M444TTB Posted December 30, 2012 Share Posted December 30, 2012 Windows 8 deeply horrifies me, especially on desktops in a way I havent felt since I used to hate apple. On that basis alone its probably brilliant. My new cheapy desktop (which ill barely use) is coming with Windows 8. I'm not looking forward to it! If I thought I'd actually turn it on more than once a month I'd probably have spent 4x the money on an iMac for the reasons outlined above. I don't like having to fiddle. I like it just to work. Lucky I don't feel the same about cars then... Oh Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Blatman Posted December 30, 2012 Share Posted December 30, 2012 Again, not looking for best killer app as that would again point more to brand preference rather than functionality. It's functionality that I want to get to the heart of here. I use Apple devices because I have to when I go to client sites as they are almost universally Apple users so I am familiar with the Apple raison d'etré. I do agree that I may well apply too much tech thinking and I have noticed that if I "dumb down" my thinking then I can usually work around the issues I face with Apple devices. But that is not the point I am making. I am a reasonably new "serious" Windows 7 user. I am definitely a new user when it comes to streaming media around my home and wanting to send data like photos and films from one device to another across a local network. I am not a "new user" when it comes to netowrking in a more general sense (although the Webmaster would no doubt have a story to tell there ) as I am a Cisco certified network engineer. My point being, I now have a strong feeling that Windows 7 and beyond DOES provide the functionality for "doing things" that was undoubtedly previously the exclusive preserve of Apple, and I want to see if my experience is becoming more typical. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Martin Keene Posted December 31, 2012 Share Posted December 31, 2012 My point being, I now have a strong feeling that Windows 7 and beyond DOES provide the functionality for "doing things" that was undoubtedly previously the exclusive preserve of Apple, and I want to see if my experience is becoming more typical. I'll be interested to see if it does. I have no experience of windows 7, and I suspect many people don't, after all XP was around for such a long time, before being replaced with Vista, which, lets not beat around the bush, is s***e on a whole new level, SWMBO laptop requires 1GB of ram just to sit there doing nothing! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Blatman Posted December 31, 2012 Share Posted December 31, 2012 I'd like to keep it on topic but... I was really trying to resist using anything but Windows XP for as long as possible, but a new job with a new work laptop meant I was dropped head first into Windows 7 Pro. It's brilliant. One or two things are a bit more complicated but on the whole it is stable, fast and DOES do what it says on the tin. And as my long post on page 2 says, once I scratched beneath the surface for the "media" stuff, well, it just worked. And as an aside, I had Win 7 Pro running just fine on a 7 year old HP 8440 with 1Gb of RAM no sweat. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dave Eastwood (Gadgetman) - Club Chairman Posted December 31, 2012 Share Posted December 31, 2012 Windows 7's quality is partly why I've just not bothered with '8 I'm not so much front line general IT support these days, so it's not been as vital for me to keep abreast of all the latest and greatest OS's. The thing is though, and I'm desperately trying to keep vaguely on-topic with you, I know what you're asking, and as in my first answer, my own experience is that in the broadest of terms you're right. I think the reason you're seeing the answers you are though is that you've framed the question in quite a narrow way, and it appears, from your further points, quite tied in with your own frames of reference. Not an unreasonable position of course! I can't believe how many times I've tried to right the next paragraph and hit the right tone! It's much easier in person than on the page As an example, I'm pretty sure I can make Windows 7 do all the multimedia sharing of pictures, video, music etc that I can with Apple. However, I will at various points have to make judgment calls on the file types I use and the codecs. I will for certain things have to find a separate app to bolt on to give me all the functionality. I'll have to do some at least basic network set up, and share a few folders. All easy enough for me and you and many, many others. Lets forget TV's with built in media functionality for the mo. we can now extend our media sharing to the TV via a third party hardware solution, anything from an XBox/PS3 to a little Android TV type box. We may at this stage find that if we picked the wrong horse on the video encoding front we've a few snags, but nothing insurmountable. To flip the coin and go to the Apple example, once again, we need to