Bought a new computer yesterday.

Some bozo has decided that windows 8 should be installed... I'd just like to say that W8 is a complete and utter pile of poo. Unfortunately, to have W7 'downgrade' capability I must first purchase the 'pro' version for about seventy quid and then I must also purchase the discs for W7 for a couple of hundred... so that's not going to happen.

The same bozo also decided that he/she/it should use UEFI as a boot method. Shame my preferred linux won't install that way - hell, I can barely get the USB to boot at all. Windows won't boot in legacy bios; Mint won't boot in UEFI (even after turning off secure boot).

Fortunately this laptop has space for two hard drives, so that's the next thing to try... the previous laptop's hard drive won't fully boot in either windows (sits there being unable to repair itself) or linux (wrong video drivers and no default graphics - no doubt fixable but I haven't chased yet...)

Bah. And likewise, Humbug.

windows 7 is available on Software for Students for far cheaper. I agree W8 is utter crap. But then so is every other MS release. Windows ME was poo, XP was great, Vista was then poo and W7 great and now we have W8.... and guess what...

p.s. if you want a Vista Code to upgrade from I have a legit copy and code you could have.

Thanks, John.

I'll see how it goes, first. Mint has been sitting on 'configuring hardware' for a suspiciously long time...

*voices off in a whispered tone* imaaaaaaaac.

How is having smooth legs going to help?

It can't hurt though!

Bad luck Neil; I sympathise.

Today was a completely wasted day for me. A veritable comedy of errors and unbelievable dysfunction. And I'm not just talking about me now.

Got a virus that warned me the police were demanding £100 to unlock my PC. Simple. Download something-kicker to a flash drive, plug it in, and boot up with it, to seek out and destroy.

PC doesn't recognise usb as a boot up device.

Even if it had, the PC won't even go into safe mode.

Right - I'll repair Windows with the OEM CD

Nope. I repair it, boot it up, and the police are still there.

I know – I can simply generate a recovery from my Easeus backup image. That's what it was for.

Consider it generated.

Whoa! – Doesn't reboot. Easeus has knackered it. So now what?

Got to go through the 'repair' Windows process again.

Once done, log in under a different user, and Bob's your uncle. It works.

But no. I can't type anything into emails, and search doesn't work, and so on. All sorts of files missing. Well done easeus!

Obviously need to go back to the repaired version, which works but has none of my settings, and copy across my settings using Windows Files and Settings Transfer facility.

In order to boot into that, I spend an hour working out how to edit the boot.ini files so that I can choose which version of XP I boot into. It works!!

Two hours later, I have it. The files and settings backup file.

Does it work?

Obviously not. The Windows service packs are different, and incompatible. So let's download service pack 3 and transfer it across to the PC.

Excellent, sets up a treat, so now I have two SP3s and can use Windows Files and Settings to transfer everything.

Nope. Backed up image not recognised, still.

OK – enough. Suffice it to Say that this is less than half of the story. It's ongoing.

I think it's a conspiracy. There should be a button labelled "press to restore to original", or "Reset". With technology being what it is, I just do not believe this is not possible.

Problem is a combination of the intel 4000 graphics chipset and the UEFI - I can get past the UEFI but I haven't found a way yet to get any output while I install the bloody drivers.

Bleedin' edge; so sharp you cut yourself.

btw - how on earth do you stop the ridiculous animations on W8? It seems my version lacks the system editor...

Him MRS, he waxeth lyrical

Brian, didn't see your message last night... you have sympathy since I had almost the same symptoms trying to get an existing W7 installation to run on this laptop yesterday. Eventually I gave up...

Nonetheless, success of a sort has just about crowned my very efforts: this is being written on linux on the new box.

To be fair, it's a beta version ofthe latest redhat; I still have to use the bios to boot between W8 and Linux, and Gnome 3 is almost as bad as W8 in terms of user interface. Also, it's using a very strange video mode with minimal acceleration, but at least it is using it... There's a way of installing Cinnamon which I'm about to try, but I'd really prefer to find out how to install Mint 14 which is what I wanted to do in the first place...

For the advice of linux types here, as of today on an Acer V3-771, i5-3210, 2.5GHz, 6GD, HD4000 graphics, and a separate disc for the installation - a combination of CD, DVD, and USB installation media were attempted.

- gentoo won't even show a text window.

- Mint will boot in the alternate graphics mode, and will get partway through the installation, but locks up at the 'configuring hardware' stage and does not thereafter boot.

- Fedora 17 will fire up in either UEFI or BIOS mode from the installation medium, with slightly different effects, but won't give anything useful in either; sooner or later it black screens and goes silent.

