Working around Windows 8's deficiencies (desktop, games, monitor, screen)

[EscapeCalifornia]

I finally got a chance to play with Start8 tonight. Its really nice and fixes most of my UI complaints against Win8. It can banish the Metro environment completely or integrate it more gracefully into Windows. It can also disable any or all of the hot corners and charms bar when in the desktop. Microsoft is straight up retarded if they don't include something like as an update to Win8.

I also downloaded 8GadgetPack which restores Vista/7's sidebar gadget functionality to Win8. I run a number of gadgets to monitor system metrics and weather on the far right edge of my right monitor. I would definitely miss those.

Someone on another forum showed that WinXP's desktop games can be copied to a Win8 PC pretty easily. Basically, you copy all of the .exe files (sol.exe, freecell.exe, etc) and the cards.dll file from the Windows folder to any folder of your choosing and copy them to Win8. They're so simple that no installation is required. Yes, I know you can download new versions of them through the Microsoft Store but that requires a Microsoft account and they're full screen Metro apps. Blech.

DVD playback was removed in Win8 but of course there's free alternatives like VLC. The UI is clunkier but it works.

Right now, the biggest thing lacking in Win8 that I can think of and haven't found a solution to is Windows XP Mode. Yes, I know Win8 comes with a version of Hyper-V but it has hardware requirements that XP Mode didn't have, lacks a licensed copy of WinXP, and doesn't support USB pass-through. On this item, the biggest obstacle is the lack of USB pass-through since I'm using it to support a scanner that doesn't have a 64 bit driver. I'm afraid the only solution here is going to mean spending a bunch of money to replace a perfectly functional scanner should I upgrade to Win8.

Out of the box, Windows 8 associates various file types with Metro apps. For example, if you're in the desktop and double click a JPG or PDF, it'll open in a full screen Metro app. Yuck. All of the Win8 machines I've seen so far shipped without a PDF reader other than Microsoft's Metro Reader app. If you install a 3rd party PDF reader, it should associate itself with PDFs. If not, you can right click on one in Explorer, and choose Open With, Choose Default Program. Set it to your PDF reader of choice. For pictures, you can do the same thing with each picture file type (JPG, TIF, PNG, etc) and choose to open them with the Windows Photo Viewer.

Windows 8's pitiful Metro Mail app lacks POP3 support. If you need a POP3 mail client, you can still download and install Windows Live Essentials 2012. I suggest downloading the full installer (about 135MB) and hanging onto it in case Microsoft pulls it some day. You don't have to install the whole suite. Windows Live Mail 2012 is the successor to Windows Mail from Vista and Outlook Express from XP and earlier. Outlook 2013 still supports POP3 but its not free. Mozilla Thunderbird is still available but is no longer being developed.