Windows 8 RTM: Final Thoughts

I've been using Windows 8 for the last week and documenting my thoughts in the following posts:

• Windows 8 and Gaming
• Windows 8 RTM, Day 1: Installation and Drivers
• Windows 8 RTM, Day 2: Metro Apps, Games, and Random Stuff
• Labor Day - A Few Quick Notes

This final post highlights all of the major changes and expresses my overall thoughts on the OS.

After six days of putting Windows 8 through its paces I think I have a pretty good feel for the OS. I did my best to use Windows 8 RTM as my primary OS for the last week and pretty much stuck to my guns. Microsoft changed a ton of stuff - not all for the better - and I'm starting to see why so many people are voicing their displeasure with the new offering.

The Good

• Gaming is Largely Unaffected
  

  The desktop environment of Windows 8 is basically Windows 7 with some minor changes. As a result, everything you're running currently should continue to run fine within Windows 8. techPowerUp published an article a couple of weeks ago comparing performance between Win7 and Win8 in several games; results were within a couple of percentage points of each other and differences are probably due to variability in testing.

  I noticed the other day that Windows 8 doesn't close down Metro apps when you're finished with them, instead keeping them open to enable quick switching. That's fine as long as it doesn't decrease gaming performance. To find out I ran Unigine Heaven 3.0 three separate times: once on Windows 7 as a baseline using the Nvidia 301.42 driver, once on Windows 8 using the 306.02 beta driver, and again on Windows 8 with some Metro apps open in the background. I ran the tests at 1920x1080 with "normal" tessellation, 4x AF and 2x AA.

  

  Windows 7

  

  Windows 8 clean run

  

  Windows 8 with Metro apps open

  In each case I opened up Heaven and let the entire benchmark run once before beginning the test in order to minimize the impact of loading textures from the hard drive. Results are pretty uniform despite the fact that this is in no way a scientific test - Windows 7 is nowhere close to a fresh install, I'm using different drivers (one being a beta version), and I only ran each test once. Still, it makes me feel pretty confident that the impact of Windows 8 on gaming will be minimal. We'll see what happens when we get some DX11.1 games, but for now everything looks good.

Labor Day - A Few Quick Notes

Hopefully everyone is enjoying their unofficial "Last Weekend of Summer." Just wanted to post a few quick items before I go back to watching baseball and golf while eating grilled meat.

Windows 8 - Assign Default Programs

A few days ago I mentioned that Windows 8's handling of the default programs assigned to different filetypes was a little weird. If you've got multiple options for opening something like a picture or video, this window pops up:

Media files are opened in Metro apps by default, which is pretty annoying. Luckily there's a way to edit the programs assigned to each filetype en masse. Open the Start page and type in "default programs" - the resulting Control Panel options let you switch things around.

Windows 8 - Antivirus Programs

Another thing I touched on the other day was the fact that MSE is basically baked into Windows 8 in the form of Windows Defender. That sounded great to me since I already use MSE in Windows 7, but I wasn't sure if a conflict would arise if you were to use a separate AV program. To see what would happen, I downloaded and installed AVG Free.

After installing AVG, everything works as expected - Windows Defender is turned off and AVG takes over all of the protection detail. After uninstalling AVG and restarting, I checked the status of Windows Defender; the program told me it was still disabled. A couple of minutes later Windows finally prompted me to re-enable virus protection. Everything looks good here.

Windows 8 RTM, Day 2: Metro Apps, Games, and Random Stuff

I finally decided to test out Windows 8 for a week after putting it off for way too long. Here's another post documenting my thoughts.

On Wednesday I installed Windows 8 and talked about some of my first impressions. Now that I've more or less gotten everything settled I can take a look at some of the quirks and features of the OS.

Metro Apps

An article displayed in the News app.

Whether or not we'll be allowed to call them "Metro", the new Windows 8/Modern UI/Metro apps are obviously the biggest curveball that Microsoft threw us with Windows 8. After switching between the new Start screen and the traditional desktop a bunch of times it seems like Windows 8 is really two separate operating systems that have been duct taped together. The new interface is sort of shoehorned into the Windows setup that we've been using forever, and you have to wonder if Microsoft ever considered marketing the Metro elements of Windows 8 as an offshoot brand that would be developed side-by-side with traditional Windows in the future.

One of the weirdest things about Metro on a desktop is the fact that everything is very horizontally-oriented, which definitely makes the UI seem like it's more suited for a tablet. Swiping through pages makes a lot more sense than scrolling sideways through 3-4 screens of content with a mouse. The first time I opened up an app I actually caught myself using the left and right scroll buttons (tilting the mousewheel) on my G9X, something I don't think I've ever done during normal everyday use. Scrolling with the mousewheel works, but "up" being "left" and "down" being "right" is a little weird.

