For the whole of last week we decided to give the retail version of Microsoft Windows 8 a go. Unfortunately, the issues that we encountered when trialling Microsoft Windows 8 RTM (Release to Manufacturing) a couple of months back were still very much around.
Microsoft have taken heavy criticism over its new Modern UI or previously known as Metro UI but we actually loved it. It was definitely a bold move by Microsoft by doing away with the start button. It look us a little bit of getting used to, but we eventually got the hang of it after a couple of hours.
This blog entry is not meant to be a review or any sort of technical help but we felt we had to vent our anger somewhere. This was mainly due the constant BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) that plagued our Windows 8 installation. They replaced the normal BSOD with the one above. We have no idea what\’s up with the sad emoticon. Is it supposed to look cute?
We have a mixture of Operating Systems here but I, Fawk, am the only one running Windows still. I would rather run Linux as there are alternatives to the software’s that I need to use. However, there is one application that has held me back from making the switch back to Linux; Foobar2000 – that would be another article for another day.
The moment Windows 8 was installed, we received our first BSOD. In the first hour of using, we received 4 BSOD. The system used to run the system is pretty old, but not too shabby.
- Intel ® Core™2 Quad CPU Q9550 @ 2.83 GHz
- 8.00 GB Kingston Hyper-X
- HGST 500GB Hard Disk
- ATI Radeon HD5850
- Asus P5Q-E Mother Board
We Google’ed for a bit to see what was up and it mostly pointed towards a hardware driver issue. Now seriously, we paid for the operating system, do we also need to spend time trying to fix it? The hardware are not exactly brand spanking new, but the least they could do was support it out of the box. Windows 7 never had this issue.
Apart from the BSOD, opening other hard disks attached to the computer on Windows 8 would take anywhere from 5 to 10 seconds. This would get really annoying when you want to access your files quickly.
To conclude, we will give Windows 8 another go if they can fix all these issues. As lazy as we are, we just want it to work right out of the box without much hassle. So for now, Windows 7 still reigns supreme.
