Windows 8 Consumer Preview Discussion

By Roger H.
in The Fast Ring (Insider Previews)

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Grand Master

Zain Adeel

Posted
Posted

Hate to say this. CP is too unstable. App quality is not up to the mark I had set in my mind.

Im talking about IE10 immersive.. Really buggy..

Some apps don't even open. They show the loading screen then go away. And I see them suspended. I have to close them and open again. The gestures work great. The scrolling and all that is great with the mouse. Hugely improved over DP. but the apps are ****!.. plain ****!

they had a lot of time to get good apps ready. But they didnt.

Community Regular

efjay

Posted
Posted

Did Microsoft do any user studies to see how straight old people keep the mouse pointer when they click? They click and then jerk or jerk and then click. I can't see them keeping it that straight in the corner.

There will be a hardware Windows key on their device, no need to hit a small area of the desktop if you dont want to.

Grand Master

remixedcat

Posted
Posted

Still not a fan, will be fine as a tablet/touch screen OS but don't see the advantages for a desktop OS. Removing the start button on the desktop is silly, not obvious how you go back to the start screen (I know but it's not obvious). Plenty of things are simply more fiddly than before if you're using a keyboard and mouse. The live tiles are nice but not really a big step forward over desktop gadgets.

Managed to crash VMWare by loading Metro IE10 and clicking yes to the do you want daily pics question, not a big deal but first time I've ever had Workstation crash.

Actually doing anything in IE10 kills vmware

LOL VMWare!!! Nice one!!

Grand Master

McKay

Posted
Posted

So far, the only part Ive been unimpressed with is the Metro apps, they are buggy and often unresponsive. I cannot add my @me. account to the mail app, because it only supports Hotmail, GMail and Exchange.

Untitled-49.png

Apart from that, the non-metro stuff. (The Aero desktop) is top notch, improved everywhere, and incredibly stable.

Guest

Posted
Posted

Is this right? Most Metro apps don't work at 720p?

I'm asking because I honestly can't believe that!

Why on earth would you use the standard of 1024x768 when 1280x720 is so much more common these days?! I mean, sure, maybe if we're talking about old legacy hardware but this really isn't for that kind of hardware!

I usually run windows on my PC at 720p, everything is simply too small to read at 1080p.

Now, I could use 1080p with the accessibility option to "make everything bigger" but it doesn't make everything bigger. It makes the tiles bigger and leaves the text tiny still :(

On another note, anyone know how to choose a different colour from the like.. 12 they offer? They're all pretty garish!

Experienced

statm1

Posted
Posted

Found a small UI bug: Shift-rightclick on the closed IE icon on the taskbar and there will be a "run". Doubt thats supposed to be there.

Drag stuff off the taskbar? Was that something in the DP? I certainly can't do that in Win7.

Ok so you could never drag icons off the taskbar before my mistake..
Experienced

bbfc_uk

Posted
Posted

I don't know what to think of it. I can see it being amazing on a tablet or a laptop with a trackpad and gestures, but on a desktop I just can't see it being very user friendly.

I really wish my MacBook Pro's trackpad would allow gestures on Windows 8 - that would be so cool!

Grand Master

Evolution

Posted
Posted

Not sure this is a new feature or not, but if you right click in the bottom left corner you get a list of options such as device manager, run command prompt with admin rights, etc. However the one thing that is getting on my nerves is the rebooting when you choose a different OS on the boot manager.

Explorer

Blackhood

Posted
Posted

Can't even boot up the installer on my desktop... it's stuck on the betta fish screen (the throbber doesn't appear either).

Installing fine on my netbook though, I'm not sure how it'll handle it... never meant to install it here in the first place, but it seems that I've no choice :p

Same thing happened to me on my main computer desktop. It took 20-30 mins to get past that screen then started to go through the setup process and got "dpc watchdog violation".

Turned out it was the marvell controller on my asus board doing it. I use that for my main hard drive (6gb/s). Disabled it and it took about 10 mins to install.

So looks like I will have to move my hard drive to the regular sata ports to be able to dual boot with 7.

Neowinian

blaaha66

Posted
Posted

Not sure this is a new feature or not, but if you right click in the bottom left corner you get a list of options such as device manager, run command prompt with admin rights, etc. However the one thing that is getting on my nerves is the rebooting when you choose a different OS on the boot manager.

make win7 default os so it wont use win8 boot manager
Grand Master

chrisj1968

Posted
Posted

how in the world do I run applications since the old school start button is gone? my first impression is that this is a mess.

I'm not keen at all with this Windows8. How do I access my games? I feel like i'm in a car without a steering wheel.... :cry:

Grand Master

stevember

Posted
Posted

Feels horrible with multi-monitors.

I keep running IE instead start menu, KB shortcuts hard for me because I'm paralysed.

Loving file dialogs in desktop, but really needs start menu as option.

Really needs option of modes touch tablet or desktop, not fragmented put finger in metro, mouse out, in, out, in, out shake it all about...

