Wndows 8.1 is a terrible OS that MS should regret blahblah

But hey when it's on a $99 tablet people will line up around the block for it.

Dell Venue 8 Pro 32GB 8" Windows 8.1 Tablet - $99 doorbuster for first 20, $199 while stock lasts at the Microsoft Store on 12/9 Monday. Online as well. 12-05-2013 - Slickdeals.net

I was genuinely surprised, I got up early to head to the mall but I see there's no point.

I also wanted to note that the Microsoft Store was doing this online, and as a result, the site is pretty much totally down.

 

You US people are lucky. Even at a normal price it's a pretty neat device.
There is still no news when DVP will arrive to Germany... Sucks...

 

I tried snagging one this morning and at around 10am their servers were getting hammered. After repeated tries I finally saw the price of $199 and within minutes they were Sold Out. Nit sure how many they had in stock for them to sell out so fast.

 

For those who couldn't get one of the ultra-discounted ones, you can get it off Amazon for $267. That's only marginally more expensive than a Nexus 7 and significantly less expensive than an iPad Mini. Not bad for a full-fat version of Windows and a Bay Trail processor.

 

I wonder if 32 GB is enough for a Windows device though.

Beamed from my G2 Tricorder

 

I think you will have 11-18GB of free space. Depending on what is exactly you plan to do it might be enough. Don't forget there's also a micro SD expansion slot, and as far as I know, normal Windows software can be installed on it.

 

Running W7 on a 24GB drive with 6GB of free space after installing my small collection of software.

 

It won't give you much onboard space by PC standards, but the onboard storage is easily on par with similarly-priced ARM tablets (16 gb inclusive of OS and preinstalled software). There's a 64 gb option of the Venue 8 Pro as well.

 

seems to be I picked up an ASUS T100 with 32 GB and even with Office 2013 loaded it is a great little unit and about the best tablet I've had. as for storage I just popped in a 64GB micro card as drive D: for storing my movies and media for on the road.

as for windows 8.1. I am not overtly fond of it on desktops etc, but have come to love it on touchscreen devices. on a desktop I am growing to like it as soon as I re-enable the old style start button

 

For those wondering whether 32 GB is enough, it is and Windows 8.1 makes it easy to add the media on the SD card to your library unlike previous versions of Windows.

 

with a little hack you can install your metro apps there as well.
How To Install Apps On SD Card In Windows 8

set libraries for data
Windows 8.1 Tip: Use Micro-SD with Libraries and Metro-Style Apps | Windows 8 content from Paul Thurrott's SuperSite for Windows

 

It's about $50 more for the 64GB version, and a 32GB MicroSD card costs < $20, and 64GB MicroSD < $35. I know SD isn't quite as fast, but it's definitely cheaper. I've wanted a reasonable Win 8 tab, but the Surface Pro 2 is just too darn expensive and other Win 8 tabs are well over $300. I'm tempted. Wonder how long it will be $267?

edit: LOL saw this from this user review here: Dell Venue 8 Pro Windows 8.1 HD Tablet Details | Dell

" The only negative is using Windows, a system designed for mouse and keyboard, on a handheld. Version 8.1 does some good but all of the legacy is still there."

Isn't that the exact opposite of what people have been saying about Win 8? lol.

 

This is a logical fallacy. People lined up outside the stores and DDoSed the Microsoft website because they felt like it was a great deal and because of our infamous American Black Friday culture, not because Windows 8 doesn't suck. Can you imagine the sh*tstorm that would go down and the number of people that would be injured and trampled to death if there was a similar firestorm sale of iPads/Nexus 7's/Kindle Fires?

 

Well Windows 8.x is a good touch OS. I've never denied that. And a decently powered tablet with ability to run full Win 8 apps under $300 is quite appealing, and if you can get it for $99 or $199 even more so. But yeah if it were an iPad or popular Android pad for $99 it would have created a much larger stir.

 

Well that was the second reason I tried to buy it. I wanted to use Windows 8 for its intended purpose. The first reason was the $99 price of course.

Anyway, did anyone here manage to snatch one of these for $99 or at all? I went to the MS Store an hour before opening. Big mistake. There were people in line who had been there since 10 PM (dafuq?!?) I had the chance to get one for $199 but passed on it. The main appeal to me was the $99 price point, otherwise there's just no point as it often goes on sale at Costco for $150.

Hmmm considering the way the Microsoft Store website buckled, I'm wondering if the $99 for the first 100 online orders was ever a thing and if anybody actually got it. I had that webpage open all night and it was down from the moment I started refreshing it 30 minutes before the sale began until I left for the MS Store an hour later.

 

Correction: If you paid any attention at all, what we were saying all this time is that Win8 is a terrible OS for standard PC hardware. On a tablet, with MS Office thrown in, and at a $99 price point, it's a steal, if you're interested in a tablet of that size. I'm not, but that's me, with my eyes not getting any younger...

