7th Station ~TV, movies, games~

[TotallyUncool]

Don't downgrade -- I'm probably as critical of Microsoft as anyone here (I've worked in software development for various MS platforms for a long time, so my anti-MS prejudice comes from excessive familiarity ), and I've been using Win 7 at work for the past year or two. It's Ok, once you kick its butt a little bit to keep it in line (pretty much like XP), and it looks better than XP. And as far as I can see, Win 8 is pretty much Win 7 with a few added dumb-but-typical mistakes (the result of yet another MS attempt to get some traction in mobile computing ).
If I had a system with Win 8, I'd keep it, then upgrade when MS remembered how to grow a brain.

[Zunu]

Quick dummy tech question here. I have been hesitant to upgrade my old PC laptop (which can just barely play 360p youtube videos) because I have heard awful things about every OS that MS has released since XP.

None of Microsoft's OS's have been awful, except maybe for the pre SP1 release of Vista. And they're all much safer and more stable than XP.

Windows 8, even if you completely despise the (imo overbashed) tablet interface, is completely fine with the addition of one piece of freeware, Classic Shell, that will boot you right to a familiar desktop and give you a Start Menu that can even look like XP's menu if you like. I'd say out of the four machines I have running Windows 8, in the past nine months, one of them has crashed...once....due to an OS error, that's it. Microsoft provides free AV/anti-malware, the OS doesn't require a lot of RAM, networking is a breeze, all the W7-compatible software I have works with W8. It boggles my mind that people will spend hours on forums talking about how much they hate the new interface when the end user almost never has to see it after a two-minute download and install of an open-source fix/upgrade/downgrade:

http://www.classicshell.net/

Also, @TU, totally aside from the tablet interface, there are some small but convenient usability upgrades; it has a smaller footprint than Win7 and usually feels slightly faster. They've upgraded some file copy dialogs so you don't have to babysit the system so much, and tweaked networking to make it even easier. Switching in and out of the Japanese IME is way better. I used to have to constantly shuffle the interface around to get it to work right, but now it just works the way it should with no muss or fuss. Plus a lot of tiny improvements. E.g. I don't recall if "extra large" icons in the folder view were available in W7, but if they were, I never used them because I didn't like the way they worked. Here they're fine. The irritating edge snap when you move windows is still here, but they did something and it's not quite as irritating as before. The task manager is more informative and intuitively arranged. Yet, I don't need it as much, for some reason. The desktop calculator works better than ever, lol.

[TotallyUncool]

The file move/copy babysitting was always the most annoying thing about Win 7 from a development point of view, since you wind up moving/copying a lot of files just to test changes. But Win 7 was a vast improvement over Vista in that regard -- Vista was the only version of Windows which I refused to allow on my system at work (I used a virtual machine for testing), because moving anything in and out of a program directory was too much like having a two-year-old grab your arm every two seconds while you're trying to type.

[esm]

So, Animal Crossing...

I still have no access to the Tropical Island, but I just paid off my loan so I should be able to in 2 days (I refuse to time travel). Been mostly fishing. Caught 3 eels in a row tonight (4 in total for that period of time I was playing). House getting expanded tomorrow morning... on my way to paying the debt for the expansion so I can keep expanding more.

The town folks are so cute. I forgot who it was, but one of them stood and clapped as I caught a fish.

Hopefully I can play with some of you soon.

[Rm88]

I'm ordering my copy soon! I hope you people are still really into it by next week

[Chatin]

A reminder to put your gaming deets in the thread over in Sports and Gaming, if you haven't already. Tough to play with people who aren't sharing FCs and gaming tags!!

[esm]

Gonna go add you people now.

edit: Chansu, which one do you actually use?

[Chatin]

Gonna go add you people now.

edit: Chansu, which one do you actually use?

I'm using the second one for Animal Crossing.

[Rm88]

Wow, Animal Crossing is sold out at the two biggest gaming stores in my city. Gladly I found it at other store, but I'll have to wait until tomorrow after work. This self-imposed rule of never buying digitally any game that exists on retail has proven to be annoying at times But I'll finally join the fun tomorrow. I'm glad Animal Crossing seems to be doing well around here, Mexico mostly plays shooters and sports games.

[Zunu]

Just bought The Last of Us. Don't know when I'll find time to get into it though.