Experienced

ManMountain

Posted
Posted

how in the world do I run applications since the old school start button is gone? my first impression is that this is a mess.

I'm not keen at all with this Windows8. How do I access my games? I feel like i'm in a car without a steering wheel.... :cry:

Stating the obvious I guess, but you just pin the application to the main Metro UI. For games you could just have a folder filled with your game icons pinned to Metro.

Veteran

micro

Posted
Posted

My experience with this release has been a disaster as far as desktop use goes. I have dual monitors. The metro apps are completely useless I have 4147200 pixels of real estate and with the metro apps i am wasting so much of this space. Also major inconsistency between desktop and metro start. I am closing apps by pulling down, swiping from the side etc and then i end up in the desktop for a program and suddenly closing an app no longer works the way it was working. Feels thrown together. I will be optimistic that microsoft will polish this up for desktop users by rtm. However if it is released functioning anything similar to what i just used today, I wont be upgrading.

Grand Master

Stoffel

Posted
Posted

I'm only at 51%, can't wait to install it tomorrow afternoon.

For the people having issues figuring things out Paul Thurrott wrote some nice articles on Win8 CP explaining how a lot of the new mouse and KB shortcuts work

Community Regular

brink668

Posted
Posted

Don't like the Metro Desktop for a Non Touch Screen Interface for reasons Im sure already explained. Start Button/Hidden Start Menu location is really not a good fit for Non Touch Screens. Looking forward to see better Server 2012 material this really isn't that stunning at the present time. Wish I knew what 100,000 changes were made and why.

I will not be recommending this OS in its current form. Hope you dedicated feedback givers really tell Microsoft this isn't the way to go, I see a lot of people moving on. If, you change to much and try to be like Apple well if they have to relearn all new stuff again, believe you me they will choose do they want to relearn a Microsoft product OS or try something different as they will most likely feel that the same learning curve will be for both. I think all this is going to do is, make a lot of home users jump ship. I see it in my town and with my clients this isn't doing any good for them. Except for dedicated touch screen interfaces.

Grand Master

BajiRav

Posted
Posted

4.0.1. The latest version.

I can't get the boot camp installer to run (tried all compatibility tricks). I have snow leopard so it must be pulling in boot camp 3.3, right? Is there a way I can download boot camp 4.0 from apple in snow leopard?

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    • AMD RX 9070 GRE AI, Blender benchmarks vs 9070 XT, 7800XT, Nvidia RTX 5070, 4070

