A friend asks: "How do you like Windows 8?"

A long-time friend asked me in an email "How do you like Windows 8? How does it compare to Windows 7?"

I had to stop and ask myself how best to answer those questions, because in the excitement of discovering what the new operating system has in it and what it's all about, I hadn't really stopped to ask myself those very questions. And let's face it - these are important questions.

My Start Screen is slowly filling out with its cute (and handy!) little tiles.....

 And there's more Free Apps available now, including useful ones like 'USA Today' and 'The LA Times', and of course a scattering of games, games, games for all those with nothing better to do..... which prompts yet another burning question: "Who the hell's actually working to pay this phone bill if all you boobs are playing your mindless little games on these cute little toys?" - Or should I ask? Who's getting richer right now - computer software companies or the phone company? Are we all going to end up working for the phone company so we can pay for all this air time in cyberspace? One wonders, Kiddies!

But I digress - sorry about that. In answering my friend's question, I had to ask myself some hard questions, like "What am I doing with Windows 8 that I couldn't do just as well with Windows 7?" And the answer is: "Nothing!" But let me qualify that, lest you think I don't like this new iteration of Windows. I like it fine, but I can't do a fair and equitable test of it without having a touch enabled computer, which mine isn't. Without which, I can't really make full and intended use of these newest features in Windows 8 centered around the touch features which are becoming more popular and therefore more important to an operating system.

I bought a new quad-core computer while testing the first beta of Windows 7, which as we all know runs best on multicore processors with lots of RAM and a graphics card having its own separate RAM as well. I'll spare you my rant about 'engineered obsolescence' here, but let's say you shouldn't try to put a forty dollar saddle on a ten dollar horse. Been there and done that - the horse died anyway. Anyhooo - getting back to Windows 8, Windows hasn't been re-invented so much as evolved. This isn't about preaching to those of us among the converted, but rather it's an evangelical effort aimed at those darlings with the cute little hand-helds who are desperately in need of better programming for those gadgets, and more ways to use one, and all of that being above all easy, quick, dependable, and hopefully affordable.

Windows 8 therefore is Windows 7 optimized for the mobile market - all those people everywhere seemingly always doing something on their phones or their tablets, while ignoring us traditional computer users with our bulky PCs and our keyboards and our mice. In other words, it's carefully aimed at you of the thumb-typing generation, you precious darlings whom we've spoiled rotten with these essential toys and gadgets. Now, Kiddies, it's "payback time" and we want you to actually perform some useful work on those time-consuming toys. And Windows 8 will connect you and your hand-held to a cloud in which you will have pretty-much everything at your fingertips that we of the PC crowd have enjoyed since the invention of the byte, kilobyte, and megabyte, and now hopefully, this technology is going to byte you, and get you into the productive phone-bill-paying crowd of self-supporting cybernoids. Get the picture? Good! So go get Windows 8! Put those thumbs to work... Do I look like your mother? And get the hell off the couch! - Any questions?