Sometimes I forget what it was like when I was worried that clicking on something or changing something on my computer might mean that I could never get it back the way it was.
When I see what my clients are worried about from that perspective it helps me know why so many people dislike windows 8 (and 8.1). To compare it to Vista, though, is completely the wrong way of looking at it.
The only similarity is that Vista was a departure from XP in terms of how the screen looks and where you find things and some software which worked with XP no longer worked with Vista.
Windows 7, which everyone loves, has the same problems as Vista outlined above but by the time it came out everyone was used to it. The actual problem with Vista was that it was overburdened by layers of clunky security (and many other) features which impacted greatly on performance. What Windows 7 did was provided the same features (and many more) in a much better designed way.
Going from Windows 7 to Windows 8 has a few superficial problems (things being in different places to where they are in Windows 7) but the added features and benefits and performance improvements are very much a step forwards.
The only problem (apart from Wi-Fi printing!) is that people have to learn a new way of finding where everything is. As I pointed out in the first paragraph, this is a deal-breaker for a lot of people.
The technical preview for Windows 10, which is the next windows operating system, is out and I’ve installed it on a test machine and I feel that it has reintroduced an old school way of finding things to a more modern operating system than Windows 8.1. I think a lot of my clients will be much happier with it. It has so many built in features (antivirus, password manager, Time Machine style backups, multiple desktops etc etc) that makes all levels of computer users happy.
Anyway, lets see.
