I spent the better part of last week
(and a rather long portion of the end of the week bellyaching about
it on Facebook) doing installation testing with some new Microsoft
stuff. My work ground to a screeching halt once it became apparent
that it is no longer easily possible to set up hard disks manually
prior to installation. All of this due to the new GPT (GUID Partition
Table) requirement for the OS. In fairness I had known about this
change for some time and still I refrained from learning anything
more about it than the little I got in passing. Since it didn't
affect my daily life more than a footnote at the time, I think it was
understandable that I didn't waste any effort digging further. My
foray into hand creating GPT disks opened my eyes to all of the
minuscule yet plague-like issues that can be caused by doing in
wrong. Even the information provided by Microsoft appears incorrect.
(I have one more series of tests before I conclude finally that they
are. It is very likely that I am doing something minor that keeps it
failing) The end result was that I let the OS have its head and
partition the disk itself. Now, for clarity, let me say that this was
a painless way to get the OS installed, but it left my inner tinkerer
frustrated. I did some after action review and I will post the
results of that in a moment.
On to my thoughts of Windows 8...
At first glance, and as a user coming
in from being Windows free for the last three years at least, Windows
was hard to navigate. It took me a bit of doing to realize what was
needed to advance from one screen to another once I had opened my
e-mail from the start page (the start menu has been replaced by a
page devoted to an Android-esque page of icons for what I assume to
be frequently used items) Once I accomplished this it was on to
discovering how to get to the desktop and then how to get to any
program not listed on the normal desktop or the start page. (for
reference, you right-click on the start page to bring up a bar on the
bottom of the page that will take you to all programs... not terribly
intuitive) Having provided a bit of criticism to those few bits I
found maddening, I would like to say that I think Windows 8 is very
pretty. The installation, once I surrendered to its whims, was
painless and the initial usage issues, once learned beyond, make the
interface useful indeed. There are still quite a number of things
about it that I find annoying, but these I attribute to my
overwhelming love for free and open source software. I find the test
machine quick and responsive and the default apps useful in ways that
they were not the last time I found myself in Windowsland. After
leaving the device on for a time and eating a meal, I returned to
find that the test machine had been powered off. Turning it back on
revealed that it had been suspended, presumably to preserve power. I
was surprised at how quickly it returned to a usable state.
Lest anyone think I have become over
exuberant in my detraction from Windows or even my praise of those
things I have always found taxing having been resolved, I will now
turn some attention to OS testing I performed on Ubuntu 12.04.
My first installation was a clean
install to one of my test laptops. (I never update versions or clean
install on systems I do active work on. I recommend you don't either
no matter the OS) My first impression was how very pretty the Unity
interface was. It is something I have become accustomed to over the
last little while, but that made the overall impression of change
that much more noticeable. The menus are getting more and more stable
and I didn't encounter any of the failures I had in previous installs
to this same machine just several months before. Congrats team.
Things continue to improve at a noticeable level. Now the bad news.
There was a tremendous lag in any menu interaction. Transitions
between windows were delayed and, in some cases, resulted in minor
freeze ups of the interface. I have since seen information to suggest
that this was a display driver issue. I have yet to test this theory
and I would like to point out that at no time was the system
completely unresponsive.
My upgrade testing encountered the same
issues mentioned above with the exception that they resolved to a
large extent once I downloaded updates. I don't recall if I did
updates on the pure install, so that is another item to check when I
go back to that machine early in the week.
That is the extent of what I have
accomplished this past week in OS testing. I've done a ton of work on
several other things that I can's give details on yet, but I plan to
in the coming weeks.
I leave you now with some reference
information on gdisk a GPT fdisk tool and some of the information
from the Ubuntu community regarding UEFI that I found useful.
Ta
~Jfo
P.S. - Here is an image of the disk as
partitioned by the MS installer. Note the differences in the actual
versus the recommended sizes... minor, I know, but of note none the
less.
gdisk
UEFI
MS disk layout for EFI booting
