Yesterday I decided to try out Windows 8.1. I’ve been using Windows 7 for a couple of years now, because Linux’s RAID support is horrible, or at least it was at the time. It’s a lot less annoying than I thought – I went for a clean install instead of upgrading in-place.
The first out-of-the-box impression wasn’t great. My wireless adapter’s driver wasn’t included, which it had been in Windows 7. One RAID 0 drive was recognized instantly at installation, but not the RAID 5 I actually keep my data on*. Still, it includes lots of bloatware in the form of little apps – more on that in a moment – some of which are useful, some of which aren’t, thankfully all of which are easily removed. The weather one in particular seems like a good idea but has some awful shortcomings – I like having weather maps, and although they are not very detailed, they are reasonable for quickly checking weather patterns. Or at least, they would be if they weren’t designed by a child. You can’t zoom out to a view larger than about two thirds of Europe, and you can only view one continent at a time. If you have that restriction, at least take the opportunity to use a reasonable projection, but no, Mercator all the way.
I don’t like the distinction between “programs”, which run on the desktop, and “apps”, which are full screen. The included ones, at least, seem very bare-bones. The Mail app, for example, has no way of setting a signature or enabling desktop notifications. Skype came included, which I thought was nice until I tried logging in – there’s no way to do it if you only have a regular Skype account – you have to uninstall it and then download the “real” one from their website.
That being said, it has some very nice features. Win+Space changes keyboard layout, right-clicking the Start menu offers useful shortcuts, and ISO images can now be mounted natively. File deletion and copying are massively improved – conflicts when copying are saved until the end and finding locked files when deleting stops the whole operation. On the eye candy side of things, I enjoy being able to have different wallpapers on different monitors and having the taskbar natively extended. I still can’t find how to have the time displayed on both taskbars, though.
*As a side note, AMD seems to be unaware that they make products other than GPUs. The downloads section offered a wide selection of video card drivers, but no chipset or RAID drivers. I eventually found them in Gigabyte’s website.
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