Journal Qzukk's Journal: 30 minutes of hate 4
I just spent 4 hours doing onsite customer training for a customer of ours who is transitioning from an ancient terminal-based software to our software. These customers had therefore bought all new laptops with all new Windows 8 to replace their old terminals. The decision to use laptops had been made because 1) the network infrastructure in place currently ran the terminals which were actually win95 computers plugged into a local network and using telnet to reach the server so wireless was necessary until the old equipment could be removed and 2) the computers running the old system needed to stay there until after the training was complete and they were ready to switch.
I estimate 30 minutes of that time was spent unfucking shit that went wrong when people who had never seen a GUI or used a touchpad in their life had their palms brush the touchpad and trigger random win8 gestures, opening the charms bar, opening bing, opening the start screen, and in at least one case, somehow closing the program window (or was it open somewhere but alt-tab no longer works in windows 8? Damned if I know!)
For the next round of training tomorrow I plan on disabling the gestures. Easy peasy, just a few SynTPEnh\ZoneConfig registry entries to change. And they say Windows 8 isn't ready for the desktop!
wow (Score:2)
That sounds pretty interesting. Though I'm surprised they haven't been using a gui based OS at home.
Re: (Score:2)
Though I'm surprised they haven't been using a gui based OS at home.
I was surprised too but two of the employees admitted that they didn't own a computer. One was an old granny type and one was a highschool kid who probably uses an iphone or something for everything and just doesn't define computer the way we would.
Maybe the desktop... (Score:2)
...isn't ready for Windows 8.
Which, I suspect, is really intended for keyboardless devices anyway, and set up for touch screens, not touch pads.
The idea of putting two mouse buttons right under or right next to a touch pad, and then leaving the mouse button clicking by tapping the touchpad feature enabled anyway always stuck me as positively sadistic when you consider how poorly calibrated that feature usually is. You'd think the designers had never heard of de-bounce circuits.
Re: (Score:2)
They eventually did add a checkbox where you can enable debouncing for clicks, but it looks like Microsoft has to learn their lesson all over again.
What's interesting is that Synaptic's GUI has all sorts of checkboxes for turning on and off zoom, scrolling, etc... but no checkboxes for disabling the charm/appswitch/windowlist/whateverelse. That has to be done through registry hacks, and seems to only work for a few of the gestures, at least the ones that are left are only the gestures that only work in Met