I don't see any pauses while typing here in neither 7 nor 8. You haven't done anything silly like disable the background search service have you? Lots of people turn that off because they think they're optimising their PC by disabling it as it means its not constantly scanning their PC when it's idle.

Missing icons know the Start screen is probably the apps creating shortcuts in folders that Windows 8 doesn't look at when considering for the Start screen icons.

First thing I always do with Windows 7 is to expand the start menu to fill the height of the screen. OK it doesn't expand into multiple pages, but it's good enough for me!

That does help a little, but still quite difficult if you have multiple levels of folders which would naturally expand horizontally across the screen in Windows XP.

True, but surely the lack of hierarchy makes the Start Screen even more of a mess. It's always looked that way to me, just a jumbled sea of icons.

It's called windows rot. It's what happens when you install and uninstall software over the years. Uninstalling never gets everything and so you're left with bits if old shit clogging up the registry.

I have grown fond of 8.1. I think it really shines on a touch enabled device like my laptop or a surface but I have also used it on desktops and it's pretty much the same as 7.

Windows 8 Startscreen could definitely do with a way to delete icons without having to open Windows Explorer to do it, but I don't think the grouping is really any worse than folders, it's just a different way of doing things.

And of course it doesn't help that application installers like to create an uninstall icon, a help/readme icon and a link to their website which clogs up the Start Screen with useless icons that you can't get rid of, except for the above method of finding them in C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs or C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu.

Maybe Windows 8.1 Update 1 (Really, Microsoft? Why not just Windws 8.1 or 8.11?) we'll get some better management options.

Not my computer, but no. It's been like that since day 1 (Dell i5 laptop, few months old).

That's a bit of a reversal from what you were saying before. I think I might as well try it out for a bit. Be nice to have my main drive back as C instead of D too, not sure how that happened.

Not heard Windows rot before. I find a fresh install is always better running than one a couple of years old.

More positive feedback on here than I was expecting.

Yeah, I still maintain that the changes they made were not for improvement but just for the sake of change and to be able to sell it as a new OS.  They are hell bent on one OS for all devices, and I'm just not sure if that's the correct approach or not.  I guess time will tell.  But for the way I use it 99% of the time it's just Windows 7 + 1.1!

"it's obvious 8.1 is what Microsoft were aiming for"

Really? IIRC at least some of the changes in 8.1 (such as boot to desktop and a vestigial start menu) were apparently introduced in response to 'customer feedback' (i.e. people hated what they'd been given instead).

Whether the W7 start menu is useful or not is, of course, a matter of personal opinion. Personally I prefer the W7 version to the rather half-hearted sop included in W8.1. Yes there are third-party alternatives out there that are popular. That in itself should have told Microsoft something.

But even with the boot to desktop and being able to sleep/shutdown without having to incant the charms bar it's still not good enough IMO. The charms bar cannot be fully disabled, and I found it popping up unnecessarily when mousing to the top and bottom of fully expanded windows. And the flat metro look still encroaches even if you do your best to get rid of it. I recognise that it's a matter of personal opinion, but I find metro rather offensively ugly.

I only hope that Apple learn the folly of taking convergence to its brain dead extreme and recognise that there are some things in iOS that simply should be different in OS X.

(BTW is it just me? I find that adding a new paragraph in the desktop version of BH requires three or four returns while lite mode only requires two)

Yes, that pause is annoying. I wouldn't mind if it showed y the programs first quickly then searched through documents and stuff.

I do both of those, depending how close my hand is to the keyboard. Maybe more often I use the mouse. But most of what I use is pinned to the taskbar.

The 7 list of programs is less easy to find something if you're not sure what it is called then the XP list with everything showing.

Yes, the return of the persistent start button and boot to desktop are obvious backtracks, but the changes to the search on the start screen and the ability to add smaller tiles are things that should have been there from the word go. A lot of the changes to 8.1 only came about after Steven Sinofsky "resigned" and was replaced with the Windows 8 Mobile team leader, who almost bought with him most of his UX/UI and technical team.

