Sunday, 18. November 2012
Making Windows 8 More Tolerable11/18/2012 03:16 PM
Finally decided to upgrade my laptop to Windows 8 which is now required for the Win8 SDK (seems stupid to follow Apple's OS dependency requirement for the SDK but I guess they're trying to force upgrades). I hated the Metro UI in the beta and still hate it in the release version. One major problem was it got rid of the Start/Applications menu, so whenever you install applications, you get icons splattered all over your desktop and Metro UI and you're forced to pin applications you care about to the task bar which eventually runs out of space....this is pretty horrible handling of legacy UIs and the desktop and if I were Sinofsky, I would have quit too :-P
Anyways, to get the Start/Application menu back, install Classic Shell.
Speed-wise, Windows 8 felt faster than Windows 7 initially because it enables hybrid-hibernate and superfetch by default; both aren't recommended for SSDs, so I have since turned them off. After disabling those two options, and recompressing the entire drive (saving 12GB on my 50GB OS/apps partition), Windows 8 actually seems slower by a few seconds on shutdown; powerup feels slightly faster because you see the Windows icon quicker. Overall application running seems roughly the same as Windows 8. Powering down requires a lot more mouse movement/clicks if you're on the Desktop. Window title bars in Desktop mode are still big and ugly because they're designed for tablet usage so they have to be bigger.
Ken's Blog
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