Dell XPS One 27: Can An All-In-One Make Us Love Windows 8?

[AndreT]

[citation][nom]sna[/nom]sorry . I like touch screens ... and consider it an OPTION .. dont touch it if you dont like it.besides , I use windows 8 and like it more than any other MS OS .people are just too lazy to learn how to use Windows 8 , they want to stick with the old ways ... now go shot yourself.[/citation]

Obvious Microsoft posting is Obvious.

 

[egmccann]

[citation][nom]sna[/nom]sorry . I like touch screens ... and consider it an OPTION .. dont touch it if you dont like it.besides , I use windows 8 and like it more than any other MS OS .people are just too lazy to learn how to use Windows 8 , they want to stick with the old ways ... now go shot yourself.[/citation]

Hmm. Misspelling, odd spacing and no caps... Did you type that on your touch screen?

And no, child, it's not "too lazy" - I've run Win8 since the dev preview (so, about a year?) I've had plenty of time to get used to it. I don't like it because it *gets in the way.* I don't like it because it can't decide what it wants to be. I don't like it because it splits options between the Metro/Modern controls and the classic Control Panel (why, for a fairly light example, is the lock screen image, patterning, etc. separate from the Personalization option in Control Panel that handles the desktop environment? That should be unified. Going to "Personalization" on either should bring up the same set of controls.)

Good things from Win8? The new task manager. The new file copy dialog. Those could be ported right into Win7. The rest? Eh.

As for the system... I'm not in the least convinced I want a 27" touchscreen. Other than specialized uses (as mentioned, kiosks and the like) - preferrably with someone ELSE to clean up after everyone's smeared their fingers across the screen - it's not something I see any need for in everyday use. If I want a touchscreen... I can see using it in something tablet sized. Something that stays close and in easy reach, with a small, sensible distance to move across. This? No.

 

[Marcus52]

[citation][nom]merikafyeah[/nom]How ***** think: "There's a touch screen so it MUST be the ONLY interface which I must therefore use CONSTANTLY for everything. My keyboard and mouse will, for some inexplicable reason, become useless, and my arms will get tired from so much reaching.How normal people think: Cool, a touch screen. Now I have more options. Perhaps one day I'll find an application in which being able to manipulate up to 10 different points simultaneously will be much more practical and time-saving than editing coordinates one at a time.[/citation]

Indeed, I quite agree here. It's like, Windows has long had some voice capability, but you never hear people talk about it - and they certainly don't go around saying "voice is terrible, it will never replace a mouse and keyboard". Touch, like voice recognition, is just another form of input.

And, a lot of people, myself included, don't use any kind of wrist rest when they type, yet they don't complain about their arms getting tired. But if you'll recall back when you started learning how to type, it was quite a strain on your fingers and hands until you got used to it. People certainly could get used to using touch even if it was the "arms extended pretty much all day long" picture detractors paint. It's not realistic though, and so isn't the problem made out to be.

 

[flong777]

Touch screens like what we see in Iron Man movies will be the future - but then that is a 3D gesture screen not a true touch screen. Still the convenience and speed of a touch interface is clearly superior. A touch screen coupled with a verbal interface or even an AI interface (can you say Siri) would be a very powerful tool. Nearly all future portrayals of show a computer that we can talk to for the interface. In this case a touch screen would be a powerful tool for direct input.

I agree with the comments on Windows 8. In its present form it is a failure for many reasons - some not even mentioned here. The biggest reason I have heard from adopters is that it is not compatible with a lot of software and the touch screen interface overrides many functions that users don't want it to interfere with (I did not make the jump to Windows 8, I am still running Windows 7 - I do not trust Microsoft). The touch screen appears to not be able to stand on its own in a desktop environment.

A friend of mine installed Windows 8 on his desktop and then after weeks of frustration, had to enlist his employer's IT specialist to make the switch back to Windows 7. After all of the great early reviews of Windows 8 I was shocked to see this first-hand example of Windows 8 failure.

 

[Marcus52]

[citation][nom]killerclick[/nom]No, we predicted it would be a failure because of the changes Microsoft made to it.We're proclaiming it a failure because it has a 30% slower adoption rate than Vista had, despite being released just before the Xmas shopping season.Fans of Windows 8 and Metro need to recognize they're the minority. More than 96% of PC users are not using Windows 8, and the reason is not steep hardware requirements, or bugs, or the unavailability of drivers, but the stupid touch centric interface that most users don't want anywhere near their PCs - hence the 3.3% market share for Windows 8.[/citation]

I don't think you understand the power of "bad press". A lot of people have a negative attitude because of the opinions of people who never touched the OS and started complaining about touch from day one.

