#win8

[higgsfigs]

Wow everything in the universe wants to stop supporting win8 in like... 160 days huh?

My laptop is a toaster so if I'm upgrading I'd rather get a new laptop

Uggggggggggggg

Time to save money I guess??????

[tom2tec]

Volume²~ Advanced Windows Volume Control

Volume² is an freeware app which is an advanced Windows volume control, a complete replacement for the default Volume Control on Windows. This application lets you easily change the sound volume just by rotating the mouse wheel or by using keyboard hot keys or just mouse move on screen border. The app comes with customization themes and interface and also other options like setting hotkey for…

[stabbyfoxandrew]

hmm... if i were to end up buying a laptop with win11 (beloathed) could i like... backtrack it to win10?

[mslanna]

pray for me i'm upgrading my windows

[pajorko]

What do you use to gif ? Thx for making the time 😊

A program called PhotoScape. The quality of the gifs is far from the ones you can make in Photoshop, but it's decent enough I guess. And the program is free!

[dragonowlie]

my laptop has officially reached the stage where it cannot sustain itself without being plugged in. it has become desktop light, if you will

[takenene]

everybody who ever laughed at me and said win10 is better than win8 owes me fucking money

[captain-acab]

Laughing and vomiting and crying because the original creator's answer to "how old are you" is, apparently, "Windows Vista."

Child I remember when Vista CAME OUT, and we all REFUSED to switch to it. Because it SUCKED.

[innitmarvellous]

Oh god, Windows 11 is so ugly...I don't want to have to deal with that :'(

[avkamfher]

I get questioned a lot as to why I install win7 on my computers when I don't decide on Linux.

7 is the last OS that MS produced that isn't utter trash and it is light weight enough I can install it on most anything.

Plus the antivirus that I pay for works on it.

[smashfanx]

since windows 10 and 11 are mostly the same with just an ui change, i say that we can start calling these windows 10x versions, alike how win95, 98 and winME are oftenly grouped togheter as "Windows 9x".

[whateverposting]

KDE and pretty in the same sentence???

Stop talking shit about Linux Desktop Environments!

KDE is Pretty! XFCE is Efficient! Gnome... Mate is Traditional!

[valodia]

The fact that theres an option that keeps your files when upgrading windows while when i looked it up earlier it said there wasnt. I spent hrs backing them up but tbh if i had lost them i would have simply disintegrated

[what-wait-why]

🙃 my laptop screen is steadily attempting to die, and i really don't have the money to get a new computer

it would, unfortunately, be cheaper and easier the just get a new laptop entirely than try to salvage this pos

[ms-demeanor]

Hello! First, I wanted to say thank you for your post about updating software and such. I really appreciated your perspective as someone with ADHD. The way you described your experiences with software frustration was IDENTICAL to my experience, so your post made a lot of sense to me.

Second, (and I hope my question isn't bothering you lol) would you mind explaining why it's important to update/adopt the new software? Like, why isn't there an option that doesn't involve constantly adopting new things? I understand why they'd need to fix stuff like functional bugs/make it compatible with new tech, but is it really necessary to change the user side of things as well?

Sorry if those are stupid questions or they're A Lot for a tumblr rando to ask, I'd just really like to understand because I think it would make it easier to get myself to adopt new stuff if I understand why it's necessary, and the other folks I know that know about computers don't really seem to understand the experience.

Thank you so much again for sharing your wisdom!!

A huge part of it is changing technologies and changing norms; I brought up Windows 8 in that other post and Win8 is a *great* example of user experience changing to match hardware, just in a situation that was an enormous mismatch with the market.

Win8's much-beloathed tiles came about because Microsoft seemed to be anticipating a massive pivot to tablet PCs in nearly all applications. The welcome screen was designed to be friendly to people who were using handheld touchscreens who could tap through various options, and it was meant to require more scrolling and less use of a keyboard.

But most people who the operating system went out to *didn't* have touchscreen tablets or laptops, they had a desktop computer with a mouse and a keyboard.

When that was released, it was Microsoft attempting to keep up with (or anticipate) market trends - they wanted something that was like "the iPad for Microsoft" so Windows 8 was meant to go with Microsoft Surface tablets.

We spent the first month of Win8's launch making it look like Windows 7 for our customers.

You can see the same thing with the centered taskbar on Windows 11; that's very clearly supposed to mimic the dock on apple computers (only you can't pin it anywhere but the bottom of the screen, which sucks).

Some of the visual changes are just trends and various companies trying to keep up with one another.

