{"id":9333,"date":"2014-03-02T09:54:36","date_gmt":"2014-03-02T14:54:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.charanis.com\/blog\/?p=9333"},"modified":"2014-03-02T20:27:04","modified_gmt":"2014-03-03T01:27:04","slug":"life-with-windows-8-1-on-a-thinkpad-ultrabook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.charanis.com\/blog\/2014\/03\/02\/life-with-windows-8-1-on-a-thinkpad-ultrabook\/","title":{"rendered":"Life with Windows 8.1 on a ThinkPad Ultrabook"},"content":{"rendered":"
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My first foray into MS Windows in a few years after moving to Mac OSX both at home and work, has been interesting and frustrating.\u00a0 There are the old habits I have to get back such as memorizing rather than figuring things out, a subtle difference I will never be able to explain to a Windows user without sounding like an Apple fan-boy, but its there. And there are things about this Lenovo Thinkpad that are unusual and subtly different that are creating anxiety that I cannot blame on Windows.\u00a0 Finally, the last Windows I used was Windows XP, skipping Windows 7 and that mashup of OS X like features blended with the old Windows way.\u00a0 Windows 8.1 is very, very different and really quite interesting. Frustrating but interesting.<\/div>\n
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First I’ll give you a few frustrating things about this new Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Touch- its a wonderfully constructed computer that is ultralight and carbon fiber, the fastest i7 processor and a beautiful touch screen.\u00a0 It has a soft-key strip at the top of the keyboard that changes with the applications, the keys press comfortably and it has a track pad and the famous red eraser pointer in the keyboard\u00a0– a tool I really enjoyed when I worked heads down building proposals years ago. You simply keep your fingers moving – using your pointer finger to navigate rather than leaving the keyboard for a mouse or trackpad.\u00a0 Problem is – its not easy to use anymore as the left and right\u00a0buttons are gone.<\/div>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 They tried to squeeze too much into the keyboard and to do that they seem to have slightly shifted everything a bit to the left.\u00a0 They put a delete key right next to the backspace key and the trackpad below – but since its all a little to the left my fast tracking fingers keep hitting the wrong things.\u00a0 For example, I keep hitting the delete key rather than the backspace key and that just frustrates me, my pinky finger doesn’t know its a little to the left.\u00a0 And the trackpad is correctly centered on the GH keys but they and it are not in the center of the computer so I keep right clicking rather than left clicking and that is just a big mess.\u00a0 I am going find myself looking down a lot more and having to consciously shift my hands to the left to make this work. And I’m not giving up my MacBook Pro for personal use so its going to be an adjustment back and forth.<\/div>\n
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The Windows 8.1 environment is really cool and clever but still built for fiddlers at heart. What I mean is that Windows has always been designed by and for people who are comfortable and actually want to customize their experience.\u00a0 Mac isn’t really about that – its actually a pretty perfect experience, if you let yourself go and just try things.\u00a0 It doesn’t overdo the minimal controls – you still have a menu bar and still have robust contextual menus.\u00a0 What I’m seeing here is closer to iOS yet still missing a awful lot.\u00a0 I know its probably there but that is my impression.<\/div>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 For example, I simply wanted to copy and paste the name of my new computer here from an email.\u00a0 I couldn’t find the right key combination to do that.\u00a0 I was able to “Alt-Tab” over to Mail and navigate to the invoice for the computer – but then I struggled to highlight the text I wanted, eventually remembering where the left part of the track pad was – and captured it.\u00a0 My first thought was to use the touch screen – but in fact when I touch the text it brings up the soft keyboard and some crazy square comes up but it didn’t intuitively start highlighting text. Even my Kindle works that way, I don’t get it.\u00a0 If I have a keyboard you would think that Windows would be smart enough to know I don’t need a screen softkeyboard. Edit: I did finally figure out that once I’m in the right context I can use good old ctrl-c and ctrl-v\u00a0at least from Evernote and pasting here in WordPress.<\/div>\n
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When I wanted to paste it I wanted to “past as” and remove the formatting.\u00a0 there is no option for that – just plain paste, there is no top menu bar to allow me to pick more advanced options, I don’t know what to do.\u00a0 So I’m going to have to take a tutorial on this, look on the web, invest a lot of time here.\u00a0 Ironically, Microsoft and Thinkpad was always more of a business tool and yet I’m not feeling like I can bang stuff out here.<\/div>\n