Also, you don't understand that very few people have any reason to change from Win 7 to Win 8; it just doesn't give them anything new they need or want, unless they want touch. I would say less than 1 in a thousand actually know anything about the other changes to the OS that have nothing to do with touch (and they are changes that no one "needs" anyway).

Vista was different; Vista came with a version of DirectX that XP didn't have. Vista was designed to be a 64-bit OS. There were big changes that made it more attractive to potential users; there aren't really any with Win 8.

So, there were compelling reasons to switch to Vista, and there are none for Win 8 (for 99% of the people not interested in the touch interface). If you want to say that Microsoft thought touch would make Win 8 a big success on desktop computers, and in that Win 8 failed to meet their expectations, I would certainly agree. However, that doesn't make it a failure - anymore than Vista turned out to be a failure.

Win 7 got great press from the word go. Therefore, the layman thought it was a better OS than Vista - but it is actually the same OS with some minor tweaks. Aero was detuned so it took less resources, which meant it ran better on your $599 computer, but it wasn't really better except it wasn't released with the driver issues and other problems Vista had on release - no surprise there, the bugs were fixed, drivers caught up, really all MS needed to do was give Vista a new name (because the Vista name was "tainted") and make sure the press was on board with the fact that it was a polished release of Windows and so a good replacement for Vista. The press agreed, and so the people agreed. "Win 7 is what Vista should have been" was often said. Well, after all the patches and updates, Vista pretty much was Win 7 except it still had a more demanding Aero (and better looking, in my opinion).

So; your "predictions" are a part what caused some of the slowdown in switching, not necessarily the actual performance of the touch interface. I mean, most people haven't a clue so will just follow the general word of what some other guy says. The bigger part though is that there is no reason for people to switch. Touch isn't something that people in general really want on their desktop - but that doesn't make the OS failure.

 

[Leigh Haines]

touch screen...no. touch desk...yes. not natural to move your hand over the keyboard to touch the monitor. we need a desk with touch screen. we have gorilla glass now, so lets use it.

 

[belardo]

Win8 sucks not just with sayso. Stop saying that many of us never used it. I had win8 preview for months, I finally killed it when it expired. You know what I did, I installed Linuxmint and it boots up just as fast. Geeze the Ed is usable as a Desktop computer.

Going from keyboard to touch screen on a desktop is a ton of hand traveling, more energy, more time... When a mouse next to the keyboard would have been faster.

Windows 8 was designed to capture the moble/touch market. It MADE sense to me, after all metro was great on a phone, I sure loved it. But after 15mins of win8... I knew it was cap, I tried to make it usable... I can't and I'm not going to spend. $5 to hack some functionality into a defective product. No, win8 has NOT saved MS from iOS or android... It only made things worse. In the past 4 months since the release of win8, the markets hare of win7 has GONE UP! Winxp has gone down. MS is at 24% market share... In another 9 months, they may get down to 19% or worse.

RT tablets are not selling. Best thing MS could have done was sell it for $200 to grow the metro market... But instead, they repeated the same stupid thing that HP and RIM did with their tablets... They sold outdated hardware at prices that competed with android and iPads... Of course MS lost. And for most people, a $1200 win8pro tablet is way out of budget.

 

[apache_lives]

[citation][nom]thinslicedbread[/nom]Every time Tom's (or any other site for that matter) posts anything about Windows 8 or touch-screen PC's you always, ALWAYS, get people who instantly denounce such products almost as if they are "of the devil himself". As a power user, or anyone who actually comes to Tom's to read "tech-y" articles - Yes, Windows 8 is probably not for you. That's fine and dandy. But I get so tired of people just instantly proclaiming Windows 8 a failure because of the changes that Microsoft has made to it. While no, it does not have a start button, anyone who has used it for more than a day can tell you that it doesn't really matter. I tap the Windows key and start typing what I want and Windows finds it for me. The start screen gives me a quick overview of important applications without having to actually OPEN the application to find the information. I love my ASUS Vivo Tablet (Windows RT), and I find myself using that more often than my laptop or desktop when I just want to look something up or read and respond to an email. Case in point: I set my girlfriend up with what I thought was a really nice setup. A touch screen AIO in her spare room. It had (read: HAD) Windows 7 on it. She was constantly complaining about how she hated it when it either did not register her touches or the limited gestures that I so painfully set up. She went months without even turning the damn thing on. She complained that she couldn't do anything with it because it was just too hard to get a simple task done.Windows 8 comes out last October and I figure I'd give it a shot and if she still didn't like it, I'd have an extra computer in my man cave for something. I can't keep her off the thing. She absolutely loves it. She loves the live tiles, how it recognizes her gestures, how easy it is to navigate. I could go on... What I wish people would realize is that Windows 8, while it will probably not be as widely accepted as our beloved Windows 7, it is still a pretty solid step forward. If you are a power user (myself included) you will probably never install W8 on your desktop or even your laptop. But it is a fantastic piece of software that can change how people use computers.[/citation]

