Windows 8 - 4 Days in - My Opinion

Hello all,

In my 20 years as an IT Professional, I have never felt the need to comment/discuss/rage about an OS.....until Windows 8 came along.

A bit of background-

I am an IT Manager.

I look after 80 users spread across 3 sites...all of which use a PC/Laptop of some sort.

I am the only person in the IT dept.

4 days in and this is my conclusion of Windows 8 -

I don't want Windows 8 for my users. I will be doing my utmost to try and obtain previous versions of Windows for my staff. Those versions can be Windows XP, Windows 7...or even Windows Vista.

My main supplier is Dell, but my suspicion is that Dell will start touting Windows 8...and soon, previous versions of Windows will not be obtainable from Dell. At this point I will look for another supplier.

Reasons -

There's only one reason - The UI.

My users are all busy people. They come to work, do their 8 hours and go home. Their PC/Laptop is a tool, nothing more, nothing less. Just like a tool, they want it to be simple, efficient and have a small instruction book.

Windows 8 is such a detraction from all previous incarnations that for the average business user, it's unusable.

Being in IT, I am of course pretty savvy with IT. I can work my way around most things IT....but Windows 8 had me confused for a good hour or two before I understood what was going on and what it was trying to do.

Some of my users simply wouldn't cope. It would take them weeks to get to grips. They would be on the phone to me constantly.

The only way I can get to some normality is to revert all the UI back to something that looks like Windows XP. So to this end, I get to the laughable.

The Laughable

I am only four days in and I have already had to download four 3rd party apps to overcome Windows 8's shortcomings -

1. Classic Start Menu - I have my Start Button back.....hooray
   
2. Hot Corners disable tool - The Hot Corners are simply annoying and offer no benefit in a work environment. I also believe the Hot Corners has created a bug for me, of which I speak about in another thread.
   
3. Foxit PDF reader - The inbuilt metro PDF app is rubbish for two reasons - 1, I cant scale it to a Window and have it hovering 2, Only seems to work well with Hot Corners that I've now disabled.
   
4. Royal TS - For some bizarre reason, I can no longer manage my four Hyper-V servers from Windows 8. The remote management tools simply don't work. Royal TS has given me this ability back.
   

What I would like...

...is for Microsoft to acknowledge that they have business users...and that those business users don't care about the latest and greatest UI fad.

Please, oh please give me a tick box that simply says &quotMake the UI look like XP&quot. And allow me to tick it via GPO.

I don't want Metro

I don't want Aero (or whatever it's called in 8)

I don't want Hot Corners

I don't want Touch Screen

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