News - Microsoft has released Windows 8.1 & RT 8.1 to hardware partners

[TheAnimus]

Animus: "It is a tiny area of enthusiasts who need large storage space"

That would be everyone with a reasonable sized blu-ray collection, a large music collection and usually a lot of digital photos and more than one computer in a house.

Which is not legal to 'rip' in large parts of the world.

The cloud is not the way to go for everyone. Unfortunately w8 seems to have designed by people barely out of short trousers for people who are still in short trousers.

Which is fair enough. So you either have two options.

1) Miss out on those new cloudy features like indexed fast searching of low cost storage space.
2) Use something for your NAS which can speak in an indexy way.

I mean seriously, who gives a frig if you can't reliably index your NAS. It can't be a library and software developers can't rely on it being indexed. Mount it as a network drive, or just use it as a network folder and get on with it.

Professionals who actually need vast volumes of data for work are going to be SAN customers anyway. Those who aren't that fly, well Server 2012 R2 has lots of options for making a nice dynamic disk spanning system (with indexing and library support).

You are crying about your cheap product not doing new premium features...

[crossy]

On your multi document support, not sure what you mean, you can run many apps side by side, until 8.1 you were very limited as to what that split ratio was mind (unless you had a second monitor!)

Hmm, the bloke who was talking to me about this needs to be able to have the "classic" windows arranged any old how setup, because the document he's typing up needs to get figures etc from two different sources. Under "old" Windows that was a no brainer, but the MUI apps he's using don't seem to be able to do that. I've suggested either "upgrading" ( ) back to Windows 7 or putting on one of those 3rd party extensions to let him have that needed functionality back.

Seeing as they've got smaller devices in mind, they should have called it "Pane v1". Because it is a right pain.

Actually one of my elderly relative refers to those tiles in MUI as "panes" because after all "this is a window and windows are made up of panes". Which - to me at least - has a certain logic about it.

Lets knock Microsoft some more because they didn't make the latest version be 100% tailored to me and how I want to use it..... Because, lets face it, there are not millions of other users with different requirements and expectations.

Yes, to quote Saracen:

The chutzpah of all those users of a Windows environment expecting to use the latest release of a Windows environment as a Windows environment!

Evolution Microsoft, not revolution - after all that step-by-step approach seems to have worked for Apple! And shaithis - the "whiners" are complaining because 8.1 was/is a golden opportunity for Microsoft to fix those annoying usage flaws and give us an OS that's a fit replacement for Windows 7. If you read the exchange between TheAnimus and cjs150 you'll be able to see what I mean. Although it's perhaps less effort to launch a cheap shot against the Windows 8 naysayers?

PS TheAnimus/cjs150 discussion is fascinating - I didn't realise that the Libraries feature needed indexing too - I'd just assumed it was some collection of links (like I've seen in some Linux distros). And personally I've always assumed that a NAS (of which I have a few) were always going to present as merely an external "slab o' disk" rather than anything more. Didn't realise that there were indexing or Windows8-based NAS's too.

[zarnywoop]

1. No clock on the metro screen - come on guys even my android phone has this

Just mouse over the charms bar, the clock, date, network icon shows up.

4. As for metro apps, I had to look it up how to close them - mouse to top, wait for mouse icon to change to hand and then drag it to the bottom is not intuitive, I know alt f4 works but clicking x in the top right hand corner is easier

I know Microsoft dropped the ball on this by not having tutorials to show how to use the hotspots etc. They went complete opposite to Apple with no demonstration; compared to Apple's "you are not passing this screen until you PROVE you know how to scroll by repeating it 3 times".

Fortunately they have find the middle ground as 8.1 will now have a full tutorial videos on a tile so should be more discoverable.

[TheAnimus]

Hmm, the bloke who was talking to me about this needs to be able to have the "classic" windows arranged any old how setup, because the document he's typing up needs to get figures etc from two different sources. Under "old" Windows that was a no brainer, but the MUI apps he's using don't seem to be able to do that. I've suggested either "upgrading" ( ) back to Windows 7 or putting on one of those 3rd party extensions to let him have that needed functionality back.

Are we talking about a Word document or similar? In which case yes, the desktop is probably the best bet, rather than MUI for that kind of thing.

Ultimately, that is the kind of thing you wouldn't be wanting to do in a "tablet mode" anyway...

[aminion]

For me Win 7 worked well for desktops so why upgrade, the apps environment is great for tablets but im a mouse and keyboard guy....

[crossy]

Are we talking about a Word document or similar? In which case yes, the desktop is probably the best bet, rather than MUI for that kind of thing. Ultimately, that is the kind of thing you wouldn't be wanting to do in a "tablet mode" anyway...

Head-slap moment - rather than put on any unsupported 3rd party apps, why didn't I just point out that he could get the shiny-shiny MUI apps deinstalled and the old "classic" desktop ones installed instead. It's so obvious ... dammit!

thanks for pointing that out, I'm getting too old for this stuff .... sigh

[TheAnimus]

I think it is a classic example of the problem MS have with MUI. They haven't communicated what it is for, why you'd use it. Myself, I only see the merit of it on small screens, that I am not using in a 'Desk environment'. That said having the full screen snap ability for Skype is very useful. A chat feature ICQ had back in the 90s has finally come back.