I totally agree here +1000.

Same thing actually happened to me, i also got an ASUS Vivo RT tab, the Mrs ONLY uses it now, rarely uses her Windows 7 desktop and laptop anymore.

Its funny because i know this will get voted down, but only because of haters with zero reason.

 

[belardo]

That is her using a tablet, not a desktop. Half the time I'm on my iPad (like now) otherwise my desktop with a 24" display when I'm on the web. It's handy to be on a tablet at this moment. And when it comes to many of my clients at home, especially wives are using tablets.

Your wife using an RT tablet doesn't validate windows8 x86. The vivoRT is especially slow compares to android and ipad3 and new devices. My wife knows little about computers... Her notebook runs linux, she uses it for work 99% of the time, otherwise she'll use her android phone.

 

[Non-Euclidean]

[citation][nom]merikafyeah[/nom]How ***** think: "There's a touch screen so it MUST be the ONLY interface which I must therefore use CONSTANTLY for everything. My keyboard and mouse will, for some inexplicable reason, become useless, and my arms will get tired from so much reaching.How normal people think: Cool, a touch screen. Now I have more options. Perhaps one day I'll find an application in which being able to manipulate up to 10 different points simultaneously will be much more practical and time-saving than editing coordinates one at a time.[/citation]

How Everyone things after using their touchscreen for 5 minutes:

@#$%, now I have to clean my monitor again!

 

[janetonly42]

"Can An All-In-One Make Us Love Windows 8?" NO

 

[Non-Euclidean]

[citation][nom]sna[/nom]sorry . I like touch screens ... and consider it an OPTION .. dont touch it if you dont like it.besides , I use windows 8 and like it more than any other MS OS .people are just too lazy to learn how to use Windows 8 , they want to stick with the old ways ... now go shot yourself.[/citation]

Just stand still, and let me reload.

 

[keithrmanning]

I own a 27" touch all-in-one (Vizio). I suspect that all the commenters who say touch screen desktops are stupid do not own one and have probably never used one except in a store. So, I hope when I tell them they are completely wrong they will at least listen.

First, using a desktop touch machine for manipulating a traditional Excel workbook is simply just silly. Mice and keyboards are better (or for me, rollermouse and keyboard). But when one has finished creating the workbook try discussing it with a colleague or three.

Old style: sit sort-of half behind me and watch over my shoulder. Want to try something? I get up and you sit in my chair so you can get to the mouse and keyboard. Then you complain because you are not familiar with my split keyboard and rollermouse. Bad experience.

New style: We stand up and tilt the 27" monitor back as I swipe through the charts and discuss the calculations. You want to try something? Just step in and poke the screen, maybe adjust a few numbers using the on-screen keyboard. Good experience, real collaboration, even fun.

Want to take a break from Excel crunching and delve into the Tom's Hardware RSS? Stand up, tilt the screen back and use your fingers to swipe through the pages, poke links, capture articles and post them to Evernote. Now you are standing up for an hour a day, just like your doctor told you - except without the expense of a sit-stand desk - which would cost you much more than the premium price of the 27" touch all-in-one.

So, touch does not replace mouse and keyboard on a desktop. But it is going to be a great addition for lots of reasons and, ironically, will be most useful to those, like me, who spend hours a day in front of their monitors.