The news search pictured above isn't even all that bad compared to some other examples I've found. Newegg has an app that lets you browse a Metro-ified version of the site. Clicking on the "Computer Hardware" category takes you to a page of subcategories that is literally seven screens wide. The original size of the following slapped-together image is 13917×1080 pixels.

Windows 8 RTM, Day 1: Installation and Drivers

So. Windows 8.

Like I mentioned yesterday, after hearing everyone on the planet voice their opinions on Windows 8 I finally decided to try it myself. I downloaded the Windows 8 RTM 90-day developer preview last night and burned the ISO to a DVD. Earlier this afternoon I popped said DVD into the drive and installed Windows 8 to a separate partition on my HDD.

Installation

Installation was relatively quick and painless. After 18-20 minutes I was prompted to configure my user settings and set up my user account, which by default is linked to your Microsoft Live account, though there's also an option to set up a local offline account. A few minutes later I was staring at the controversial Start screen, ready to go.

The size of a fresh installation was somewhere in the neighborhood of 18GB - I forgot to get an exact number because I'm awesome like that - and I'm currently sitting at around 22GB with a bunch of everyday programs installed.

Drivers

After downloading the Windows 8 RTM ISO last night I looked around for drivers so that I'd have them on hand if needed. I was able to find updated beta drivers for pretty much everything, leading me to believe that we'll be in pretty good shape for the Windows 8 launch on October 26th. The ASUS Service downloads page had most of what I needed, and Nvidia released the GeForce 306.02 Beta drivers for Windows 8 on Monday.

During initial setup you have the option of running Windows Update to check for updated installation files and drivers, which was the route I took. As it turned out, Windows Update found drivers for just about everything automatically, though some were generic Microsoft drivers while others were a bit out of date. The one exception was my ASUS XONAR DG sound card, which didn't function right out of the box. I downloaded the Windows 7 Xonar Unified Drivers, which Windows promptly told me were unsigned and unverified. After telling Windows to ignore all of that and install the drivers anyway, everything worked.

Windows 8 and Gaming

Throughout the last month we've heard just about everyone's opinion about Windows 8's potential impact on PC gaming. Gabe Newell kicked things off by calling Windows 8 a "catastrophe," and a Blizzard exec seconded the motion on Twitter. Last week Kotaku and Gizmodo ran sister pieces offering arguments for and against Windows 8 being a solid gaming OS.

At this point it seems like almost everyone is running around screaming about the sky falling, yet we're still two months away from a full release. The Metro UI (that isn't named "Metro" any more) has been called every name in the book and the loss of the Start menu was almost universally lamented everywhere you looked. When you think about it though, this is the first radical redesign that Windows has seen in a long, long time. My first exposure to Windows was Windows 95, and the basic layout hasn't really changed since then. Mice have evolved and both screen size and display resolution have increased in the years since, but we're still using the same basic setup.

As Gizmodo put it, Metro "rearranges the furniture." People crying about the interface being all "tablet-y" and "different" are probably just resisting change, and there are even things like Classic Shell that you could use to de-Metro the Windows 8 UI. That's obviously not the best solution, but it's not like this is a forced upgrade by any means. Windows Vista peaked at about 19% market share, so I don't think it's a stretch to say that if Windows 8 truly is terrible we'll all wait for a service pack to think about upgrading or just skip the OS version all together.

The other big complaint when it comes to gaming seems to be the Windows app store that will be your only option when looking to buy Metro-but-not-called-Metro apps. Every other "normal" desktop program (ie games) can be purchased from anywhere and installed just like it can be in Windows 7. People argue that this could open the door to Microsoft being an Apple-esque app dictator, which I guess is possible. I have a hard time believing that they'd try to make a power move and disallow anything that isn't a Microsoft-sanctioned application, since that would really piss everyone off and drive them towards tablets and smartphones, areas where Microsoft doesn't exactly have a strong foothold.

To figure this out for myself I'm finally going to install one of the Windows 8 preview builds and see what all of the commotion is about. When I first built my PC I didn't have a solid-state drive, so I installed Windows 7 to a separate 100GB partition of my 1TB HDD. After picking up a 64GB Crucial C300 and throwing Windows 7 on there I never got around to reformatting that old partition, so it's sitting there ready to go.

I'll probably install it on Wednesday and I'll try to use it as my primary OS for the next week or two, so look for posts describing my experiences through the next 7-10 days. I'm installing the 90-day evaluation version, which you can find here. You can alternatively download the Release Preview from May, which won't expire until January 15, 2013.

Image sources: Windows Team Blog and Official Microsoft Blog