Is it an upgrade? Is it a downgrade? I have a laptop here that I bought without OS, and using on Linux. However my IT prowess is less than I thought, and now I would like to have a windows safety belt too.
Thing is, it gives the "no device drivers were found" when trying to install Win 7, and all I am seeing on the pre-installed OS versions of this laptop is win 8.1, even the drivers on the website are win 8.
Why would you replace it?
I don't *want* to replace it per se, I can't install win 7, and I have this horrible suspicion that it's because the drivers are not compatible
FPBP
win 8.1 is fine if u dont mind start menu
q: is it acceptable.
A. its commercial shit
it's been run into the ground by the company that relies only on PC licensing lock-in/ignorance
it's hardly a viable OS at all
with windows 10, the singular OS
with it's store-front
m$ looks like AOL - it has the technology
8.1 is an upgrade from 7.
Disable OneDrive.
Don't use a Microsoft account if you don't intend to use the store and modern apps.
If the start screen pisses you off, install Classic Shell and be done with it.
And that's it. Now 8.1 acts just like 7, but with performance improvements and better resource management.
I tried Win8.1 two years ago on a laptop and found it extremely annoying. It REQUIRES a hotmail account to even log onto it. When my wifi password was changed and Win8.1 refused to let me update the password I had typed in previously, even though I followed directions from Microsoft on how to do it, I reinstalled Win7.
Fuck Windows 8.
Like my professor said: Only every other version of Windows seems usable. XP, Vista not, Win 7, Win 8 not.
It's a sidegrade at best.
Windows 10 is another sidegrade, arguably a downgrade in many respects.
If you wan't an upgrade download a GNU/Linux distro.
>It REQUIRES a hotmail account to even log onto it.
You don't have to.
DO NOT USE OPERATING PLATFORMS THAT DON'T RESPECT YOUR FREEDOM
It makes you a cuck to use windows.
Had this exact same problem, couldnt install 7 because of jewtels fuckery. Windows 8.1 is usable.
Even if I had, I thought it still sucked and I'm not giving it a second chance.
Everything but gaming I do under Linux anyway.
Btw. a serious business magazine (I forgot which one, Forbes etc.) called Windows 8 the biggest business mistake in history. Microsoft pushed Windows 8 and customers stopped buying PCs because they didn't want it.
They said that even New Cola back in the 1980s wasn't as bad as Windows 8, because Coca Cola realized the customers didn't want it and changed back to the old formula after a few months. Not so Microsoft, and their insistence not only hurt them, but also manufacturers.
This.
I've forgotten the exact numbers, but the losses to the entire PC industry were measured in the tens of billions of dollars per month for the first year or so of Win 8.
It was still recovering but not yet back up to pre-Win8 levels when they shoved Win10 up everyone's ass. For the last year, the losses in sales to PC manufacturers has been measured in the tens of billions per month.
The only thing slowing it down now is the artificial unavailability of an alternative to Win10.
Productivity losses in lost time each work day are measured in the tens of millions of lost work hours every day worldwide. Businesses simply don't have enough money to retrain everyone for even ten hours worth of classes, and it's estimated that it takes most people about 50 hours of training/relearning to switch from Win7 to something newer over the course of 6 to 10 weeks.
Multiply by several hundred million workers and you begin to grasp the scale of the economic damage microsoft inflicted on businesses worldwide. It's utterly staggering. Several trillion dollars over the last 3-4 years.
Literally this.
Is there any point in 10? Or more accurately, any way to disable all of the telemetry/botnet shit in 10?
No, because you're a shill
>8.1
>Is there any point in 10?
Yes and no.
DirectX 12 is a thing if you're gayming, that alone would probably be a reason to run 10 on a gayming machine.
Aside from that, some rather minor improvements here and there. Overall I would say it is (in my opinion) a bit nicer in daily use, especially on a laptop, largely thanks to some UI improvements here and there. Like the task bar and start menu are nicer, notification center isn't useless, some of the first-party UWP apps (like weather, for instance) are quite nice and integrated much better than in Windows 8.1.
Bash is nice to quickly test things on, or for access to some utilities for interacting with files, though it can't directly interact with the Windows system and thus isn't as useful as powershell.
Some things here and there are worse (like, 3 or 4 different looking right-click menus ? what the shit, MS), the telemetry boogeyman, and such.
>any way to disable all of the telemetry/botnet shit in 10?
No. If it makes you uncomfortable, don't use Windows 10.
But if it makes you uncomfortable, don't use anything from Google either. They are just as bad, if not even worse, about collecting your data and selling it to the highest bidder.
Though I feel like the real question here is, should you be scared of Windows 10's telemetry ?
Microsoft has, just like every other tech company, a history of shitty business practices. But they don't have a history of breaking their EULAs, which in this case is fairly specific about what is being collected, while also stating that all of this is anonymized.
At worst the things you search for, using Bing/Edge/Cortana, are tied to your advertisement ID which is nothing but a number in a sea of numbers with a series of keywords attached to it.
Google collects all the same data and then some. If you're comfortable using Google's services, you have little reason to be uncomfortable with Windows 10.
Got any sources or just air?
> but with performance improvements and better resource management.
You keep saying that
install server 2012 with classic start. literally the best windows gets.
>but with performance improvements and better resource management.
Citation and clarification heavily needed. "It boots two seconds faster because it actually just uses hibernation instead of cold booting" or "this benchmark said it's 2% faster in Cinebench" do not count. Memory compression and other minor changes produce no tangible impact on everyday usage either.