Windows 7 vs 8. Any opinions or experience with Win8?

[3Turner]

Here is the CNet review on several options for the Start button that you can install in Windows 8 to get that old Windows feel back.
How to get the Start menu back in Windows 8 | Windows 8 - CNET Reviews

One of them, Pokki, I noticed also includes a shutdown button in the start menu.

[Darwin]

John, I was faced with the same question when my desktop died. In short, I went on Ebay and bought three Win 7 Pro systems to keep going long enough to wait out Win 8. I 've only had enought experience with Win 8 to decide I didn't want to turn my computer into a glorified tablet....I say enough bad words to my Nook as it is. I have noted that business is avoiding Win 8 like the plague, and I've never seen Microsoft price it's upgrades so dirt cheap in order sell it. From my viewpoint, it will prove a bigger disaster for Bill Gates than Vista....but to each his own.

[John Wagenseil]

Thanks all for the very helpful input.
I went back to a computer store, tried messing with Win8 again, after having gone on-line and looked at a couple of instructionals, and still ended up very frustrated.
I ended up mailordering a win7 laptop, since I could not find any in the local office supllystores (had to spend an hour talking to someone in India to get my credit card to work). It should arrive early next week.

Thanks Darwin, for your post and reminder about EBay,

My XP desk top is very old, and while it still seems to work well I am getting very compulsive about doing backups against the day one of its HD crashes. It has three optical drives and 4 internal HDs. The HDs were considered big years ago, but I am now having to supplement them with a pair of terrabyte USB drives, and moving data around by usb 2 is not fast.
I need to start thinking about a replacement, either having one built for me or do as you did and stock up from EBay and maybe have one customized to add more optical and HDs.
Again thanks to all.

It is a pity that MS seems to have really jumped the shark with win8. It makes vista look great by comparison.And what is sad is that I could figure out on my own how to do basic stuff with Linux, and could go to work on a Mac after a little trial and error playing around, but am totally baffled by win8. What bothered me most is that I read on a couple of user sites is that MS appears to be trying to patch some of the "holes" that developers had been using to install Start menu replacements.

[John Wagenseil]

My Win7 laptop arrived and Ihave been using it for about a week, and so far am vedry satisfied. Even taking infaltion into account, it is less expensive than my former laptop but is faster. It took next to no time to make the transition from XP to Win7. I have not yet tried to use it with my old printer and scanner, so I do not know if the drivers will be compatible.
About the only major disappointment so far is that "Sandboxie" will not run on this 64 bit win7 machine. I had been using the program to provide a shell around my browsers when I explored the internet, and for testing new programs. So far I have not found anything equivalent that runs on Win7. I have seen articles about using Virtual Box, but that requires having a Windows OS disk to install inside Virtual Box which I have not got. And the resulting virtual box environment would probably be real slow since I did not get a speed demon machine.
A long time ago before Sandboxie I used a program called Altiris which also ran programs inside a protected space, but that program was also for 32 bit windows and appears to be no longer supported or offered in a free version.
The Linux guys also have not offered a virtual Linux that runs in Windows for a long long time. Both qemu Puppy and embedded
DSL are available only in very old versions, and I am not techie enough to upgrade them. Hopefully sometime soon someone will come up with an easy to use virtual browser or a sandbox that will work with the newer MS OS.

[SCEtoAUX]

Check this out. Says it can be run on Win7 32-bit and 64-bit.
Sandboxie - Notes About 64 Bit Edition

Starting with version 3.44, Sandboxie offers full support for 64-bit editions of Windows Vista with Service Pack 1, and Windows 7.

Perhaps something to explore.

[imcold]

Install any Linux distro in Virtualbox (instead of Windows). It shall work just fine, though sandboxing is faster/less demanding.

[John Wagenseil]

Originally Posted by SCEtoAUX

Check this out. Says it can be run on Win7 32-bit and 64-bit.
Sandboxie - Notes About 64 Bit Edition



Perhaps something to explore.

I saw the Sandboxie notice about the new version running on a 64 bit machine and tried installing it. Could not get it to run. I might try again when they uprade the program and I have more time to mess with it.

[Peter Epps]

I have been using 8 for a few months now. My last computer was ailing from many years of faithful service. My new machine came with 7 and a free up grade to 8. I did the up grade and aside from some silly stuff, it went smoothly.
As for 8, I love it. I think it is the best version of windows yet. To get to know it, avail yourself of some tutorials available on how to work with 8. It has a fairly short learning curve, and once you work with it you will find it fast and fun.
My wife who hates change in this sort of stuff, got a new machine with 8 installed and she loves it.
Jump in with both feet, I think you will be happy with what you find. As for old programs not being compatible, I have found newer, better , faster stuff to replace most, if not all of the old stuff.
Good luck!

