It turns out I was utterly, staggeringly, badly wrong.
I've been waiting to try out an x86 Windows 8 tablet, since I considered the ARM variants a bit of a waste of time, and was lucky enough to get my hands on an ASUS ViVoTab ME400c. This is very much a bottom of the range tablet, coming in much cheaper than Microsoft's Surface Pro. For the price, however, it seemed fairly well equipped.
At first things seemed to be ok. The blocky Metro UI (or whatever it's now called) was fast and fluid, opening apps was quick and responsive and things seemed to be looking up for Windows 8. Soon after, however, the rot started setting in.
The first indication of this was the "charms" bar. With a mouse and keyboard, once you know how to make it appear, displaying the charms bar is a simple affair. On the tablet, however, it was much more of a hit and miss affair - more often than not I'd end up flicking pages rather than getting the bar to appear.
The next major irritation was search - an absolute necessity if you want to get anything done in Windows 8 - which whilst not perfect with a physical keyboard, was an utterly horrible experience with the on-screen keyboard. Something as simple for searching for settings was rendered practically useless by the on-screen keyboard disappearing at inopportune moments, the search displaying no results if you hadn't pressed on the correct category beforehand and obstinately refusing to save your search string after selecting the correct one. I find it frankly incredible that simple things like this, that should have been picked up and corrected well before release, remain in the final release of Windows 8.
I was getting a bit tetchy by this stage, but thought to myself well the benefit here is that this is a full version of Windows so it's going to be compatible with practically all of my existing devices. What follows is my attempt to get a simple IrDA dongle working with my Windows 8 tablet... an experience which made all that preceded pale in comparison.
On inserting the dongle, via a handy USB to Micro USB converter, Windows made a friendly sound but gave no visual clue that anything was happening. After a few minutes of waiting, I tried searching for devices and after the fifth attempt landed up somewhere that showed an unrecognised device. Being a seasoned Windows user, I immediately went looking for the Metro equivalent of device manager. Within a few more minutes of searching, I found a likely candidate and pressed it...
...only to be dumped to the desktop where the traditional Windows Device Manager had opened, complete with tree, menu bar, min, max and close buttons. And nothing but my chubby fingers to navigate it. After about twenty attempts of stabbing the wrong icons with my fingers, accidentally closing the screen and having to return to the Metro UI to again search for it and some how managing to turn the tablet off in the process on two separate occasions, I finally managed to open the unrecognised device to see what was going on.
It turned out that Windows couldn't find a driver for the device. No worries there; all I need to do was copy the drivers from the installation CD to a network share and copy them across. It should have been that simple, but I hadn't reckoned on Windows 8. To do any file management you'll be using your chubby fingers to control an all-singing, all-dancing traditional Windows Explorer. Hell's bells was that painful! It took - and I make no exaggeration - a full on five minutes to copy the drivers across to the tablet.
Once copied across I tried using the installer that came with the drivers. This seemed to be going ok, with expected UAC prompts etc., but then failed at the end with some obscure error. Uninstalled, tried again, same result. I then had the bright idea of trying to install the drivers manually via the Device Manager and had much the same experience mentioned earlier, but finally managed to get where I needed to be to install them manually.
Windows 8 flat-out refused to have anything to do with them. By default Windows 8 wont let you install unsigned drivers. At all. You're not even the given the choice! Now you can bemoan the evils of unsigned drivers all you like, but I'm of the opinion that this is my computer and my device and I'll install anything I chose, Microsoft be damned. I set about googling the voodoo required to install unsigned drivers in Windows 8.
The, completely unobvious, solution is to reboot Windows 8 in an "advanced" mode. Good luck finding that on your own. Suffice it to say, once you've found the correct incantation Windows 8 will reboot and instruct you to press keys F1-F7 to invoke these advanced options. Guess what? There's no on-screen keyboards here, no ability to press on any of those advanced options and no way to proceed unless you attach a full, physical keyboard!
At that point I gave up on Windows 8 completely.
Conclusion
Only Microsoft, and I mean ONLY Microsoft, could release a half-arsed botch like Windows 8 and expect anyone to think it is good. Only Microsoft could release a desktop OS that requires touch controls and a tablet OS that requires a mouse and keyboard. Windows 8 is bad as a desktop OS, Windows 8 is bad as tablet OS. Windows 8 is bad full stop. Avoid.
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