- Ubuntu 12.4 won't do anything useful: black screen in either boot.

- Ubuntu 12.10 is marginally more useful; there are a few moments of either graphics (BIOS) or text (UEFI). Then it black screens.

- Fedora 18 Beta seems to work, though it crashes - white screen just to be different - after the second boot; thereafter it seems to work.

Time to hassle some developers...

Yup - it just goes on and on.

Today I have a working machine again, except that now I can't install the sound drivers (Sound Max Digital Audio D865GLC). It tries to install them, but just at the end I get the blue screen of death. Anyone know how to interpret the information on that? Something about Portcls.sys

The only solution for me is to make a regular disc image using xxclone. Must try to be more disciplined.

I just make a copy of all user data every month. Everything else can be installed.
Then do a fresh W7 install on a newly formated drive and do not use ANY virus protection software other than spybot and MS defender.

Yes and No...
In terms of user interface... its not great. I hate the fact there is no start menu and the metro interface just sucks.
However if we look at the actual OS its very good. Ive been using it for over 6 months now. Boot time is superb, the OS is very stable and runs beautifully.

Hopefully Microsoft will listen to the consumers and make some changed in the next service pack or version...

We will see

I agree about Windows 8, boot time is nice and speedy, and if you don't like the Metro interface, you can just pull up the normal desktop. Create a few shortcuts and pin some bits to the desktop, and you can treat it pretty well like W7.

Still not entirely sure what it is "for", if you get my drift, but for the boot time, I'd not go back to 7.

How much different is the boot time?

I really like W8 so far. Amazing boot time. Looks nice. The new Start/Metro window is a bit redundant on a PC, but still looks nice, though I just go to the desktop.

I skipped straight from XP to 8 because I f**king HATE Vista and 7 - Nearly as much I hate Word 2010; broken piece of crap. docx my arse...

Given that I use windows only when I have to, I'm unlikely to do anything significant with it except perhaps rip it off and try again with W7.

The most irritating thing about it is all the bleedin' visual nausea-inducing animations. Everything fades and slides and spins and folds over and generally gets in the the way of doing anything useful. It's only half a second, but it's a thousand times a day... like a million animated smilies every time you use it.

And by the way - didn't microsoft have a requirement to offer a choice of browser on first boot? That's gone - and from a recent W7, too...

There's no warning, for example, that the low-security password on the throwaway email address that you *must* use to start the program will be used as your login and password... and just exactly *why* is it necessary that the OS wants to pass your location details to Redmond? Why do these things come laden with 'free for a month' process heavy and expensive virus checkers, backup thingies, and other crap? Do I really want netflix and all the other stuff?

It's not difficult. An OS is there to let me *work* - windows 8 is intended to let me *play* - and *pay* at the same time.

Meh.

Got Intel i5 and, er, some gigs of RAM (you can tell I take notice of these things!) and boo time is literally like 30 secs after pressing the power button. That's from power on, to sat idling.



Er, I don't have any of that??
Oh yeah, slightly off topic but what you said reminded me. Get Adblock It makes teh Interwebz like it used to be 10 years ago - not covered in bloody adverts!

And what was it before, on which os?

I think mine is already faster than that tbh and I rarely switch it off fully anyway.

I don't even *start* a browser without adblock+ and noscript... in Windows, recommended AV is Avast free. Norton hasn't been any use since Norton sold the company.

The bad news is that the W8 supplied with the system doesn't supply tools to turn *off* the animations...

2nded

hmmm boot time is sub 10 seconds on my windows 8 laptop

Probably 10-20 secs is the boot up time on my Hp probook in windows 8.

I have an ssd installed though which makes lots of difference.

i dont have ssd but do have a pretty decent spec inc 8gb ram

I honestly cannot stand windows 8, I still run office 2003 and if it wasn't for such poor driver support on xp64 then I would likely still be using that. That all said after windows 7 has all the shiny bits removed its OK.

I have no experiance with uefi none of the boards I have support this? Is it worth avoiding?

It's fine with an OEM Windows installation. Anything else... see those rats, coughing?

For my use its windows only, if I want to do anything in Ubuntu I just jump in to a vm

Honestly - this thread just reminds me why I'm an Apple fan these days. Kudos to you guys for having the patience

Each to their own, Rich... in my defence, I haven't had a problem like this with Linux for perhaps fifteen years.

The issue is not that Linux isn't working, but that a new chipset isn't yet supported, and doesn't react in a standard way to default code.

It'll be fixed.

You've got more money than technical ability?





Sorry, couldn't resist