Windows 8 - The Schizoid Operating System

Over the past few years I have encountered quite a few times that I wished I had a laptop system to use at various meeting I go to as part of the Oregon 8^th Air Force Historical Society (www.8thafhsoregon.com), Association of Naval Aviation  (ANA) as well as my own photography work. I like my Windows 7 desktop system and had no need to replace this hard working system with a heavy duty laptop. Not what I needed. “Form follows function” is still a good Victorian era motto to follow in this electronic age.  But the Target.com “Black Friday” (in target’s case more of a late night Thursday sale )– I went to and got their Gateway laptop they had on sale for $349 – even though it came with Windows 8.

 

Windows 8, as designed and implemented by Microsoft IS a “Schizoid Operating System.” It has dual personalities that act totally different based on which one you are in. One OS is not really aware of the other OS. What you can do in one OS you cannot do in the other – and even Internet Explorer does not act the same way in both of them. The ability to work in the “native” Windows 8 mode is based on you having strong arms and perfectly controlled fingers to move around all day on the screen – fingerprints, food particles and other stuff you pick up on your hands – in order to do WORK. Ohm, and you can only really work on one item at a time. Otherwise, you have to constantly flip back and forth via keyboard commands you have to memorize or use your hand / fingers to flip back and forth. You CAN see two different apps/docs on a screen at one time – but one can only occupy 1/3 of the available screen space. For all practical purposes Windows 8 in this mode it not functional: you cannot resize any Window at all. You either run full screen, or 2/3 and  1/3 screen for any TWO apps and that is it.

 

Now the OTHER Windows 8 system is what appears and acts like Windows 7 – but without ITS start menu functionality. It is like they wanted to show it but not really allow people to really use it like it is in Windows 7 in order to force you to use Windows 8 – and put everything into the cloud and pay a monthly fee to use Office in the cloud. Luckily there are already 3^rd party applications that allow you to live totally in the Windows 8 desktop mode and ignore the bad half of the OS.

 

Start8 is out there that (from www.Stardock.com ) brings back the Windows 7 menu to this OS so that it becomes functional again. For $5 you cannot go wrong with this. There are others also but I went with Start8. CNet.com published a review of them at http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-33642_7-57496506-292/how-to-get-the-start-menu-back-in-windows-8/

 

Now once I sign into my system it starts up in the desktop mode and I work in there. I find no need to get into the “idiot light” mode that is Windows 8 interface. (“Idiot light” mode is what a LOT of car makers converted to at one time to save money. You just have lights on the dash that are either on or off – good or bad – and no way to see trends at all. They started putting that into aircraft also but that quickly was rescinded – they found out that without the ability to see any trends people would crash more – become idiots to the lights – and not really fly. That is why all these modern “glass cockpits” actually replicate ANALOG gauges on the screen – more functional.) To make them useful you have to have them in large size mode – else you HAVE to memorize every single icon / corporate logo out there and remember as to what they do with NO words at all – unless the maker of the app decided to put any on there – within the Microsoft guidelines of course. Which means of course if you have 20 to 30 apps installed on your system you will be FOREVER scrolling left and right to maybe see the apps icon / logo in a sea of others (somewhat organized by you) and remember what each and every logo means. You get so much identical looking visual clutter you just cannot find anything since you now really HAVE to read view each and every icon to find something. This makes is harder since you can have lots of them out of your view ALWAYS and now you also HAVE to remember that that one app is somewhere off to the right in some mass of other icons. You will spend lots of time scrolling / hunting for items and or task switching if you ever try to use this as a DESKTOP in native windows 8 mode.

 

Now if you actually have a tablet – or a Windows 8 phone -- then this MAY work well if all you EVER do is maybe a few work functions with it. Then this idea does work pretty well. These screens are so small that you really cannot do multiple task-switching work on the system. Their FORM is really following their design function of only doing ONE THING at a time – really. The ads may suggest surfing and talking at the same time – but the function is really TALKING with a visual non-required SECONDARY task can be performed when you are NOT TALKING – they are not really trying to do two tasks at the same time and integrate them.

 

Remember – no person can “multi-task” at all – every person actually does “task switching” where you do work on one item, stop, switch to another item, then switch to another and so on. Like scanning a cockpit and looking at each gauge you are task switching among the 15 or gauges in a typical aircraft and looking at each one on their own them as to what they mean. Only after looking at all would a person try and determine relationships between them – but never try this in native Windows 8 – you could only ever see two and the other 13 would be hidden from you!