It has been almost a year since my oldest son stepped on my laptop and broke the screen away from the keyboard. My stomach was doing flips not because of my lost laptop but because I knew that the new one would have Windows 8. I searched and searched for a new laptop with Windows 7, but Microsoft had laid down the hammer on the computer manufacturers and it seems that by February 2013, it was no longer possible for a consumer to buy a new laptop with Windows 7.
So I bit the bullet. I tried to approach the entire experience with a positive attitude. I knew about all the frustrations, and I set about the task of making my new laptop and Windows 8 usable. There was not a start button, and it was frustrating to figure out where they hid everything, but that was just a minor obstacle. It was time consuming to break the bridge from the Windows world to the tiled world. For example, if you someone sends you an email with a few photos. If you click on one of the photos, BAM, you are in the tiled world looking at the first photo. The problem is how do you look at the second photo? Somehow, you need to get back to the email program. The solution is to not use the Metro photo viewer, and use the same photo viewer (or any other Windows photo viewer) that was available in Windows 7. The problem is that there are a lot of bridges between the two worlds. But over time, I found them all and I had it working reasonably well.
Except for the one bug which I never resolved. There is a more-than-annoying problem when you move your cursor from the left of the screen to the right of the screen. For example, if you are scrolling down a web page using your mouse and the scroll bar, and then decide to use the back button which is frequently on the upper left of the screen. Windows 8 detects this situation and decides that you don’t want to move the mouse from left to right. No of course not. You want the Charms Bar! Now that the charms bar is activated, the window in which you were scrolling has been deactivated. So if you want to continue and hit the back button in your browser. You need to first activate the browser window again and then move the back button.
This was happening a lot. I did all the mandatory Google searches and tried in vain to find a fix to this bug. I changed registry keys and as a last resort I called Microsoft. They could not help either. It is not fair to call it a bug because this is how Microsoft wants it to work. The problem is that I don’t want it ever to work this way. So despite all of the hours tediously configuring Windows 8, I moved back to Windows 7 paying an old tech friend of mine to take me out of my misery. I hope that my boy does not break another laptop or at least he waits until Microsoft figures out a work around to this bug.
