Windows 8: Your Sexy Wife



I don’t know why I couldn’t wait to install Windows 8 on my laptop. My laptop is almost three years old and had windows 7 working quite fine for that whole period. Sure, I was getting a bit bored with Win7, and Win8 was like an enigmatic temptation which I knew I would succumb to eventually, with time. 

Win7 is like your honest housewife who is always able to get things done in the way you like it. For most, it is the mundane things like writing a document (like this one) or editing some images on Photoshop or most importantly surfing the vast empty space of the internet which keep us occupied on the PC. Win7 does that very well and with lots of gusto and resilience as never before seen. Then why Win8? 

Win8 is akin to giving your wife a makeover to make her more attractive, yet not at the cost of losing any of her functionalities. So now you can have a hot wife cooking your meals and washing your dishes, and you don’t even need to peek into the menu of your neighborhood restaurant or the people sitting in it. That is exactly how Win8 is. 

Win8 is the best Microsoft could have done to merge design with functionality in an operating system. It is still not perfect, and needs a lot of improvement to make it a thoroughbred, and invincible. I believe, it has the potential to become invincible, and achieve dominance in personal computing. 

A lot of early users have criticized Win8 for its unnecessary duality in the form of the start screen and apps, packed together with its legendary desktop. But I say the duality adds excitement to an otherwise boring Win7 interface. Win8 is something that can make users passionate about Windows and take Windows beyond the utilitarian image it lives by. It is not fair that Apple should be taking away the style awards while Windows sits comfortable with utility, never giving a shot at that category all these years. It is time to unsettle Apple’s singular, unchallenged domination. Thanks to the phone OS war that Windows now has something that looks as good as it works. 

As far as the new interface is concerned, I too have some minor criticism like the removal of the start menu from the desktop without introducing something as functional in the start screen. The start screen with its big, live widgets looks beautiful, but could be made more useful and practical to make the new interface as independently functional as its more dependable predecessor, the desktop. 

Perhaps Microsoft doesn’t want to shock its customers, so that they are not frightened to make the change. Reception of Win8 has been lukewarm, and one major reason has been the big jump in its interface, and though the new interface is way more cool than anything that Microsoft have ever made, it takes time to get used to the new paradigm. Also, the software is still evolving, and there are a few kinks that need to be smoothened out to make things more intuitive. I personally love Win8, though I don’t have a driver for my graphics card, but that is a fault of Sony (from whom I bought my laptop). They have to tinker with every driver before they put it in their machines. 

I especially love the fact that you can install Win8 like an update without risking the loss of your personal data or programs. I like the way things are shaping up with Windows because I would like to say that Windows is any day better and more functional than Mac, and if one is worried about using programs which need a lot of computing power, one can always use Linux.

Dwaipayan Adhya

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