 

Well, it's better than my 5" smarthphone screen.

 

Absolutely, but then I'm not trying to run Microsoft Office on that phone of mine...

 

Yeah I was trying it out in the store and even 1280x800 on 8" makes the text pretty damn small at 100% DPI scaling. I can definitely see it causing some people problems. 150% would've been much better, but there goes your screen real estate.

 

This is true. I think this would be more of a toy for me than anything else. I hate that I'm attracted to silicon, and it's not even the real fun (ahem, bewbs, ahem) kind.

What I really need is a Win 8.1 8-9 inch phone. But I'd look ridiculous with a 9-inch tablet up to my ear. lol.

I just hate that I need 2-3 devices to make it most useful.

If I could get a 13 inch notebook with a detachable screen for use as a tablet with a flat flip out keyboard for on the go, and a detachable 5 inch phone with all my data on it, that would be perfect. But the 13 inch notebook would have to be gaming capable. Come on, someone design this device to my unique requirements!

 

You know, I remember that this was actually an idea that had some support in connection with the roll-out of Windows 7 (if I remember correctly, unless it was Vista). There were some APIs and some sort of support defined for exactly the kind of companion devices you are talking about. I forgot what this was called, but someone could probably dig this out. A number of companies were showing some pretty cool concepts of laptops that had detachable companion devices. Unfortunately, none of this ever got anywhere...

 

It's $229 at MicroCenter, in-store only: Dell Venue 8 Pro Tablet BELL8-PRO81 - Micro Center

I think I did see some nifty concepts at one point, and that's ultimately where I'd like to be, personally. I think a lot of people would like companion devices, since they more or less have them already, they just don't interact seamlessly like they should. Basic storage and processing on the handheld/smartphone, which would essentially act like a storage drive when connected to the "master" device, so you could store your essential stuff on that handheld device and/or have it sync with specific files or folders. It would be nice to even have "lite" versions of software that would manage your docs like a basic word, excel, powerpoint viewer, etc.

 

Since this thread is about how Windows 8.1 sucks, maybe I should chime in with my complaint and see if anyone else has ran into it or can fix it.

I've got a Asus T100. When I set it so the display turns off after 'x' minutes, then it goes into 'lock mode'. When its in this 'lock mode' then I don't get ANY sounds from ANY desktop programs. I get my sounds from the useless homometro part of windows, but no desktop sounds. Can I seriously not save my battery life by turning of my display while listing to music via WMP, Pandora, Flash, Fubar, Spotify, VLC, ect..

None of these issues come win with windows 8, or any other windows before hand that I have used. Now I'm just curious if its a windows 8.1 thing or if its analyzing my hardarware on the T100 and gimping the ^%&*(%$%^&*( out of my system because its a '2 in 1'

 

I have a T100 as well and will see what I can do.

 

You could try disabling hardware acceleration for sound in Windows. Clover trail atoms had a similar issue with screen lock and hardware acceleration for sound. No guarantees it'll work, but it's worth a shot.

Sent from my 8X using Tapatalk

 

Hah, yes, that's what it was called!

 

No more WEI. Did it ever work?

But its not all bad: Appearance > Personalization > Display.

 

WEI has always worked perfectly fine. The only issue that WEI ever had was people not understanding what WEI was supposed to do. While, depending on your usage, you can argue that WEI did not give you the information you were looking for, you cannot say that it didn't work: it has always given exactly the information it was supposed to give.

 

WEI worked well as a random number generator.

Beamed from my G2 Tricorder

 

Not only were the numbers not random, they were highly predictable. Certain components would always land at very narrow spots. Every hard drive got the same score, which was just low enough to make one want to buy an SSD.

As a tool, it would tell you if you were getting a bad (1.0) score in something, you were missing a driver.

 

There's nothing random about it. It just sounds like you don't fully understand how it works. WEI scores are actually somewhat important. Not only can it reveal abnormalities as S.SubZero mentioned, but Windows uses the performance information it obtains from WinSAT, used to calculate the WEI, quite seriously. For example, Windows uses WinSAT to determine your drive speed and capabilities, and hence whether it should automatically disable certain features such as SuperFetch if it determines that you have an SSD. That's why people recommend running WEI as one of the setup steps for a new OS installation.

To update the individual score for a particular component, and to also see more details of the actual tests being undertaken and the detailed results, you can access WinSAT directly through a command line interface. In fact, I believe this is the only way you can run WEI in Windows 8.1 since it has been removed from the Control Panel.

 

My cynicism is lost. Not only one but three... I give up. You all win.

 

Well that's good. It would suck to die a bitter, cynical old man.

 

I caught the tongue in cheek, not sure why it was lost on others............

