run as well? The Apple Windows Support tool allowed me to install an iCloud app so I may be able to access it using that I suppose.

Far too early to decide what I think about it so far but people seem to have really mixed feelings about it which I suppose is normal.

[k0pp0]

Just upgraded my ageing laptop from windows 7 to Windows 8 Pro, after setting up the Mother in Laws new laptop for her.

The main reason for upgrading is for the windows xbox live integration and apps. It runs ok, slightly sluggish but no real issues anywhere.