Thread:Vorknkx/@comment-3547390-20161116194210/@comment-3547390-20170108021201

Tomorrow? Wait, I guess you forgot about the stream... welp.

Hey, breaking time can help with fixing other things.

So, I decided to do one of the stupidest things you could possibly do. I have decided I wish to give Windows 8 another chance. I dismissed it rather quickly without working out my problem, especially when it wasn't working properly in Windows 7, so I feel the tests weren't as valid as they could have been. So, here we are again.

This time around I did things a bit smarter. I installed drivers right off instead of dealing with my frustrations. Last time I tried to get my browser up so I could complain to you and my Skype up in case anyone was on I could complain to. This time things were quicker since I had an idea of what I was doing. Plus I got a bit more acquainted with that amazing program I mentioned, Classic Shell. Before I had just run with the "Windows 7 mode" and called it a day, which is pretty nice. But one of the very nice things about this program is that you get the Start Screen of Windows 7 and the right click menu of Windows 8. That is one of those extra features I mentioned before that was a great improvement to Windows 7, right clicking the start button gives you a lot of quick shortcuts that makes things even easier to access. As I always base my logic of my general OS experience on how quick it is to access something, this makes it a bit faster.

Installing the drivers solved my instabilities I faced yesterday in regards to metro. I still don't like metro as it feels more like a kiosk mode than something that allows for good multitasking, but at least I can use it without it breaking on me. I learned the shortcut to access the menu and uninstalled a bunch of the junk apps, plus I learned I can hide them from Classic Shell. Needless to say, this test is on making things a lot more stable before I test Thief just to give fairness to it. So far I have gotten rid of a lot of my previous frustrations and Classic Shell is starting to make things feel a bit more stable. Also, the Charms glitch isn't actually a thing, it was just because I had an option on in Classic Shell to keep it on and it took priority.

A nice little feature of Classic Shell is that I can automatically have the programs list come up at startup. It is like Windows 10's feature except without the mess that is Cortana! Bing has been disabled, Apps have been pretty much shut down and I don't even see the metro Settings app, and things feel better. We are going to do this right and not just dismiss it out of prejudice. Windows 7 also relies entirely on the order in which things are typed, so a name must be written fully, while this allows for you to find parts of words.

One thing I really loathed about Windows 8 and later is the existence of something called hybrid boot. It makes you boot faster and shut off faster, but it also completely locks you out of Safe Mode, meaning you are pretty much at the mercy of Windows to detect and put you in Safe Mode in the event that something breaks. Luckily Classic Shell allows you to disable hybrid shutdown and you can turn off hybrid boot. Until this point the best I knew was to run a console command to shut it down, so this is definitely a nice change.

Windows 8 does add some weird funky thing to the charms bar which basically makes moving from monitor to monitor a bit more funky. There is no option for this, but looking online I found this to work perfectly.

There is a way to bring back Aero Glass entirely, but I don't really need it. As long as the task bar has transparency, it seems pretty good, and the Aero Glass mod sounds like a horrible piece of nagware.

Okay, so a few hours into setting up everything I have finally gotten a fully functional operating system I am quite happy with. I have installed all the different drivers for my hardware and can perform an actual test.

First and foremost, I should say this setup is definitely working much better than my Windows 7 at the moment. Thief takes about half a minute or so to load, here it is instantaneous. Also all complaints about the menus seem to be completely gone! This is really promising! I find it also really crazy, since Thief has never worked this good on my Windows 7 system. Upon loading, I can see the main menu. Another great thing is that Windows 8 has better multi-monitor support, this is especially noticeable when Thief is up, since my first monitor doesn't go black.

Everything in-game works exactly as smooth as on Windows 7 now as well. In fact, due to the improvements on startup, it is technically working better than my Windows 7 system. Of course, this might be due to the extra programs I have running, so now I need to install a bunch of my programs. You know, I might be migrating right now at this rate right before a new build, that will allow for more testing and it seems like so far things are doing quite well. I will see as I migrate everything over.

I went to an area of Thief that always is unstable, the resolution selection screen! As on Windows 7, I crash, but I got an error message. This might not sound like a lot, but it definitely is making me rethink the whole Windows 8 is unstable thing. This feels relatively nice.