The other day one client asked me to check that his laptop was decently configured for his needs. Nothing new in that, been doing that among other things business-wise for 8 years. So far I've been able to manage with new Windows versions quite easily. Actually, there hasn't been major changes after Win95, which was the first version I've owned and started to study after paying a couple of times for reinstall due to having messed it up all by myself...
So, the new laptop, a PackardBell, was running Win8. The guy had already finished the installation procedure and had stuck into a situation which, according to him, wanted him to create a Facebook account. Oh wow! I woke the computer up and saw the "tiles" view. Uh-huh... well, there's Internet Explorer, Photos, Facebook and many others, plus the one that said "Desktop" when hovered over. Click! Finally something familiar!
The first thing was to get rid of some demo programs, like Norton Antivirus and Norton Online Backup. Wait! There's no Start Orb! Fortunately there were two (!) Help icons on the desktop. The first one (worked with F1, too) led me to some login program's help, the other was the regular Windows Help. So, how to uninstall programs? Answer: Click Programs and Features link, followed with a 101 about what to do there. "Sweep from right to left, or if you're still using a mouse, place the cursor in the upper right corner of the screen" to access a menu bar on the right side of the screen. There's some links, among them Settings, under which there's the familiar Control Panel. Now, how many cheap laptops do you know with a touch screen? Neither do I...
I managed to uninstall the demos and download and install the newest version the paid-for antivirus served by his operator. I also could make some basic tweaking (not too much to maintain the plain vanilla experience for advice given by someone else than me) and put some icons on his Desktop. Can you imagine, the Help advised to use Windows Explorer to find the (my) Documents and other personal folders? Honestly, how many of your wives or parents who have been using a computer lately, really do know how to find their profile starting from My Computer? Not to mention finding My Computer without an icon, via a keyboard shortcut?
The last task was trying to find the "All Programs" menu that's normally in the Start menu/Orb. I scrolled back and forth the Tiles screens, rearranged some of them and finally by chance right clicked on the empty area. Bingo! A grayish bar appeared to the bottom of the screen, on the right edge of which there was a single small icon "All programs". That brought a somewhat arranged set of smaller tiles or icons on the screen. It still seemed to lack some of the functions of older Windows versions, but it showed what was installed.
Oh, and last but not least: The only way I could find to shut down the computer was on the Desktop: The people of PackardBell had been kind enough to create a PB Shutdown icon into the TaskBar. That sounds like Windows itself doesn't have such a simple feature, at least not in an easy place to find.
Conclusion: If I had a tablet or a smart phone and didn't know anything about previous Windows versions, Win8 might serve quite well. Could it be that future versions of Word and other programs could use a netcam to register finger spelling? For now I'd rather stick to Windows7 and hope that #9 would follow the "only every second Windows version is totally crap" -rule
