Windows 8.1

I decided up upgrade my work desktop. The old one was perfectly good, but was running XP. Which meant I was out of date and less able to help my customers who are more up to date. And Microsoft have been running a fear campaign to get people like me to switch. My work colleague, who knows more about computers than I do, advised going for Windows 8.1 so I agreed but only if he did the dirty work of transferring my files and making the upgrade process as painless as possible. He did a great job and installed the 3rd party software that brings back the Start menu which Microsoft carelessly lost when they crafted Windows 8.

In my work I am constantly installing or re-building software. I quickly faced the issue that Windows 8 doesn't allow you to do anything like this unless you sign in as administrator. To save having to do that every day I got my colleague to somehow fix it so I am always "administrator". Which somehow defeats the purpose.

It has now been several weeks since the changeover. After some experimentation and a good deal of frustration I can now do most of what came second nature under XP.

So, how do I like Windows 8? There are little niggles like the change of display style but I can just about cope with that. My main observations are:

(1) Windows 8 has not yet given me ANYTHING that XP did not have. I do not see any improvement whatsoever in features or speed, except that start-up is quicker but that is to be expected with a solid-state disk cache and fresh operating system. In fact my XP machine was lightening fast when I first bought it, and it didn't have such advanced hardware.

(2) Conversely the change to Windows 8 has cost my business several days of effort for both myself and my colleague just to constrain it to do what XP did effortlessly.

XP was a major improvement over Windows 98. So what is the point of Window 8, or 7, or Vista. Frankly I have no idea.  One wonders what Windows 10 will offer?

I liken this process to buying a new car. My old car was fine but it was just getting a bit old.  With the new one I have, after a while reading the manual, figured out how to unlock the door and am sitting down in the driver's seat. The dashboard looks quite pretty but is strangely unfamiliar. I find that I cannot actually start the car without authorization from the garage - and I need this authorization EVERY time I start the car. This, I am told, is a security feature to reduce the possibility of theft. Once started I notice the accelerator is where the handbrake used to be, and the brake has swapped places with the clutch. The dashboard now - instead of a speedometer there is a coloured rectangle which animates first with a sloth, then a tortoise followed by baby, a sheep, a dog, a lion, and a jaguar in that order as one accelerates. Very pretty. There are no levers on the steering column - instead the dashboard is touch-sensitive and you have to find the right button to operate the indicators - but the button is not always in the same place. Oh, and did I say? The steering wheel doesn't actually turn, but is touch sensitive. After a couple of days learning how to manage the differences I am finally out for my first drive. My old car managed 100mph on a fine day but this one cannot do more than about 60mph - another safety feature I am told.  And yet the engine is twice the size of that in my last car, so the mpg is not too good.

Apart from those small gripes I am really pleased with my new car!

By the way, the current statistics show that there are still more XP users than Win 8 and 8.1 combined!