 

Is it still a joke if it's not funny and nobody gets it? OK maybe a bad joke.

 

On my machines WinSAT would auto run sometime after the NVidia driver was installed. During install, Windows 7 detects the zero spin of the SSD and sets optimizations accordingly: No scheduled defrag, No SuperFetch, and enables TRIM.

 

I'm nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody, too?

 

No I'm a Somebody. I like your self-deprecation though.

 

I can't believe this was online as well..all the early talk said in store only...so bummed.

Sent from my SCH-I510 using Tapatalk 2

 

Even though it was advertised as such, $99 for the first 100 online orders was never actually a thing with the way the Microsoft Store website got DDoSed, so ultimately that deal still turned out to be in-store only.

 

I'm back


And yes it was tongue in cheek. What I should have said was "it might as well be a random number generator because numbers don't mean much".

In any case I picked one up for $209 at MicroCenter. Clean install (obviously) and it's been stuck at the "checking for updates" for about 30 minutes now. Second time I've tried and it just spins there. Seriously? The screen size is ok for Metro, but for desktop it's definitely too small to do anything reasonable with it, icons are too small and difficult to click with finger. But overall the device is pretty nice. It has some heft to it, which is actually decent because I don't feel like I'm going to break it, and it is a lot more responsive than I thought it would be. It's going to be my toy I guess for a while. Mainly use it for portable movie viewing, some web surfing, and document viewing. My phone is a bit too small for that, this at least give me a much larger screen for multimedia stuff.

With the OS and MS Home & Student installed there's ~ 12GB free of 23.3GB usable storage. I was wondering if anyone ever turned on drive compression for a device like this? Even if you could gain 5-10GB it may be worth it.

edit: net stop wuauserv and deleting softwaredistribution folder worked.

edit: oh great, now the wireless adapter doesn't work. It shows as working in device manager and enable/disable doesn't do anything. Airplane mode is not on... It just gives me the wireless bars and a red circle with X... gah!

 

Yep, something from the latest Tuesday Win 8.1 updates broke the wireless. System restore and it works. Now to install one at a time to figure out which one it is. Yes, I will be your beta tester MS and Dell...

edit: they had a new BIOS and drivers at Dell's site which didn't cause the wi-fi to drop out... so all's good. But how many users will even bother doing that?

 

I missed out on this sale but probably would have jumped on it. I don't like Windows 8.1 much on a laptop, but I think on a tablet it'd be great.

 

It's still $229.99 at MicroCenter if you have a store near you.

 

Don't bother guys. I got mine the other day from Walmart and it's going back, what a letdown. I went to do the system updates and it KILLS all Wifi connections !

If you do a system reset not restore it brings back Wifi. Do the system updates again and it knocks out your Wiff-Fee connections and apparently Dell is aware of the problem according to a Google search.

The touch screen leaves a lot to be desired especially when trying to pull up an icon in the system tray. Sometimes you get it just right and other times you pull up the next icon in the systray by mistake. The clear view fonts are not as sharp as they should be and screen real estate is lacking so increasing the screen res from 1280x800 to 1920x1200 will only hurt your eyes more and make touches more inaccurate. You can get away with a high resolution in Android and iOS but Windows 8.1 on an 8" tablet just doesn't look right.

I find the battery tends to get hot if you are using the device plugged in or not. Remember this is a full blown OS the Atom is running.

The rotational animation takes some getting used to. If you go from portrait to landscape the animation begins to zoom out of the window, pause then rotates the screen. Kind of a funky way of doing things. Sometimes you think the rotation is stuck when it's not, you just have to wait for it to finish.

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I did find a KILLER deal and it's on Amazon. I bought the Lenovo Flex 15 which is kind of like the Lenovo Yoga with a lower screen res of 1366x768 and a 500GB spindle drive with 8GB cache for $575 and it comes with an Amazon $25 Windows 8 Apps gift card for free and an Amazon $50 gift card for free. So i'm returning the Venue 8 Pro and going with the Flex 15 instead.

 

The Venue 8 Pro doesn't have a 1200p screen.

 

Misleading thread title...

 

Care to elaborate on it then?? They didn't listened to tester and preview users so why wouldn't it be the O/S M$ regrets then???? And now they got 8.2 with Start Menu Aero not sure but why bring back Start Menu if 8 was in no need of it???? Kinda makes you wonder right.....whom was not listening to begin with......

 

It's a misleading thread title because this thread is actually about the Dell Venue 8 Pro and the long lines to buy it at discounted prices, not about Windows 8 at all.

I love how people talk about what 8.2 will be like it's all certain and confirmed. At most, we've had one commentator talk about what he thinks a reasonable progression would lead to.

PS--the "M$" thing was old and overdone even when Kurt Cobain was still alive...

 

Complaining about it is just about as old too...................