One of the things I hate most when Microsoft updates Windows, no matter how stable the new OS may be, is how everything is always in a different place. I don’t have the time when when it comes to my work computer to start figuring out where they’ve now put Device Manager, or System Properties, or Control Panel or System Restore etcetera. And even after you find them, it’s then a rather long time until you get into the habit of remembering where they are, and until then it’s a lot of minutes wasted with hunt and peck, trial and error, to find them again.
And so many of those layout changes are not an improvement to the previous OS, they are just different. Often seemingly just for the sake of being so. At least when Nuendo is updated, everything is still in its familiar place, only with additional choices added.
Okay enough griping. I did a forum search and can’t find too many posts about Win 8. Anybody out there care to share their experiences, especially as it pertains to getting used to the new OS and workflow?
I haven’t spent that much time on N5.x in Win 8, but I’ve spent some time doing casual computing tasks on it. It’s not that bad. My only complaint really is that my laptop in particular has touch gestures on the touch pad which allows me to side-swipe to bring up the Start Page or the Charms Bar (or whatever it’s called), and I end up doing this by mistake at times. But that’s an issue with the implementationon the laptop, not the OS.
So far absolutely none of the complaints that people had has been bothering me. As I suspected they were in my opinion super-overrated. The Start Page is simply the Start Menu but with “live” buttons to click, or “tiles” as they’re called now. It takes one click to get to it, just as with the Start Menu. Similarly opening an app, or searching for it, takes the same amount of time.
I spend most my time on the desktop so I really don’t notice the difference much. That said though the Start Page looks nice to me. You can group your apps any way you like and if you don’t want to spend time in a desktop environment you can instead use the apps. It’s a personal preference thing. I also don’t spend much time using Device Manager etc, but it’s readily available.
All in all I’d say that I’d never not buy a computer because it has Win 8, but I’d also not go out of my way to get it for the purpose of a DAW. Lastly, I really do think they have a winning concept simply because it’ll translate well to tablets and phones.
I have windows 8 installed on my notebook and I must say it’s the greatest Windows version for me.
I love the tile menu. Agregated news feed, social networks merged and all that. It’s like a facebook wall. It’s never the same due to dynamic tiles showing you content of picture folders, contacts, news etc.
Cloud integration is tight (25gig on Skydrive, 6 gig on Dropbox, 100gig on Mega, all free).
I found a few nice music related apps in the shop and I already bought a few (Bass and Guitar lessons).
Then, the desktop is still there, enhanced windows explorer (you can at last, pause data transfer/copy), better peripherals management…
There has been a lot of work on it, despite what all the “experts” say. Faster boot was a long time due too.
Amusingly, the netbook’s power supply, died a week ago and I didn’t have all my datas, internet bookmarks, passwords readily available. I logged into a friend’s win8 machine, creating a microsoft user session (so with your mail account ), and bam, it was all there. Even desktop wallpaper.
People tend to be negative when there is too much change in one go it seems. It surely comes to adapt and loosing long time habits.
Each time I fire Protools, I swear because I didn’t commit myself on learning it long enough to feel as comfortable as I am on Nuendo.
However, I don’t think I need that for work, so my studio is still on win 7 / XP. But that may change later, with software evolution & requirements.
It doesn’t sound like the switch over will be all that bad. I’m kinda surprised though that with all the techies around here that I didn’t hear from a bit more people!
Some people might have gotten turned off by some reviews, and a lot of people simply didn’t need W8 because W7 is fine. Then of course this forum is kind of dead to begin with. And for some really fantastic reason Nuendo people can’t post in the Cubase section where there are a lot more people active that might be on 8…
