[9876543210]

a435843,

Originally Posted by a435843

A couple of quick comments:

The crippled Cortana search was reported by InfoWorld from an earlier beta, but their "NO" response was in a slightly smaller font. Furthermore, they had reported that the kludgey way of searching your files was via a forced upload backup of said files to MS's servers (Azure services), and that Bing would then be nice enough to index those files, and search for them from the f*%#^!g cloud, via Cortana. My response was not merely just "Hell No."

Still haven't had time to play with it.

I'm glad they've come to their senses on this, and kept the Explorer local/network drive search function, if not local optional indexing, as well. My Explorer searches better not be reported back to MS, though.

I have used Explorer a lot and haven't had any problems with it. But it looks almost identical to 7 with a bunch of useless folders I'll never use (pictures, videos, downloads, etc.). I'll probably never use those as I have a second HD in the laptop which stores all my files. It may be possible to point those folders to my D:\ drive but I haven't had the time to do that yet.

Is MS recording all of my Explorer searches? Don't know and I certainly hope not. But if they are they've probably been doing it for a long time (at least since Vista IIRC).

Another rumor is about service packs...with 10, there won't be anymore big updates, or even monthly updates, it will just be this Chinese Water Torture of drip, drip, drip, constant updates, endless nags to reboot, and so on. That won't work either, and will contribute to a horrible user experience, if you cannot control that flow of updates in the "Home" version.

I've heard the same rumor about the Home version. I'm using the "Pro" version so I don't think that applies. But who knows at the moment.

It sounds as though 9..., that you've just hit some usual beta stuff, but clearly, it doesn't sound ready for release in several weeks. The early reviews of Spartan I've seen are in line with yours, but with no add-on infrastructure, and unknown security & privacy functionality, I wouldn't touch this with a 10-foot pole. My question for you is, is Spartan full-screen only, like an app, or is there availability for it to run as a Windowed application? I've only seen it run as an app.

I agree, this is nowhere near ready for release to the general public. If for no less than their Email, browser and shortcuts are pretty much nightmares for them. An average user would not be happy with things as they are now.

And beta testing is an important part of the process, but nagging me to do it is not. I hope MS takes the feedback you and others give them to heart. My experience, even back in the old days, when I was responsible for buying licenses for 3,000 PC's, was that MS didn't give any feces about your opinion, but times for them are more desperate now.

Hah! Agreed! I think something must be up with them as they've really made sending them feedback really simple. I don't remember that from earlier testing.

And I definitely agree with you on Thunderbird, as a Mail application, an archiver, and a PIM, I enjoy that program.

Yeah, really hard to beat Thunderbird. MS has a long way to go to break even with it.