"I am sorry to inform you that we do not have any option to disable the Charms Bar in Windows 8."
OMG, when I pay hundreds of my hard-earned dollars, especially in this economy, I expect to customize my product after purchasing. Did Microsoft have regular people try Win 8 for awhile before releasing it?
Got it!!! Its simple, go to control panel, synaptics touchpad and disable side swipe function, simples. it was really beginning to annoy me.
And unfortunately this only helps if you have a synaptics touchpad
As for "did they have regular people try it?" I doubt. Some MS mid-upper manager was BSing on reddit about how they did extensive research to make 8.1 have the optimal user interface.
Either he was full of it, or those supposed studies were totally worthless. The results were probably either totally meaningless (which means anyone can use them to support any pet agenda they might have) or the studies were designed specifically to support
the decisions someone had already made.
Yes we did studies (after we made the decisions) and see how they "proved" our decisions were right?
I settled for windows vista and 7 over Linux because 1) I didn't want to dual boot, 2) I wanted to play certain games without taking a sysadmin refresher course in linux in order to play them
And overall windows 7 worked out pretty well. I could do what I wanted without too much ridiculous extra steps (gee you want to do something simple? lets force you to person 27 different actions to achieve that result) and windows 7 was moderately customizable.
Now we have windows 8.1 which is almost not customizable and has a lot different options completely removed, all to push the magical modern UI that everyone is going to love so much they'll do tons and tons of free development to build apps that MS management
knows are needed but is too cheap or greedy to spend money on without then charging their customers 10X or most the cost (and probably pushing the "price" win81 so high that even the most avid of mac/linux haters would switch from MS to one of the alternative)
The metro ui is good enough for certain physical interfaces, like tablets, and for doing very simple tasks. But it is not capable of supporting serious or complex tasks yet without a much amount of time/manpower investment. And it looks very much like someone
at MS really thought the users would give MS their time and effort and build nice base of user developed apps.
*sigh* I've semi-ranting for too long already.
It's just a sign at how fed up I am at being almost stuck with MSWin81.
Once I get some warranty repairs on my laptop, I'm voiding the remaining warranty to put in an SSD AND install either open bsd or linux.
That's how sick I am of it.
Before they had a solution that wasn't perfect but did provide more than token amount of choice to the user AND it was pretty reliable.
They took that, stripped out most of the choices and stripped out at lot of the usability, and replaced it with a new interface that they were hoping someone else would finish for them, for FREE.
Wow, talk about a winning strategy.