It is odd how you have problems with the Charms bar always popping up, I tend to have problems with it not appearing when I want it to, but I think that might be more to do with my dual monitors and that when I try to make it appear I'm always trying to do it on my left-hand monitor. The Charms bar only opens for me if I move the mouse to the bottom right, not sure if that is an 8.1 change or a peculiarity to dual monitor set ups.

Apple have been treading the down the path of converging the desktop and mobile platforms for much longer than Microsoft have been seen to be doing. However, they do seem to have slowed down their conversion of Mac OS into an iOS for the desktop though and I can't help but wonder if that is because they've been keeping a close eye on the criticism of Windows 8. I do think it's something that will eventually become all OSes though as even Linux (Ubuntu at least) is heading down this route of a single UI for all platforms.

(Beehive doesn't actually do paragraphs, pressing enter should insert an <br> tag each time. On Mobile, enter inserts a new line which are then converted to <br> later.)

The charms bar is a strange thing. I had problems getting to show when I wanted it, and problems getting it to not show when I didn't. Rather like some idiot cousin it seemed to do the opposite of what was needed. IMO the whole implementation was retarded. There was a hack (registry? I can't remember now) to stop it showing up when mousing to the middle right of the screen, but I still couldn't disable it properly, even what it was no longer needed (i.e. when the lightweight start menu introduced a more user-friendly way of shutting down.)

Oh yes, and not all of it's been good. But hopefully now that idiot Forstall been shown the gutter things will improve. I think MS looked at what Apple were doing and tried to beat them to the logical conclusion, thereby showing the world how unhelpful the logical conclusion is. What works on a mobile device doesn't necessarily work on a desktop (et v.v.). I can't imagine why anyone would've thought otherwise. hey ho.

Yeah, I realise that BH creates the visual representation of paragraphs by inserting line breaks. What I meant was that in order to create this effect on mobile I pressed return twice. But on desktop I have to do it three or four times (just tested...this is IE10 on W7). The first return gets a new line, then two or three may be needed for the next line.

 

Actually I would say I have started using the keyboard search a lot more than I used to after realising how much quicker it can be to find certain things, like strange options hidden in the control panel.

Are the sites selling Windows 8 keys genuine? Seems you can get a key for 8 Pro for about $40-$45.

I'm confused. That's all you should be doing on desktop too. When you press enter you should be getting a <br> on desktop and a \n on mobile (because mobile is plain text). These never get converted to paragraphs anywhere. The only thing Beehive does is use PHP's nl2br method to convert the \n in mobile content into <br> tags.

When we first switched to CKEditor it did, but people were used to the old method of pressing enter twice so I switched it to that option, plus with CKEditor not supporting mobiles this was the only consistent way for it to work.

I only have IE11 here and it seems to behave the same way Firefox does, not sure if there is something about IE10 that makes it behave differently. There is a seemingly odd quirk that makes a new line appear the moment you start typing, but it goes away again shortly after.

Why not buy one and find out? :P

No, I know. I didn't mean to imply that BH was converting double line breaks (either <br> tags or \n) to <p> tags, simply the visual appearance of paragraphs (blocks of text with whitespace between.)

And the problem with multiple returns seems to be odd. As I noted, I was posting on IE10/W7. Now I'm posting on Safari 7, Mac OS X 10.9 and returns behave as expected. But then the quote function is also working now (it wasn't this morning on IE10).

As Alice said, curiouser and curiouser...

Edit: (BTW, IE11 was one of the unwelcome additions that came with W8.1, I found that it broke a few websites, including WYSIWYG text editors. Strange that we seem to be having the opposite experience here.)

I could do but I don't really want to pay £26 and realise I've bought a counterfeit key. Why don't you buy it and if it works I'll buy it off you.

I already have 2 keys, why do I want more??