With software like Adobe I think it's probably based on customer data. The tool layout and the menu dropdowns are likely based on what people are actually looking for, and change based on what other tools people are using. That's likely true for most programs you use - the menu bar at the top of the screen in Word is populated with the options that people use the most; if a function you used to click on all the time is now buried, there's a possibility that people use it less these days for any number of reasons. (I'm currently being driven mildly insane by Teams moving the "attach file" button under a "more" menu instead of as an icon next to the "send message" button, and what this tells me is either that more users are putting emojis in their messages than attachments, or microsoft WANTS people to put more emojis than messages in their attachments).

But focusing on the operating system, since that's the big one:

The thing about OSs is that you interact with them so frequently that any little change seems massive and you get REALLY frustrated when you have to deal with that, but version-to-version most OSs don't change all that much visually and they also don't get released all that frequently. I've been working with windows machines for twelve years and in that time the only OSs that Microsoft has released were 8, 10, and 11. That's only about one OS every four years, which just is not that many. There was a big visual change in the interface between 7 and 8 (and 8 and 8.1, which is more of a 'panicked backing away' than a full release), but otherwise, realistically, Windows 11 still looks a lot like XP.

The second one is a screenshot of my actual computer. The only change I've made to the display is to pin the taskbar to the left side instead of keeping it centered and to fuck around a bit with the colors in the display customization. I haven't added any plugins or tools to get it to look different.

This is actually a pretty good demonstration of things changing based on user behavior too - XP didn't come with a search field in the task bar or the start menu, but later versions of Windows OSs did, because users had gotten used to searching things more in their phones and browsers, so then they learned to search things on their computers.

There are definitely nefarious reasons that software manufacturers change their interfaces. Microsoft has included ads in home versions of their OS and pushed searches through the Microsoft store since Windows 10, as one example. That's shitty and I think it's worthwhile to find the time to shut that down (and to kill various assistants and background tools and stop a lot of stuff that runs at startup).

But if you didn't have any changes, you wouldn't have any changes. I think it's handy to have a search field in the taskbar. I find "settings" (which is newer than control panel) easier to navigate than "control panel." Some of the stuff that got added over time is *good* from a user perspective - you can see that there's a little stopwatch pinned at the bottom of my screen; that's a tool I use daily that wasn't included in previous versions of the OS. I'm glad it got added, even if I'm kind of bummed that my Windows OS doesn't come with Spider Solitaire anymore.

One thing that's helpful to think about when considering software is that nobody *wants* to make clunky, unusable software. People want their software to run well, with few problems, and they want users to like it so that they don't call corporate and kick up a fuss.

When you see these kinds of changes to the user experience, it often reflects something that *you* may not want, but that is desirable to a *LOT* of other people. The primary example I can think of here is trackpad scrolling direction; at some point it became common for trackpads to scroll in the opposite direction that they used to; now the default direction is the one that feels wrong to me, because I grew up scrolling with a mouse, not a screen. People who grew up scrolling on a screen seem to feel that the new direction is a lot more intuitive, so it's the default. Thankfully, that's a setting that's easy to change, so it's a change that I make every time I come across it, but the change was made for a sensible reason, even if that reason was opaque to me at the time I stumbled across it and continues to irritate me to this day.

I don't know. I don't want to defend Windows all that much here because I fucking hate Microsoft and definitely prefer using Linux when I'm not at work or using programs that I don't have on Linux. But the thing is that you'll see changes with Linux releases as well.

I wouldn't mind finding a tool that made my desktop look 100% like Windows 95, that would be fun. But we'd probably all be really frustrated if there hadn't been any interface improvements changes since MS-DOS (and people have DEFINITELY been complaining about UX changes at least since then).

Like, I talk about this in terms of backward compatibility sometimes. A lot of people are frustrated that their old computers can't run new software well, and that new computers use so many resources. But the flipside of that is that pretty much nobody wants mobile internet to work the way that it did in 2004 or computers to act the way they did in 1984.

Like. People don't think about it much these days but the "windows" of the Windows Operating system represented a massive change to how people interacted with their computers that plenty of people hated and found unintuitive.

(also take some time to think about the little changes that have happened that you've appreciated or maybe didn't even notice. I used to hate the squiggly line under misspelled words but now I see the utility. Predictive text seems like new technology to me but it's really handy for a lot of people. Right clicking is a UX innovation. Sometimes you have to take the centered task bar in exchange for the built-in timer deck; sometimes you have to lose color-coded files in exchange for a right click.)

[faeriekit]

For only $800 per household, I think we could crowdfund a family desktop for every home with a teenager in it, for a fraction of a cost of a modern hardware. It will run win8 and we can provide thrifted computer games from Goodwills across America. We will sell this idea to them by pointing out that they can more appropriately enjoy the cute keyboards and monitors TikTok is trying to sell them. They would LOVE downloading virus-riddled freeware to play games with no educational content. I believe in us. We could do it.