I have been using Windows 8 for 4 months now, and I am a believer. The thing that got me at first was the speed. I’m running a Sony Vaio Z series with two 128g SSD in Raid 0. Boot time was never an issue, but to have something that fast and notice it got so much faster with windows 8 is insane. I have even noticed that it’s about ½ as faster transferring files. This is stuff I notice not that I have been told.

I’m not a massive techie or geek, so I don’t know what’s going on under the hood, but I still so surprised there are so many haters out there. Every time I hear someone saying windows 8 it crap they are complaining mostly about 1 of two things. One: it is so hard to shut down now (when it’s literally one click more); two: oh my god there is no windows button and now they have this metro thing.

The power button:

This is an easy fix. There are many forums that tell you how to put a shortcut icon on you metro launcher, but even easier than that just use short cut keys. Go to your desktop (windows + D or windows + M) and then press Alt + F5 a pop up will come up and then press enter. Oldest trick in the book. XP even had that feature.

The start button vs. metro:

There is a start button. It’s in the same place. If you move you curser to the very bottom left hand corner a start icon will come up, click and you launch metro. I prefer to just use the windows button that of course does the same thing, but hey whatever cooks your chook.

Then when everyone gets to metro and sees a mobile tablet screen, when it’s not. It’s your start menu and does exactly the same as it would in windows 7. You have you program icons that you can pin to it, you run program from there, you just start typing and search from there. You can do everything you need to. The amount of times I have heard people complain about this is insane. When I tell them that you can do that exactly the same way they say that you can’t. Then when I show them, they still complain that it’s different.

And here we have the root of the problem. It’s different, it’s changed. It’s no secret why windows have changed their start menu to metro, to bridge the gap between the mobile world and you home pc and to be a bit more user friendly with touch screen PC’s. Although this is a close to impossible task I think this is a good start. 5 months on people are still so adverse to change that it continually panning it, and in most cases they haven’t spent more than ½ an hour on it.

For those who are still confused that metro is and does exactly what the start button does stardock have created  start menu for windows 8 (one of the better ones apparently) just like the windows 7 one. It also boots directly to the start screen. You should never have to see  those weird new tiles and get really confused about if you are on your computer or a tablet again.