Metropol

For Christmas, I treated myself to a new laptop, and got a Dell Inspiron, with Windows 8. The 'Start screen' stuff is difficult to adapt to at first, but it's a lot better than I thought it was going to be.

I'll report back later on with some more in-depth thoughts. It's not too bad, but at the moment, I do miss the Start menu.

Oh, the Charms bar. Every time I go across the touchpad from the right, it opens up, when I really am just looking to move the mouse over from the right of the page. I've only really used the 'settings' option on it so far, anyway. It seems to me they've taken a few things from the start menu and moved them over, and then put some Social Networking fun in too. I do miss the start menu. It took me a surprisingly long time to work out where 'Shut down' was, and also a long time before I found a full list of programs installed.

However, I'm adapting to the Start screen itself, which isn't that bad - the UI in particular for apps and the like in the Metro (or whatever it's called) UI is really lovely. I miss the start menu - but I think I'll get over it.

Oh, and whilst the gestures on the touchpad are useful at time, swiping from the left opens the previously opened app - and I usually get transported back to Metroland.

Critique wrote:For Christmas, I treated myself to a new laptop, and got a Dell Inspiron, with Windows 8.

Out of interest, did you buy yourself something and decide not to open it till Christmas morning?

wells wrote:

Critique wrote:For Christmas, I treated myself to a new laptop, and got a Dell Inspiron, with Windows 8.

Out of interest, did you buy yourself something and decide not to open it till Christmas morning?

No, I ordered it a few weeks ago, and it arrived on Friday. I just didn't really get a chance to fiddle with it for a few days, and didn't post about it until Christmas day.

Critique wrote:

wells wrote:

Critique wrote:For Christmas, I treated myself to a new laptop, and got a Dell Inspiron, with Windows 8.

Out of interest, did you buy yourself something and decide not to open it till Christmas morning?

No, I ordered it a few weeks ago, and it arrived on Friday. I just didn't really get a chance to fiddle with it for a few days, and didn't post about it until Christmas day.

Fair enough.

Is there any reason you shouldn't put a laptop into Hibernation and then just turning it on out of that, rather than shutting it down completely and then going through the full start-up? From opening the lid of the laptop, it only seems to take a second or two to get to the lockscreen on Windows 8, from Hibernation - the kind of quick response you'd expect from a tablet, and it's very nice that it can do so.

The general boot speed isn't that long either - generally around 15-20 seconds, but if there isn't a problem with hibernating, then I may as well do that. Also, if I do that, and Hibernate whilst on the desktop, when it turns back on it'll be on the desktop, so I won't have to go through the Start screen.

Windows 8 is faster booting in general. There's no reason why you should shut down rather than hibernate - but if you're looking to sort out a driver which is playing up or other such annoyances then obviously a full reboot would be neccessary.

Do you have an SSD?

No, I still have a spinning HDD. I understand that there are things where a restart is necessary/the best thing to do, but Hibernation became a habit after working with slow computers for so long.