So, do I use my 27" touch Vizio at work? No! Although my experience with it at home shows me that good things are going to come, a single 27" all-in-one is not good enough for me. I use dual 24" monitors at my sitting desk and a matching pair of monitors on my treadmill desk. This arrangement will evolve over the next two years as follows:

1. Next month I will start to use Leap Motion for gesture control both at my sitting desk and my treadmill desk. I hope this will replace my roller mice - but I suspect I will use a combination of Leap gesture and roller mouse manipulation.
2. Probably late this year I will purchase a pair of 24" touch monitors and engineer my own stand so that I can quickly raise and tilt both of them for personal standing sessions of reading, surfing, video watching and more importantly, for interactive discussion sessions with my colleagues (while standing in a group). This arrangement will only be at my sitting desk; trying to use touch while walking is not a good idea and I don't try to collaborate with colleagues while we all walk on the same treadmill!
3. Probably next year I will purchase a commercial stand to replace my amateur one because, by then, the industry will have got its act together with dual monitor stands which will tilt to much lower angles because they are intended for touch monitors.

 

[daglesj]

I can't imagine many folks with $2500 to spend on a new PC would think to buy a Dell. It's like "I've got $75000 to spend on a new car...I'll go round the Ford dealer!"

So I wish the 8 or so that buy one all the best.

To be honest I just see these All In Ones as a huge liability.

 

[tpjaper]

I don't think anything can make people 'love' windows 8. There are a few fans around, but the overwhelming majority of people I speak to (in business at least) are avoiding it like the plague.

Microsoft had a fantastic opportunity here, because conceptually they were definitely on the right track. However they have delivered dismally.

Its almost like they've tried to be apple and tell people what they need rather than ask them.
If they had retained the option of a start button, and enabled the tablet view for tablets and desktop view for desktops they would have succeeded.

 

[okeefe58]

This is nothing new - I've had the Lenovo A720 27" Touchscreen All-in-One for over a year now, and almost exactly the same as this, component for component. About time Dell (or anybody else) came out with it's equivalent.

 

[jimmyjamesros]

[citation][nom]ericjohn004[/nom]When I bought an all in one for my secretary's, it had Windows 8. And I can't even figure out how to search for a freaking file. Much less set my page file, or turn on a file back up. And I haven't even gone on that computer since because it's so frustrating. I absolutely hate it. And she does too, and is begging me for Windows 7. BOTH of my female secretary's are begging me for Windows 7 on their 2 all in ones.[/citation]

Figures a misogynistic mouth breather would have a hard time figuring out how to search in Windows 8.

 

[Crashman]

[citation][nom]jimmyjamesros[/nom]Figures a misogynistic mouth breather would have a hard time figuring out how to search in Windows 8.[/citation]I never really understood the supposed link between being unenlightened and having sinus congestion. Care to elaborate?

 

[unknown9122]

What is up with the up to date drivers and chipset drivers. This benchmark would be more accurate if they all had the most up to date drivers.

 

[frank_densmore]

I have a Gateway NE56R31u. It came loaded w/win 8 and ie-10, win 8 i like but the ie-10 SUCKS. I use Google Chrome, now i,m happy. It came loaded wiyh all the things i need to play Neverwinter Online and DDO Unlimited : Eberron. My suggestion is to dump internet explorer 10 and get Google Chrome.

 

[Matsushima]

I would hate to think stretching over my desk accidentally hitting the keyboard, shaking the screen while I was trying to type on a FIXED desktop monitor. And you'd have to touch with the tip of your fingers, making your whole arm hurt after short use and have less control and also shaking the monitor.
Samsung was right; Windows 8 will lead to the demise of the PC. And Windows Blue will be worse still because Microsoft has not paid attention to anyone. I would not want to see a brand new Core i7/FX computer in the dump with the shiny Windows 8 Logo still stuck on it. Looks like in about 10-20 years Microsoft will probably dump the PC platform altogether.

 

[Matsushima]

I was a Mac hater, but when Microsoft drops support for XP/7 I think I will have to switch to Mac. Or Linux.

 

[daglesj]

Holy crap guys, just install a Start Button if you need to, set your default apps to the Desktop ones and its 99% the same as Windows 7 but a bit quicker and a little more secure.

I thought folks here were meant to be a little more technically able than most. Maybe I was wrong.

First sign of a little challenge and you all run screaming.

 

[RobAC]

I use Class Shell to get my Win 7 start button and menu back.

I find myself using a combination of the Win 8 UI or Classic Shell Start button menu depending on what is faster and more efficient. They each have their strong and weak points.

I look forward to trying out the Leap Motion touch less gesture control.

 

[Matsushima]

That is because Windows 8 is for the technically UNable.