After nearly 4 months with Windows 8 I think I can say I have given it a fair chance to show itself off and here are some of the highs and lows of my experiences.
My lowest point was a recent Windows Update automatic reboot which lost me 30 minutes of my life through closing a browser session where I had been filling in a long complicated insurance claim to automatically reboot to apply some updates. Windows 8 was meant to stop this but some research showed me that you only see the reminders on the login screen, which if you have a fingerprint reader you never see! So, despite the warnings having been in place for 3 days, I never saw them because I just swipe and go. The cure? From your Windows 8 Metro Desktop, type "gpedit.msc" and hit enter to open Group Policy Edit. Expand the following: Local Computer Policy > Computer Configuration >Administrative Templates >Windows Components >Windows Update - No auto-restart with logged on users for scheduled automatic updates installations, change the setting to enabled and you're all done!
My next problem was regular blue screens/crashes when recovering from sleep, the system would just lock up and I would have a black screen that wouldn't respond. This would happen every 2-3 days and there was no explanation in the logs. My guess was something to do with the hard disk but being a new SSD it was unlikely to be mechanical ;-) so I turned to the interweb again. One crash showed me something to do with 'clock watchdog timeout' so a quick google led me to this site. Having hunted down the relevant AHCI drivers from Lenovo that had been released the day before and installed I haven't had a crash since, fingers crossed!
The 'Metro' interface (called some other nonsense now) is something that still mystifies me and I haven't found a use for it, in fact it seems to make my life harder because every time I install something, all the notes, uninstall options, different sub applications each get a tile, so for one application there may end up being 5 or 10 tiles. Install 20 programs or more and that is a possible 200 tiles. Finding what you want isn't simple. The search is also hit and miss because you have to say if you want a Program or App. Is Windows Update a program or an App? I don't know, I honestly don't care, I just find it annoying that when I search for Windows Update it isn't there and I have to click again. The Windows+X shortcut was useful but no replacement for the start menu with full search. The cure? Start8. It's perfect and makes Windows 8 finally a lovely thing to use...
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