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I do need to explore more the options of customizing the start screen and tiles – that’s kind of cool. I’ve moved around the ones I want, deleted all of the advertising tiles wanting me to buy all things Microsoft and resizing things.\u00a0 I want to add a few websites for easy access, haven’t figured that out yet, just the Internet Explorer Icon.\u00a0 Using websites is somewhat confusing – pulling the “charms” from the right, sliding up to see tabs of other sites. Having it automatically open a second page and splitting the screen when I don’t want it to\u00a0(then I have to drag it to the right). Its quite a juggling act.\u00a0 In fact I’m still not sure how to easily get to favorites or how to quickly toggle between websites.\u00a0 Maybe Firefox or Chrome work that way – I can try that. Wait (geez, went to edit this and immediatly hit the delete key rather than backspace and deleted the next paragraph – argh) – wait – if you work form Explorer from the desktop rather than start screen you get the old tabbed website view.\u00a0 That’s great.\u00a0 But still no menu bar at the top.<\/div>\n
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The fact is I probably should have loaded Windows 7 and upgraded later but I felt I needed to learn this. So I opted for Windows 8.1 Pro – will dig in and maybe at some point I’ll be able to help my friends again in the Windows World. So folks, the days of Jim the IT guy aren’t here yet.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My first foray into MS Windows in a few years after moving to Mac OSX both at home and work, has been interesting and frustrating.\u00a0 There are the old habits I have to get back such as memorizing rather than… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9347,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9333","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology","category-thoughts"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.charanis.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/windows-computer-e1393786627388.jpg?fit=1224%2C1632&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3mX8K-2qx","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":11532,"url":"https:\/\/www.charanis.com\/blog\/2013\/11\/06\/retail-online-banking-innovation-or-evolution\/","url_meta":{"origin":9333,"position":0},"title":"Retail Online Banking – Innovation or Evolution?","author":"Jimmyc","date":"November 6, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"I spent the day visiting with bankers, executives and vendor salespeople at BAI Retail Delivery 2013 - Denver, CO November 5-7. 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I\u2019m not talking about compounded interest though the results are quite similar. Or my rapidly growing middle, softer in time. I\u2019m talking about reading 30 minutes to a young student during lunch - over 25 years. The truth\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "leadership"","block_context":{"text":"leadership","link":"https:\/\/www.charanis.com\/blog\/category\/leadership\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":22990,"url":"https:\/\/www.charanis.com\/blog\/2014\/10\/25\/about-me-new-online-biography\/","url_meta":{"origin":9333,"position":3},"title":"About.me – new online biography","author":"Jimmyc","date":"October 25, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"So I've seen About.me in a few situations, usually among the people in my professional graph that are creative and technical. \u00a0I finally put one together and it was an interesting exercise. 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I've started this post a hundred times and each time I stop because things change so rapidly.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Banking Tech"","block_context":{"text":"Banking Tech","link":"https:\/\/www.charanis.com\/blog\/category\/banking-tech\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"20130929-172310.jpg","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/charanis.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/09\/20130929-172310.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":596,"url":"https:\/\/www.charanis.com\/blog\/2013\/12\/03\/a-few-tidbits-ebay-simplifies-storefronts-snapchat-turns-down-3billion-amazon-com-and-drones-and-we-will-all-print-in-3d-someday\/","url_meta":{"origin":9333,"position":5},"title":"A few tidbits – #eBay simplifies Storefronts, #Snapchat turns down $3Billion, #Amazon.com and Drones – and we will all print in 3D someday","author":"Jimmyc","date":"December 3, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Interesting article about how Ebay is looking to go the other direction - physical storefronts to expand a company's digital footprint. \u00a0The company has always been helping businesses to connect with customers but this is a great example of expanding horizontally. \u00a0Its very different from Amazon who wants to build\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "technology"","block_context":{"text":"technology","link":"https:\/\/www.charanis.com\/blog\/category\/technology\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charanis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9333","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charanis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charanis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charanis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charanis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9333"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.charanis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9333\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9350,"href":"https:\/\/www.charanis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9333\/revisions\/9350"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charanis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9347"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.charanis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charanis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.charanis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}