I finally got off the iPad band wagon, since I kept running into frustrations over what it wouldn’t do in a mixed environment, like the one that we have at home with a mish-mash of PCs and i-appliances. So, I now own a windows 8 laptop with the new touch interface. Theree is a learning curve, and as usual, Microsoft made some completely dumb-ass decisions like eliminating the POP interface for the mail tile, and making it difficult to use Google contacts and Calendar-Google stopped supporting the Microsoft sync methodology, and Microsoft isn’t supporting Google’s and so we users are left with 3 important tiles that don’t work out of the box. I got the contacts and calendar sync to work sort of-ish, by hooking up a Microsoft Live accoutn to my Google, so that is at least acceptable.
Other than that I was totally loving my new laptop, until today. I rebooted and the Metro interface stopped working. Just stopped. I could not do anything! I am not even sure what I would have done, except that luckily I had set up a local user, which boots into the desktop or non-touch/Metro UI. From there, I could boot into Safe mode and I was able to determine that everything was ok on the Windows side of things. There was a notice to check the last programs that were installed, which I thought I knew what they were and had already un-installed. But it turned out, that I had forgotten that I had installed PhotoShop CS6. Some of the programs that Adobe installed for PhotoShop, that were set up under the Start up service were causing the issue.
So BEFORE you run into an issue with Metro, I would suggest the following:
- Create a local Account
- I would even suggest you search the Internet for how to boot into Desktop mode, and then go to Metro when you want. This may be an extra step if you really love Metro, tho. I installed a Shell program that sets up the old-style Start Button, and from there I was able to configure to start in Windows Desktop mode, but there are other ways of doing this.
- If you have Adobe CS6 installed, look at the StartUp processes and disable the Adobe ones (from memory, it is something like: Ctrl-X->Task Manager->Run->msconfig-> and then look at the StartUp tab).
Ohter than these few glitches, I loved getting back control with a Windows 8 convertible! Good Luck!!
