Tag Archives: windows 8 review

UX, Windows Server

Windows 8, iPad Minis, & Nintendo, Oh My: What to Buy This Holiday Season

I took last Friday off to watch my son and hit the local Best Buy since we had some time to kill before picking up my daughter from school.

With the latest Windows 8 release I was hoping to check out a couple of the new touch screen devices. I don’t recall the exact models, but I looked at an Acer RT tablet, Lenovo Ultrabook/Tablet Convertible, and a Dell All-In-One desktop. I have to say after using Windows 8 on my Lenovo x220 for a month, I’m really missing not having a touch screen interface. After playing around with each of the devices, I found the Windows 8 UI to be fluid and responsive irrespective of device. Windows 8 gestures all worked as advertised. Application launched and closed in several seconds. I launched Excel on the Acer RT tablet and sure enough it dropped me to the desktop interface, where I saw the common matrix of empty cells. I even typed in a few numbers and ran the simple SUM function. The on-screen keyboard worked well enough for this task. Office on the desktop ruins the RT experience, they will probably eventually port it or a subset of it to a Windows 8 app, but the fact that it can run on an RT tablet should satisfy business users who depend on Office. Overall, I’m impressed with the few pieces of Windows 8 hardware I used.

I was also hoping to see the newer iPad Mini and thinner iMac for comparison, Continue reading Windows 8, iPad Minis, & Nintendo, Oh My: What to Buy This Holiday Season →

Featured, UX, Windows Server

Windows 8 in Review: The Good, the Bad, and What You Need to Know

Windows 8 TabletI’ve been using the RTM enterprise version Windows 8 on my work laptop and workstation for about a week now and these are some of my initial impressions of it.

The Good

Some of my better experiences…

It’s fast. It’s as fast, if not faster, than Windows 7. On a Dell Precision T3400 and ThinkPad x220, the experience is snappy.

It’s beautiful. Minimalist metro style, live titles, square edges in metro and desktop mode, and sleek background artwork will really catch your eye.

Keyboard shortcuts. There is basically a Winkey shortcut for almost everything. The Windows 8 secrets book has a full list in the appendix or you can visit Paul Thurrott’s Super Site for Windows for a quick guide on Windows key shortcuts.

Search. Press the Winkey and start typing. Find stuff. Enough said.

My kids could use it. I spent about 30 minutes last night reviewing metro interface with my 9-year-old. After explaining the screen gestures, she was able to download and play a couple of free metro games.

 

The Bad

These may be nit-picky, but I demand perfection…

No search with the Windows store.  You have to use Start Search and filter on the store to see results. This is kind of annoying.

No Hyper-V client support for my workstation. You need SLAT or second level address translation support on your processor for client side Hyper-V. This is an optional requirement for server so why not on the client. I will gladly forgo VM memory optimizations to ditch VMware workstation.  You can check if your processor is SLAT compatible by following this helpful blog post on How-to Geek.

Metro is designed for a touch experience. Not an earth shattering realization, but Continue reading Windows 8 in Review: The Good, the Bad, and What You Need to Know →