Comments on: Windows H8

By: James Sutherland

James Sutherland — Sun, 28 Oct 2012 11:30:55 +0000

Sadly no – there will be limits to how much monitor capacity the tablet can drive, as well as how many.

With the non-ARM Windows 8 tablets, you might be able to get a USB video card working to drive a decent screen area, with a hefty performance hit from going through USB. A proper laptop will do much better, some of them having the graphics card power to drive two or even three monitors directly, which would be nice.

(Dream setup right now? Probably a 15″ Retina MacBook Pro, driving a pair of 27″ Thunderbolt displays… if only it were affordable!)

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By: Brian

Brian — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 19:31:44 +0000

Very nice analogy, I’m hoping too for the good kind of innovation (like Office 2007) as opposed to the bad kind of innovation (like Windows Vista?). Many reviewers seem very happy with Windows 8 so I’m feeling optimistic so far.

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By: wendy

wendy — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 06:52:07 +0000

surely all you need for the multimon is a docking station for the tablet that has connections to the monitors and a more comfortable keypad. I’m really overwhelmed by how much effort I, as consumer, have to put into thinking about a vision for my technology infrastructure in order to make a decision about buying a computer. I can now totally empathise with the ‘damn it I want a tablet I’ll have one” approach that leads to emergent home technology networks rather than the simple, efficeint and beautiful infrastructure that I aspire to.

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By: ExpatEgghead

ExpatEgghead — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 06:07:25 +0000

I agree. Making the change to a tablet after dual big screens is hard. If I need small and quick, well, the phone does the basics and more. Win8 ready? Hmmm. Anyway, as all PC process are 64 bits these days running a 32 bit operating system does not make sense. 32 BIt OS = 3.5Gbyte memory available no matter how much you plug in. 64 bit OS and you have have as much memory as you can afford and everything runs so much quicker. The downside is drivers.

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By: James Sutherland

James Sutherland — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 21:25:13 +0000

I imagine almost any PC you could buy now would be Win8-compatible, assuming you do go the PC route rather than a tablet or other rival platform.

I’m starting to think about heavier tablet use; I read a blog post by one full-time developer who moved to using an iPad exclusively! He does have a “proper” PC – a virtual machine from Linode – behind the scenes, but he does all his email and web browsing on the pad itself, then uses X (Unix remote desktop) to run the software that needs it. If I could get a giant tablet I might be tempted to try it myself, but the tiny screen would just seem too cramped after a full size desktop/laptop setup for so long…

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By: wendy

wendy — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 13:16:03 +0000

Expat – that is a very powerful point in favour of windows8. My Teccy friends that dont work for Microsoft (run everything on Apples and use Windows licences for virtual machines, they get all goooey when they talk about virtual machines) say I should buy a windows 7 machine that is hardware compatible with Windows 8 then wait until Microsft releases SP1 – then do a cheap upgrade to win8. That makes me feel all teccy myself. Upgrade an OS (have done it before)! I might wander into John Lewis’s this weekend and see what their salesstaff suggests – though I do like this manufacturer’s ‘Refurbished’ laptops as a potential bargain…

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By: ExpatEgghead

ExpatEgghead — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 06:55:18 +0000

Yes, you will. So don’t buy a conventional laptop and your audience will learn from your experience.

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