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Old dogs, Old tricks, and Windows 8

Author(s)

Ben Woo
Windows 8 on the big screen!

Windows 8 on the big screen! (Photo credit: bobfamiliar)

New laptops are exciting. They’re personal; they become uniquely our own, in some ways they are an extension of our beings, our hands, our words. We know the laptop’s quirks, sounds and touch. Cue … new job.

When I started my job with Neuralytix, I was handed  my new laptop and was given a few words of advice about adapting to Windows 8 by our managing director, Ben Woo, who also recently migrated to Windows 8. “Toss out all your preconceived notions of how you expect to interact with Windows, read the directions and enjoy.”  I listened politely, asked appropriate questions, and then went home and proceeded to ignore all of Ben’s advice!

I thought to myself, “How difficult could Windows 8 be? How different from 7 and all preceding iterations of Windows could 8 be?” Well, it’s different, and it’s not different. I’ve been using Windows 8 for a couple of months now; first I hated it, now I love it.  I find the tiles to be really helpful and easy to manipulate and fit to my particular type of work patterns. The tiles actually reflect the way my mind works, in chunks of work and life maintenance. I can go easily from one task to another, comfortable in the knowledge that all my data in other tasks are waiting for me to neglect once again! They’re visually neat and in some way comforting because another task is only a tap away.  Windows 8 was not intuitive to me initially, and I would become annoyed when it didn’t do what I thought it should, based on my Windows 7 paradigm.  Now I can’t imagine going back!

My advice to users looking to migrate to Windows 8 – “Toss out all your preconceived notions of how you interact with Windows, read the directions and enjoy.”

 

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