So with all the comments flying around about windows 8, I figured I do a quick experiment, and load it on my mothers laptop.
My mom has a laptop thats quite old, can't remember the spec exactly, but her last one died when I was visiting at the weekend, RAM failure, so I just decided to buy her a new one, from Cornwall's only in stock option it seemed, Argos. I spent £480 on it. This was 3 years ago.
So its not exactly great hardware, its got no touch screen, and my mother, bless her, isn't the most technical user.
So Windows 8, with its noddy Metro UI seems perfect right?
Well not quite, first off, logon. So I set it up with a Microsoft Account (whatever they call .Net passport nowadays) for my mum. This is an internet account, so has a very long good password.
Now she has to enter that everytime.... Oh that nice image logon you can do, its crap with a mouse, about as dumb as the slide the image up with a mouse. So control userpasswords2 and set it to auto log her on. Fixed, but no way the average joe will know to do that.
Then comes the metro UI bit, she simply loves it, she suffered a stroke a few years back so her eye sight isn't top, but the whole email, messaging (still waiting on skype metro app), web browsing and games, brilliant. So far so good.
Enter the photos app. You can not, as yet, print from it. Oh dear, back to the desktop for that. I didn't want her to be spending as much time on the desktop. The jaring nature between the workflow is awful.
The whole Charms menu (moving mouse to top right corner in a metro app) she took to very well, the only oddity was printing from IE, she had to learn that a printer is a "device".
So this is now day 3. I'll post back whenever anything interesting happens, but so far, so good, considering she didn't like the ipad idea at all, I'm thinking a windows RT 'ultrabook' (must have rigid keyboard so can be used on lap easily) thats nice and lightweight with a touch interface might be her Christmas gift at this rate.


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