Danilo Loc: Las Vegas

I'm not very clever about this stuff, Mark. Is Microsoft the only one who uses Intel? I've never been too interested in Apple, but, do they use Intel, or something else?

mdorn Loc: Portland, OR

Microsoft is primarily a software company, but when they started designing their new "Surface" tablet, Intel jumped in to strike a deal. The Surface now has only Intel chips. We (Intel) missed the boat on the iPad & iPhone. Apple also uses Intel chips, but only in their desktops and laptops, not in their mobile devices.

BboH Loc: s of 2/21, Ellicott City, MD

The computer shop I use told me that they do NOT recommend Windows 8 - stay away from it.

rayford2 Loc: New Bethlehem, PA

Toshiba laptops have worse issues than Win. 8.

singleviking Loc: Lake Sebu Eco Park, Philippines

I warned you about that months ago MT. No touch-screen, pass up Win8. I got wind of this by a top exec in Intel that I've known since he was at Bell Labs. Sorry you got taken in by the hype.

ted45 Loc: Delaware

I once knew a guy that manufactured drive shafts. His drive shafts were installed in GM cars. He would go on for hours about how crappy GM cars are even though he lived in Phila and did not own a car. He could not drive and had no interest if learning, but he was an expert on cars. Mdorns post reminds me of that guy.

Microsoft and Intel have been joined at the hip since the beginning of the personal computer. While Intel makes, in my opinion, some of the best chips on the planet for computers they do not make, design or install software. Microsoft is a software company. Over the years they have tried to be all things to all people. They have a history of releasing their systems too early. The original Widows had two versions, one for consumers and a second for business. Windows 95 was issued as 95a and 95b when version A proved to be a total dud. They repeated the error with Windows 98. Version 1 proved to be a disaster. Version 2 after multiple updates and service packs became a winner. Windows XP right out of the box was a farce and barely ran. After 4 service packs XP became a solid system. Windows 2000 was designed to follow the original path; one system, XP, for consumers and another version 2000 for business. Windows 2000 was a great system unless you wanted to IM, play games, and watch movies. After watching their stock plummet because of the lack of a new system Microsoft released Vista as a stop gap. An excellent system, if you upgraded your hardware and properly installed it as a new install and not an upgrade. Windows 7 is what Vista was supposed to be. A melding of the game playing, email slinging, media watching consumer machine and the solid business machine.

Microsoft always tried to make its systems “backward compatible”. A mistake they rectified with Windows 7. Windows 7 is intended to run on new compatible hardware and run programs designed for its platform. To save money most people only buy the “upgrade”. Big mistake!

Now we have Windows 8 designed to capture the emerging tablet market and appeal to the younger generation that does all of their computing on their cell phone. Yes, a great deal of the younger generation does not own a laptop, desktop or even a tablet. They prefer the touch screen on their cell phone and the “apps” that they buy at the “app store”. Cell phones as computers have outsold the desktop market for the past two years.

Here is the truth: Professional IT guys are gun shy. They have seen Microsoft release one dud after another and then come up with a service pack to fix the original errors. They are telling people to wait until the first service pack. Windows 8 is built on the Windows 7 platform. It is solid and works great. I am not happy with some of the touch screen crap, but then I don’t do my computing on a cell phone. You can use a traditional desktop with Win 8 or the tile screen. For those of you that haven’t figured it out the “tiles” are nothing more than the shortcuts you put all over your XP screen. There is a learning curve. You will have to break some old habits, but it is worth the effort.

I bought a Lenovo Twist with Windows 8. It goes from dead stop, no power, to a usable computer in 10 seconds. The improved battery technology lets it run forever between charges. I love it.

Sorry for being long winded but I get tired of reading all of the whining and bad information.

RicknJude Loc: Quebec, Canada

I think you have it figured out. :lol:

LaughBrian Loc: Tn

My Asus has it on the hard drive you can burn recovery disk from there But Asus is one of the best for gamming laptops out there, 2gig vid card 8 gigs ddr3 ram i7 quadcore nothing i have found can even sow it down. stay away from dell and hp they use low end junk in them and they crash alot. my setup was only $1399 try and find a setup like that cheaper! win 8 is junk was a fast way to make some money for them!

jeep_daddy Loc: Prescott AZ

Are you sure that it doesn't have a partition on the hard drive and a recovery program by Gateway that will restore it to factory? I thought all computers had this. I know that my HP does and so does my Acer.

Jim Plogger Loc: East Tennessee

:thumbup: :thumbup: :thumbup:

Picdude Loc: Ohio

It still has a chance to get better. I seem to recall even XP was a little flakey until the 1st service pack came out, then the second service pack really made it shine. Kind of like Windows 98 after it came out in Second Edition.

travelwp Loc: New Jersey

I agree totally. I found Win7 to be a stable operating system. I bought a "high end gamers" system and since I owned a licensed copy of Win7 professional, I formatted the hard drive and after many, many online windows updates, I now have the latest Win7. Oh, yea, "gamer" computers are INTEL inside.

marcomarks Loc: Ft. Myers, FL

The Microsoft warning that not all software and hardware used on Windows 7 would be compatible with Windows 8 was enough to stop me dead from getting it. That's a reiteration of what they did when moving into XP when it came out and everybody was angry for a couple years over it because printers, scanners, and many other things wouldn't work and some manufacturers didn't supply upgraded drivers for XP so you'd have to buy new peripherals. So I waited for several years until my peripherals were actually needing to be replaced and finally bought a PC with XP already on it and they were well into Service Pack 2 by then.

I have a laptop that the hard drive crapped out on. I'm going to buy a solid state drive for it (yes, it's an Intel CPU thank you) and since I also didn't get any disks with it, I have to buy an OS for it. It's not going to be the original Vista 64-bit, and it's certainly not going to be Win 8, so Win 7 64-bit it will be - although I sense instability in Win 7 on my desktop from time to time when it does some minor whacky things on its own.

flyguy Loc: Las Cruces, New Mexico

I went to using Mac's about three years ago and love it --- the underlying unix operating system that OS X is built on is a pleasure to use from the command line and it is practically "crash" free. Because it is based on a Unix foundation it comes with lot's of "free" and open sourced software, whereas with Microsoft one has to pay through the nose for their stuff and then have myriad frustrations using it.

flyguy Loc: Las Cruces, New Mexico

Yes they (Apple) started using Intel based chips about three years or so ago and prior to that they had been using Motorola hardware, and because they switched I decided to start using Mac's. The Intel based hardware provides a lot of speed and processing advantages that the Motorola hardware didn't have, too much to go into here.