      By hellowalkman · Posted

      AMD RX 9070 GRE AI, Blender benchmarks vs 9070 XT, 7800XT, Nvidia RTX 5070, 4070 by Sayan Sen Earlier this week, we shared the first part of our review of AMD's new RX 9070 GRE. It was about the gaming performance of the GPU, and we gave it an 8 out of 10. As a follow-up, similar to how we did with the 9070 XT and non-XT, we are doing a dedicated productivity review for the RX 9070 GRE as well, where we compare it against the 9070 XT, 9070, 7800 XT, as well as Nvidia's 5070 and 4070. This will include AI, rendering, compute, and more benchmarks. AI performance, especially, is a very important metric in today's world, and AMD also promised big improvements thanks to its underlying architectural improvements. We will be pitching it against the data we already have for the RX 9070, and RX 9070 XT, but also the Nvidia 5070 FE, MSI GeForce RTX 4070 VENTUS 2X 12G, and Gigabyte Radeon RX 7800 XT GAMING OC 16G as they are in a similar price class, but also because we do not have a comparable 5060 Ti card lying around here that we can compare it against. Before we get underway, this is a collaboration between Sayan Sen and Steven Parker, who lent me his test bed. Also, there was no editorial input from AMD. First up, the specs of the RX 9070, 9070 XT, and 9070 GRE, which were given to us by AMD: Radeon RX 9070 GRE Radeon RX 9070 Radeon RX 9070 XT Boost Clock: Game Clock: up to 2.79GHz up to 2.20GHz up to 2.52GHz up to 2.07GHz up to 2.97GHz up to 2.40GHz Stream Processors 3,072 (48 CU) 3,584 (56 CU) 4,096 (64 CU) Ray Accelerator 48 56 64 AI Accelerator 96 112 128 ROPs 96 128 Texture Mapping Units 192 224 256 Memory 12 GB GDDR6, 18Gbps Clock, 192-bit Bus 432 GB/s 16 GB GDDR6, 20Gbps Clock, 256-bit Bus Effective Memory Bandwidth: 640 GB/s Infinity Cache 48 MB (3rd Gen) 64 MB (3rd Gen) Card Bus PCI-E 5.0 X16 Output 2x HDMI 2.1b 2x DisplayPort 2.1a Power consumption 220W 304W Recommended PSU 650W 750W Slot width 2x 3x Price (SEP) $549 $599 As you can see from the specs above, it is less than the standard RX 9070 in every way that counts, except for slightly higher Boost and Game clock speed. Design Moving on, the RX 9070 GRE we were given is an XFX Swift triple-fan, dual-slot design with two 8-pin connectors. At 30cm (self-measured), it will fit in most systems easily. There is no RGB either. The AMD Radeon RX 9070 GRE by XFX from all angles. Test system Our test system consists of the following: Lian Li O11 Dynamic Mini V2 Flow (Amazon|Newegg) ASUS Z890 ProArt Creator WiFi (Amazon|Newegg) Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus (Amazon|Newegg) Thermal Grizzly KryoSheet - 44x37 (Amazon|Newegg) 2x 16GB G.Skill Trident Z5 RGB (7200 MT/s in XMP) (Amazon|Newegg) Sabrent Rocket4 Plus 2TB SSD (Amazon) Windows 11 25H2 (Build 26200.8246) AMD shared a press driver based on the recently released Adrenaline 26.5.2 that we were required to use. We now move on to our benchmarks. First up, we have Geekbench AI running on ONNX. For some reason, the 9070 GRE does exceptionally well here in both half-precision (FP16) and single-precision (FP32). It manages to beat the RTX 5070 and RX 9070 non-XT, and is only behind the 9070 XT. Since Geekbench runs in short bursts instead of continuously hammering the graphics card, it seems the GRE's faster boost clocks are helping here. Next up, we move to the UL Procyon AI test suite, starting with the image generation benchmark. We chose the Stable Diffusion XL FP16 test since it is the most intense workload available on Procyon. The Nvidia cards do very well here, as even the 4070 out-muscles AMD's best fairy easily. The positive thing about the GRE is that it gets quite close to the 9070 non-XT in this test; this indicates that the VRAM does not play a very big role here, as SD XL relies on float16 (FP16). So this is something to keep in mind again. If you wish to work with float32 AI workloads, graphics cards with larger than 12 GB buffers would likely emerge as victors. Regardless, the gains are still massive on AMD's 9000 series compared to the 7000 series. Following image generation, we move to the text generation benchmark. This is one test where the 9070 GRE struggled, quite a lot. It seems that the 12 GB VRAM and lower memory bandwidth of the new Radeon 9070 GRE are hurting it quite a bit; the split is massive, especially in a test like Llama2, which packs 13 billion parameters. As such, in all the tests, the 9070 GRE is the slowest of the lot. Next, we tried Blender, and here the AMD GPUs were beaten by Nvidia. Rendering is something the Green team has always had a lead over the Red side, and it has not changed so far. On the positive side, though, the 9070 GRE shows significantly better results than the 7800 XT, which means AMD is on the right path. Catching up to Nvidia, though, will require a lot more effort. And we hope HIP and ROCm can keep improving. Wrapping up AI testing, we measured OpenCL throughput in the Geekbench compute benchmark. The RX 9070 GRE alongside the 9070 did not fare well here at all, even falling behind the 7800 XT. Interestingly, even the RTX 5070 could not beat the 4070 on OpenCL, so perhaps this suggests that OpenCL optimization may not have been a priority for either AMD or Nvidia in the modern era. Conclusion We reached the end of our productivity performance review of the 9070 GRE, and we have to say it's a mixed bag. Unlike the 9070 and 9070 XT, the GRE excels in some areas while losing ground fairly easily in others. Similar to how it happened in gaming, any time the card's memory subsystem gets hammered, it tends to fall behind the others. This was the case with text generation, wherein we saw the VRAM sometimes hit its maximum available 12 GB of usage with larger model sizes. So what do we make of the RX 9070 as a productivity hardware? It can certainly be used, but you have to know it has its limitations. For those looking for a GPU that can deal with more, AMD recently unveiled the Radeon AI PRO R9700, which is essentially a 32 GB refresh of the 9070 XT with some additional workstation-based optimizations. On a similar note, the new Ryzen AI Halo platform is something you can consider if you want to set up a local AI processing station. Considering everything, we rate AMD's Radeon RX 9070 GRE a 7.5 out of 10 for its productivity performance. Price is less of a factor for those looking at productivity cases compared to those considering the GPU for gaming, and as such, we felt it did quite decently on many occasions and can be handy if you need a 12 GB GPU and, for some reason, don't want to get Nvidia. Purchase links: RX 9070 / XT / GRE (Amazon US) As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases.
    • Microsoft released new Defender update for Windows 11, 10, Server ISO installations

      By skinnyJM · Posted

      Does anyone here know if these updates are integrated into the UUP dump isos?
    • Motrix Next 3.9.4

      By Copernic · Posted

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    • AMD 9070XT

      By Steven P. · Posted

      NVIDIA officially supports Ubuntu, as linked above with the GeForce NOW Hands on I did in collaboration with Paul Hill.
    • AMD 9070XT

      By cooky560 · Posted

      TO be clear I am not running linux today, however I keep thinking about it. And I want to make sure there are minimal obstacles if I decide to make that switch in the coming months.

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