why wont you use windows 7 instead? windows 8.1 support got killed way before windows 7 one, and almost everything runs the same or better on 7

Technically 8.1 has untill January 10th 2023 before all support is killed

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2022-03-20, 22:40:

Technically 8.1 has untill January 10th 2023 before all support is killed

yeah that's from Microsoft, but driver support from both amd and Nvidia ended a time ago, intel too i think
as such, software support i think is limited

I'm still running 8.1 on my main rig. In fact I reinstalled Windows over the weekend. Installed Nvidia driver 473.04 yesterday.

weldum wrote on 2022-03-20, 21:20:

why wont you use windows 7 instead? windows 8.1 support got killed way before windows 7 one, and almost everything runs the same or better on 7

Because I don't have a license as I had in the past OEM netbooks and the only modern Win I have (and I suppose the last version I'll have considering how heavy they seems to become) is 8.1 retail boxed version. I agree that at the end there should not be compatibility differences and the Win 7 GUI is way better imho and on a much lighter general o.s. with less background weight on the cpu and gpu. At the end 3D retro games from Directx8 and above runs more or less similar (a bit slower in Win 8.1) but older games compatibility is a big problem on latest o.s. versions and need much more tweak than Win 7 to just run but generally the whole experience is slower even with every drivers anyway installed and running.
I was thinking if the latest updated GUI from Win7 could live in the Win8.1 setup. It's not about the theme itself already at the lightest mode, is about the whole logic of the Metro GUI imho.. the o.s. would requires a WDDM1.3 driver to run better but anyway requires a more powerful cpu than in Win7 to run just as fast using older gpu drivers.

weldum wrote on 2022-03-20, 21:20:

why wont you use windows 7 instead?

Sadly, as new CPUs continue to integrate more essential things (like bus controllers) , 7's being gutted that way. If not the Visual Studio Core lib gambit move again (i.e. "core path") or the new D3D compiler, it's that.

I don't use 8.1 but I imagine the solution for the GUI style is still the cursed WindowBlinds. 😒 Note that a lot of those popular "classic windows shell is back!!!" solutions only stop at the start menu imitations and never the actual windows and there's no WB alternatives.

The lack of font configuration and actual color schemes in recent Windows really sucks.

IMO, Vista/Win7 are the pinnacle of Microsoft's desktop GUIs in terms of appearance and style. Win8 made a total mess of things, which Microsoft is very slowly sifting through with Win10 and lately Win11.

In terms of speed, Win8 is generally faster than Win7, but like everything it depends on proper driver support from the hardware vendors. Time and again the conclusion I reach is that for good experience, one should run contemporary Windows on their hardware. Any other combination (OS much newer than hardware or hardware much newer than OS) is just a never-ending chain of issues, weird bugs, workarounds, and generally a subpar experience.

I understand why Win 8 might have had a reason to exist considering touchscreen devices but after that just like from Vista to Win 7, I would have expected the whole o.s. to come back to a minimal lighter logic and desktop/notebook oriented, beside the WDDM driver features version. It's not like these features were needed to make XP or later GUIs faster. Even Win 95 GUI is hw accelerated by the well known ancient video chips and the gui was fast even on hardware that nowdays would be slower than a coffe machine subsytem. For the few experience I had with Win 10 I didn't see much really changed and also many services, background processes, ram usage weight even at boot. If it's like 8.1 not much can be tweaked (before installing like old Win 9x o.s. let the user choice) and "to feel" fast it might use all GPU features but when on low end config it's quite clear how much complex it is.

Like it happens in the web browsers modern homepages, they might use all the opengl accelerations but the weight of most pages rendering is obvious. It's not like linux o.s. didn't become heavy too but at least a different gui and sw choice still can be done but not always easy, old alternative gpu support is a big problem there if they're not the good open radeon or intel driver supported gpus. Anyway using official o.s. options I configured the gui as lightest as possible but not really much changed in terms of latency speed.