join our boxes to the network, no real difference there. However, now, we're assuming that we know absolutely nothing about IT (or networks), so we just shovel content on to our laptop, some direct from the CD, some that we bought and downloaded on to our tablet. We've taken photos on our phone. With the absolute minimum of our intervention, those photos are on our tablet too, they can also appear on our laptop if we want - and if we installed an app however, what we want to do, is watch the videos we downloaded on our phone while bored on our TV, again, we plug our hardware solution in, the little Apple TV, let it see our wireless ap, pop our password in and wahoo, we're now sending the videos to the telly. Again, both set up's will ultimately let you do the same thing, one was just much easier for the uninitiated to achieve. By the by, we get far fewer support issues with the Apple clients than the Windows. Though the Apple stuff can be right awkward when it does give problems. Ironically enough network related aspects are still it's biggest failing, I find, compared to Windows, in a commercial file sharing server/domain sense. Though as we head more to the cloud that may become more and more of a non issue. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Blatman Posted December 31, 2012 Share Posted December 31, 2012 As an example, I'm pretty sure I can make Windows 7 do all the multimedia sharing of pictures, video, music etc that I can with Apple. However, I will at various points have to make judgment calls on the file types I use and the codecs. I will for certain things have to find a separate app to bolt on to give me all the functionality. I'll have to do some at least basic network set up, and share a few folders. All easy enough for me and you and many, many others. Lets forget TV's with built in media functionality for the mo. we can now extend our media sharing to the TV via a third party hardware solution, anything from an XBox/PS3 to a little Android TV type box. We may at this stage find that if we picked the wrong horse on the video encoding front we've a few snags, but nothing insurmountable. Soooooo glad you said that. I have deliberately done *nothing* to my new Windows 7 Home Premium laptop. I have done nothing in the way of sharing folders in the usual "networky" way on my desktop by mapping/sharing a folder. On my Samsung tab, the Allshare app was already loaded, so I've done absolutely *nothing* to that either. I approached the problem as if I knew nothing about sharing. I shoved a CD in to my CD drive. Medai Player opened. The option to rip it was there. Windows 7 automatically put the ripped CD into the music library folder as well as the media player playlist. I turned on my TV and PS3. I could find and play the ripped CD no problem. I could also find and play it on my Tab and my new Home Premium laptop no problem. No set up, no fiddling, simply followed the default options to rip the CD on my desktop. The use of the Home Network option in Windows 7 helps and for all I know is there precisely to make this stuff work. I have used the default file extensions for the music and have tried MP3, WMA, CDA and... er... something else and they all played fine. Ripped DVD's is where it can get interesting. Can you rip DVD's natively with iOS or do you need 3rd party software and have to make a codec choice? If it's the latter it's no different to Windows. I'm would think things like the WD Media Player or Seagate Freeagent or possibly a new Android Media player called Justop will fit the bill hardware wise for streaming video, and all are roughly Apple TV price. To be fair though, I thnk an Apple TV would do just fine irrespective of what the rest of your hardware may be. I will dig up which files Windows won't feed to my PS3 but ISO files work perfectly and as you know are probably the best file type to use for "back-ups" of executable type media. Once it was working I wanted to stream to my phones but I didn't get that working yet, and I also started to fiddle around with the password options. My post on page 2 does make it seem like I had to do that first but I got the sequence of events wrong, which doesn't help my case I may brick it all tomorrow and start again from scratch to see if I had previously done something that caused it to just work, or whether it really does just work. I know *for sure* that my new laptop and Samsung Tab just worked with no intervention from me other than normal bog standard setting up of the devices... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dommo Posted December 31, 2012 Share Posted December 31, 2012 Windows 8 is worth getting to know. You can watch a video on your laptop/pc/tablet and if you decide you want it on your tv, simply open the charms bar and select the TV. So simple it's frankly scary. I'd have expected to at least right click... If I were after a tablet I'd definitely give the Surface a look. I wouldn't go straight it without playing with an android or iPad of course, but it's a strong competitor. