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bert's blog v1.21 Powered by glolg Programmed with Perl 5.6.1 on Apache/1.3.27 (Red Hat Linux) best viewed at 1024 x 768 resolution on Internet Explorer 6.0+ or Mozilla Firefox 1.5+ entry views: 1576 today's page views: 64 (6 mobile) all-time page views: 3248211 most viewed entry: 18739 views most commented entry: 14 comments number of entries: 1215 page created Mon Apr 21, 2025 02:47:52 |
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So there I was, content after scarfing down an Akamaru Chashu (medium noodles, refill hard, couldn't tell much of a difference) at Ippudo to commemorate Mr. Neuroscientist making it back to Singapore, and doubly so with some of my (real) work actually coming to fruition, when I awoke at noon on Saturday only to find my PC refusing to boot up. It has to be said that this is not an uncommon occurrence - for the past year or so, it has been intermittently doing a fair impression of a vintage hamster in a bad mood, which means that I have got to lay it down and massage its sides before it agrees to do anything. In the PC's case, this involves reseating the graphics card, from long-ago trial-and-error; I saw little reason why it should not work once more. Except it didn't, and hung up soon after the desktop appeared. There was nothing to do but to restart it, and this time, it didn't even get to the OS selection menu, instead displaying a foreboding blinking cursor. Uh oh. BIOS did recognize all hard drives, so it had that going for me. Burnt a recovery DVD (having access to multiple PCs is nice like that). No versions of Windows detected?! Now, that was new. Ran CHKDSK with the repair option, and it reported four bad sectors on the system drive after an hour or so. Still no Windows, so the usual recovery procedure was out. Tried restoring from the image from a fortnight ago. No dice either. In the past, this would have meant either A) much fiddling with various run-and-pray utilities, while getting more and more frustrated, or B) sending the system in for repair, and submitting to the tender mercies of overworked technicians. Being older and slightly wiser, I figured that this was a sign to get the solid state drive I had been considering for awhile. Of course, this was possible because my own data was distributed over the other four drives (and various clouds), which is something I highly recommend doing. So, to Sim Lim Square. It was certainly quieter on a Sunday afternoon than I remembered from years past, with the way mostly clear to the fourth floor. I was torn between the Samsung 840 EVO 500GB and the new 850 Pro 256GB, but the choice was made for me when I was told the former was out of stock. The shopkeeper was happy enough to throw in a SATA cable for free, which was appreciated. With a complimentary copy of Windows 8.1 downloaded off DreamSpark Premium (being an academic has its perks), the installation went off with barely a hitch. A couple of drives were missing, but this was only a matter of opening up Disk Management and assigning them drive letters. The requirement to link up my online Microsoft account to log in made me slightly uneasy, and it was only later than I learnt that an old-fashioned local login was possible - just hidden away in the small print. Sneaky, sneaky. Windows 8.1 - Second Impressions Since it was drifting in this direction anyway, I figured that I might as well make it official. As the subtitle reveals, I had already dabbled with Win8 on a server on campus, and the fact that I hadn't upgraded my home system before this could be a sign that I wasn't overly impressed. As it turns out, I'm not alone in this. Now, Win8 isn't bad, performance-wise. That said, I didn't find it noticeably better either, but this is hardly a knock on Microsoft - how much can you buff up a GUI? Heck, a quarter of Windows users are still happily chugging along on WinXP today (13 years after its release), and I'm perfectly fine with Office 2007 myself (do you really need a spanking new word processor/spreadsheet every couple of years?) No, the biggest complaint I had was that it tried way too hard to force the touchscreen/tablet-friendly "Modern" UI on desktop users. Oh, it's pretty. The colours coordinate. Unfortunately, doing anything substantial was a right pain. I can understand marketing folk pushing for this to "unify experiences over multiple platforms" or somesuch bullshit, but the bottom line is that I'm not on a tablet, I have a keyboard and mouse, and I've no use for big blingy tiles. It's almost as if a motorcycle company started installing pedals on their cruisers, just because they're opening a bicycle division. How hard did they try? Initially, it wasn't even possible to skip the useless Modern/Metro start screen without hacks, but it seems they've finally seen the light, with the addition of a skip option. So far so good. Next major gripe - why the heck does the Windows key conjure up the Modern UI and take over the whole screen? Yes, I get that you're very proud of the rainbow tiles, but it's hugely distracting. Other than that, the default Win8 appearance is a definite step back from Win7, perhaps out of the consideration that it could be used on less-powerful devices. Remember the pleasing semi-transparent Aero theme from Win7, with rounded corners? Well, it's gone. The Win8 sober flat-coloured standard reminds me more of Win3.1 than anything. A definite stylistic regression.  Left: Win8; Right: Win7 (Sources: nikopik.com & globalknowledge.com) Microsoft seems to have gone all out to de-emphasize visual effects, which extends to the loading screen now being a flat-coloured logo with circular movement indicator, as opposed to the subtle intensity hints of the Win7 equivalent, without even getting to the loss of nifty functions like Flip 3D. [N.B. Interestingly, Aero was sold as a productivity enhancer that allowed "looking behind" windows, which seems to suddenly no longer apply to human vision; Same for Gadgets, a huge selling point not so long ago, now just a security vulnerability.] The good news is, it doesn't have to be like that - despite Microsoft's best intentions, one can make Win8 look and behave almost identically to Win7, with a few tweaks. Booting straight to the desktop and skipping the login (not on public machines, mind) can be achieved with built-in options. The other modifications require third-party software, but with Aero Glass for Windows 8 to bring back the translucency and Classic Shell to revive the beloved Start Menu, I suppose I could get used to Windows 8.1, which does bring unexpected conveniences such as built-in no-fuss ISO mounting. And on this, I discovered that getting back up and running was surprisingly fast - a clean install does force one to think about what one truly needs, and is a great opportunity to abandon a lot of accumulated gunk previously accumulated in the old OS's guts. I did salvage most of my desktop from the appropriate folder (since the system drive did work when connected through an external enclosure) [N.B. Looking at my desktop snapshot from a decade ago is almost like peeking into a time capsule - mIRC? Quake III Arena? FIFA 2003? BattleLANv0.5.exe??!!] I did maintain a Clean Install Pack of installers for useful programs for just this very purpose, but found that it was useful mostly as a reference to download the latest version. Moreover, some of them, such as TeraCopy, are probably no longer needed, having been subsumed into the OS. Overall, the upgrade has been positive - bootup times for one are down to maybe twenty seconds from over a minute, and responsiveness on "heavy" applications is noticeably better with the SSD. The replacement of the old system drive has further forestalled boot problems, which I now suspect to be due to a combination of the drive's inherent issues and the heat, and nothing to do with the GPU at all. And Then... Of course the data drive on my school PC had to die on me after this. Law of the universe. Next: Thirty Summers
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