Fruen fik ny bærbar i dag – med Windows 7. Flere bekendte har nemlig dårlige erfaringer med Windows 8, og flg. skrækhistorie afgjorde sagen.

Det var en mail fra en ven i Canada, og jeg gengiver den i uddrag nedenfor. Hvor der står ”[snip]”, har jeg klippet i teksten.

Hi Eric,

I just wanted to pass along a note about my new Windows 8 machine. I have no idea whether you have one yourself, or are thinking about getting one soon. If you are, then you’ll want to read this first.

As I wrote about a week ago, I bought a new machine, an HP Windows 8, core i7 3770, etc. A top end machine for $900.00 + $100.00 tax. Well, straight of the bat, I noticed a number of small bugs with it. For one, I had trouble finding a simple PDF reader that could display thumbnails of the PDF files. [snip]

Another bug that I found was that, about 5 minutes after starting the computer, some background task suddenly starts and takes away the focus from whatever program or window you are working with. [snip] I have so few programs installed that I can’t help but think that it is an OS program or service of some sort.

But here is the real killer, at least it certainly would have killed any desire on my part to buy a Windows 8 machine had I had any inkling that what I’m about to describe could ever have happened.

Tuesday night I was working away on the machine, adding some notes to an Open Office document, just like I do several times through the day. I saved the file and closed Writer. I had an open folder window behind the application that I had just closed. I then double clicked on a folder icon in that folder window. The folder wouldn’t open. I then tried to close the open folder window. Nothing. It was frozen solid. I hovered the cursor over the close button of the folder window and noticed that it was flashing bright then dull; blinking in fact. What to do?

Well, I did what I always used to do in Vista on the odd occasion when a folder window locked up. I fired up the Task Manager, selected the open folder window and clicked on the ‘End Task’ button. What happened next stunned me. Under Vista, what used to happen was that the folder window would close, all the icons on the desktop would disappear, the task bar would also disappear and then a moment later everything would be back up and running again, everything except the folder window you wanted closed. What happened to me on my Windows 8 machine was that everything except the open Task Manager window disappeared and was replaced by a bluish-purple blank screen — even the background image on the desktop disappeared for good. Nothing came back at all, even though I waited for a minute or two. I then closed the Task Manager, thinking that maybe the open window was somehow holding things up from restarting. (A faint hope I know, but what else was I to do?) Now I was looking at an entirely barren screen filled with that same sickening blue-purple color. I waited and waited … but nothing.

I had no choice but to do a hard shutdown. I pressed and held down the computer’s start button until it shut down. OK, so a bit of bizarre behavior from Window 8. I’ll just restart the machine and everything will be fine. Ha! Now the real horror show began.

Instead of the usual Windows 8 greeting screen, what I got was a blue screen of death telling me that my boot sector was corrupt and that I would have to use my Recovery Disks to try to fix the machine. Un-fucking-believable! A brand new machine, less than two weeks old, and just trying to close a frozen folder window using the Task Manager had turned my $1000.00 machine into a &#$0*ing brick! I stared at the screen is shocked disbelief — it just couldn’t be happening. How could it? I literally grabbed my hair and just stared at the horrifying message on the screen: “Your machine is fucked, mate!” (Not in those exact words, of course, by the meaning was pretty clear.)

I continued to stare at it while the full meaning of that horrible message sank in. “Your machine is toast and all your work is completely lost!” After a few minutes had passed, I noticed that there was another option or two available on the blue death screen. One of them seemed to say that I could get into the bios or some such thing. (I can’t for the life of me remember exactly what it said. I wish that I did.) What did I have to lose? After all, I hadn’t even burned the Recovery disks yet, I was waiting until I had a chance to pick up some DVD+R disks, the ones recommended by HP. I found my way into a menu where one of the options was to restore the machine from the Recovery file on the D drive. I was grateful to even find this option, I was convinced that my new machine was completely finished. I began the process and saw a message saying 1% done, then 4% done, etc. I couldn’t sit there and watch this unfolding disaster, so I went off to the kitchen to wash the dishes. I was convinced that the best that I could hope for was that it would be able to reformat the hard drive and maybe reinstall a fresh copy of the OS. All my work would of course be lost.

When I returned, about 15 minutes later, what I saw, unbelievably, was my desktop background image and all the shortcuts and program icons I had pinned to the task bar. By a miracle, everything was exactly as it had been just before I tried to shut down that frozen folder window with the Task Manager. Even all my data was safe. Hallelujah!

Naturally, after this horrifying experience, I have absolutely no faith in Windows 8 and I don’t trust my machine in the least. [snip] I’m convinced that this must be a bizarre, fatal bug in Windows 8 itself. I cannot imagine a hardware problem or even a virus that could cause such a cascade of ever-increasing errors, ultimately leading to the corruption of the boot sector. No, this is some fatal flaw in Windows 8 itself, nothing else can come close to explaining such a disaster.

I have been to Microsoft’s Waterloo and I died on the battlefield, a casualty of their corporate incompetence. Tell your friends, Eric, and don’t let them buy a Windows 8 machine!

Best regards,

Andy

Og det har jeg hermed gjort – altså fortalt det til vennerne.