[John Wagenseil]

Again, thanks all for your input.
I have been using Win7 for awhile now, and not had too many shocks, and so far have been enjoying increased speed and bigger storage than I had previously.
I have been trying to learn the ribbon on Word Starter before installing MS Word 2010. I am struggling, but have found that some of the word processor alternatives are either not completely compatible with complexly formatted documents or lack some navigation features I have grown dependent on in Word 97 . However since Word starter is stripped of features I do not know if Word 97/2003 functions I used are in the new product.

So far I have found that:

Libre Office is bloated and slow.
Apache Open office has a good conversion from ODT and HTML to PDF, preserving most of the links. It does a better job than MS Office Starter. However, it does not have complete compatibility with doc and docx files. I find for best conversion to convert file to odt using MS Word Starter, which does a good job, and then use this odt file in Open Office or Libre Office which have formatting features that have been turned off in MS Word starter, or for PDF conversion .
Kingsoft Office has pretty good compatibility with MS word, it will open but not save to docx format. You have to be carefull with the install because it wants to take over all the file associations and then clean up your start up files after the install since it adds commands there that let the program automatically "phone home". You can either clean up manually using config.sys or use CCleaner or EasyClean to edit the configuration files. I will keep my eye on this product, to see if it reinstalls the startup commands or otherwise tries to phone home.
I have only started exploring IBM Lotus Symphony but it seems to have very good doc file compatibility, but will not handle docx files.

None of the above use ribbons, they are all tab and drop down menu. LibrOffice, Open Office and KingSoft are very similar to Word 97/2003 in layout so there is not much learning to do. IBM Lotus has a hybrid tab and drop down menu - sidebar with menu , but it is easy to understand, and less confusing when first encountered than the MS ribbon.
Having messed with the ribbon, I wonder if the MS designers had been snorting too much Seattle fog when they came up with it and where they recruited their testing groups from.

If you only need a basic word processor that has some MS compatibility, then Abiword is a good option.

Portable versions of Abiword, Libre Office and Open Office can be downloaded from John Haller's Portable Apps web site and from WinPenPack web site. I have found that the WinPenPack packages load up and seem to run a bit faster than the Portable apps versions. The portable program packages are self contained and do not mess with your computers registry. Both Portable Apps and WinPenPack are worth exploring, they both offer a lot of very useful software, including image viewers and graphics programs. Both have Gimp, Paintnet is available from WinPenPack.

Another word processor that is out there is Corel Word Perfect, which has received good reviews and seems capable of handling documents with complex formatting. It is payware but there is a 30 free trial version, and the pay version is not excessively expensive. I have not tried it yet.

MicroSoft offers MS Word Starter as a free download. It is a stripped adware version of MS Word. It lacks almost all of the advanced formatting features of the complete Word program and the advertising pane is somewhat annoying. I found it is most useful for opening docx files and converting doc and docx files to odt format that can be used by OpenOffice and LibreOffice, and then converting the odt files back to doc or docx. However trying to write something with a crippled ribbon command word processor is frustrating.

[John Wagenseil]

Microsoft has shown itself to be shifty as its doc format has changed over the years and is mostly but not completely compatible between different versions of MS Word. Once rival non-MS word processors finally reverse engineered .doc format and got reasonably good compatibility with it, MS threw the big wrench back into the works and came out with docx.
A few people I worked with send me docx documents and opening them was a pain. I usually asked if they could resend the documents in doc, or rtf or html or pdf. Now I do have a couple of programs that will open docx.

Documents I archive to CD or DVD, that I want to be sure of being able to open in the future (assuming in the future there are CD and DVD readers) I save in several formats, including rtf, doc, odt, PDF and HTML, in the hope that 5 or 10 years from now there will be a program that can open one of them.
I could save in txt as well, which almost every browser, text editor, or word processor, past and present (and hopefully future) can open, but the formatting is gone and you get a big blob of text.

I am dreading the day current optical drive formats become obsolete and I am faced with either migrating data from piles of CDs and DVDs disks, or just tossing them and loosing whatever is on them. It was a pain migrating data from cassettes and 5 1/4 inch floppies to 3 inch floppies, and then from those disks to CD and then consolidating a lot of CDs to DVDs. Having to do it again really would not be practical in terms of the amount of time it would take. Having all that material on paper would be impossible.