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dave Eastwood (Gadgetman) - Club Chairman Posted December 31, 2012 Share Posted December 31, 2012 If I were after a tablet I'd definitely give the Surface a look. I wouldn't go straight it without playing with an android or iPad of course, but it's a strong competitor. That's the impression I had after a very brief play with one. The clip in keyboard worked OK too. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dave Eastwood (Gadgetman) - Club Chairman Posted December 31, 2012 Share Posted December 31, 2012 Interesting read Blatters, I suspect the only way, like you, I'd know for sure on 7, is to do a clean install on a machine. All my other 7 machines have either already been adjusted or had too much added already that might distort the results. Just had an embarrassing thought that will also be affecting my home results, although my previous post was also based on doing similar things for clients, where it wouldn't be an issue. My home network is actually a domain, not peer to peer or a workgroup. Sorry. It's been that way for so many years I tend to forget. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Blatman Posted December 31, 2012 Share Posted December 31, 2012 Mine is just a standard default Windows workgroup, although I have changed the name. To be honest I have never been that bothered about streaming media because like many people, if I want to stream something I have to switch on a couple of devices and wait for them to boot, synch and build libraries. Frankly it's faster to bung a DVD into the DVD player... So I would not have configured anything to "help" the set up unless it was something that inadvertently helps the set up. If your devices are already switched on of course, then boot time isn't an issue, and having an all ethernet (wireless or wired) and HDMI TV's and stuff will go some way to making life easier. And of course if you have a big collection of CD's and DVD's then there is a case for de-cluttering and having all your stuff in a nice easy to browse format that doesn't leave a plastic case on the floor getting covered in pizza toppings... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Matt Seabrook Posted December 31, 2012 Share Posted December 31, 2012 Blatters is it that tablet screens are too small to view your porn collection and thats what has made your eyesight bad in the first place Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Blatman Posted December 31, 2012 Share Posted December 31, 2012 Entirely possible. HD porn at 1080P is the way forward That may also explain why my TV has gone from 27 to 32 to 37 inches in less than two years... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stuart Posted December 31, 2012 Share Posted December 31, 2012 Happily ripping DVDs to .mkv and streaming from a Netgear ReadyNAS Ultra 2 to a WDTV Live box wirelessly here. So devices on all the time no wait for booting. It won't handle video_TS nor .iso files over wireless without buffering though and not practical to cable it all (so no 1080p but then I don't have an HDTV yet). MP4s etc. all work fine. Use Squeezeboxes for my .flac music and they are perfect (I think they are so fab that I bought 2 more when they discontinued them). Don't profess to be knowledgeable at all about this but it's working fine for me (have to say after a fair bit of stress setting it all up!) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Blatman Posted December 31, 2012 Share Posted December 31, 2012 Happily ripping DVDs to .mkv and streaming from a Netgear ReadyNAS Ultra 2 to a WDTV Live box wirelessly here. So devices on all the time no wait for booting. It won't handle video_TS nor .iso files over wireless without buffering though and not practical to cable it all (so no 1080p but then I don't have an HDTV yet). MP4s etc. all work fine. Use Squeezeboxes for my .flac music and they are perfect (I think they are so fab that I bought 2 more when they discontinued them). Don't profess to be knowledgeable at all about this but it's working fine for me (have to say after a fair bit of stress setting it all up!) I have used TP Link Homeplugs where infratructure is an issue in a couple of houses. They work very well as long as the wall sockets are on the same ring. I had a sod of a job in an extended house where the extension boundaries were unclear. I had connectivity on one part of the room but not on another 'cos the wall socket had been joined to a different ring from the rest of the extension... Streaming VOB and ISO files from my Windows 7 machine to a PS3 has them playing no problem across the wires without the need to resort to the PS3 Media Server software that I was enthusiastic about a year or so ago but which I now rarely use. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stuart Posted December 31, 2012 Share Posted December 31, 2012 Good tip thanks Blatters may well try those Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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