Win9 - will MS understand what is needed?

These are just preference complaints, nothing broken.

1. Aero was fundamentally flawed in that it put an artificial strain on your GPU, and had to be disabled whenever running a full screen app due to performance issues. That is a bad design. As for the flat design, its not going away, even if i don't care for it either. Ubuntu went to it, Microsoft went to it, Apple went to it, Google is going to it. So to blame MS solely on this one? Not uh.

2. It falls back to your last used live ID password that worked on that machine if not online. That is a non-issue.

3. I'll give you that but from a consumer perspective its a non-issue. F8 "can" work to get you to recovery options, but only if you do not use an SSD (the window of opportunity is too short).

4. It makes more sense than managing stuff like that from two places: msconfig and taskmgr. Msconfig is a tech tool and dangerous for the typical consumer to use. You can't break your OS (that a reboot won't fix) with taskmgr, and have access to what consumers would want to use msconfig for. I'm not sure what you mean fill the screen on startup. It doesn't come close to filling up my screen, and the default view is quite simple: a list of tasks with a end task button.

5. Apple calls it by computer name which isn't useful either. I've yet to see a good solution to this from anyone.

6. Which?

7. There are no charms in Windows 8. These is a charms bar which few will use anyway because the features are easier to access via keyboard shortcut. A widget is a gadget is an app. This is true, they are all the same in the end. Blame patents for the radical swing in name changes between OSes.

8. If you don't know the different ways, sure. Otherwise, its the same amount of clicks. It takes 3 clicks from a couple areas:

a. start page > power button > shutdown
b. alt-f4 from desktop > choose option > shutdown

 

Our situations differ, perhaps broken is the wrong term, but these are causing or will cause problems.
1) Losing Aero will break FRAPS. You can turn off Aero, although I know of noone that has done it. Aero is one of Win 7's best features IMHO.
2) That non-issue has cost me a few hours looking up how to get around it. Once I found out and explained the office wants to know how much data MS is keeping on them. With Snowden in the news so much noone wants yet another database on them. Game Explorer was bad enough, failing when the internet is down or slow, but login fails? Try it, without a local account it does fail for me. Last password does not work.
3) we run all SSD's or raided SSD's with a few Revodrives
4) Pretty much agreed the more I think about it. In Win 7 fastest way to task manager for most is ctrl alt del which fills the screen
5) actually Apple has the best solution to date for the user because they know the name of the computer, not so good for support perhaps
6) 7) 8) opinions vary as does the problems they cause

 

Press 'Off' button on keyboard => Computer turns off...0_o.

 

Two words:

Customizable Shell

 

When I worked for Apple we were given strict guidelines for what is better.
The UI was tested for speed once learned, new user friendliness, extensibility (will it work for the next OS). Above all else you were not to do anything without communicating to the user.
Windows changed all that, now we spend a lot of time in OSX and Win wondering if that click worked or if the program crashed when the program is actually working fine and neglecting to put the user as a priority. Adding features and selling them is the new mantra, even if they aren't of any value.

"Customizable Shell" would be really good idea.

Two things come to mind for UI suggestions. One is a "support" UI the tech can invoke to get a standard UI and invoke again to return to the user's custom UI. The other is to incrementally step up the UI customization available to the user. i.e MS should stop re-inventing the wheel and let users do it through evolution.

 

DailyTech had an interesting comment
"W7 was a big jump in terms of hardware support over XP (DX11, SSD TRIM, AVX, booting to +2TB discs, native 4k partition alignment, USB 3.0, Bluetooth +2.1, UDF 2.6, etc), but strip away the marketing BS & UI changes, and W8-9 vs W7 is ultimately about selling an OS with an integrated advertising billboard as per Google & Apple."
Nice list of why 7 beats XP. Now I have to find a concise list of what 8 and 9 offer.