I have been using Windows 8 on my 5+ year old PC laptop for awhile now and have been happy enough with it. In fact, I always encourage anyone I know to update to Windows 8.  Its worth it.  The “metro” part of win8 however, has never been of much value to me.  Actually, no value.  In fact, it gets in the way. I have to manually change the OS setting to never open a metro app or whatever they are called.

But now that my evaluation version has aged out, I decided to buy Windows 8 pro.  The downside is that all my app got blown away so I have to reinstall everything.  One of the first apps I wanted to install was Skype. I decided however that I would give the metro apps another try.

I installed the win8 skype app.  All went well enough. I did not understand how to get to my history but I figured I would work it out over time.  I sent a Skype  message to someone and then went back to the desktop to do email.  After 15min I was wondering why I have not heard back.  I manaully went back to Skype and I had a reply waiting for me.  FAIL.

99% of desktop PC users are going to use, you guessed it, the standard desktop to do most of their work.  So why would I not have notifications working on the desktop?  Basically once I go into the desktop, the win8 apps may as well not exist because there is no link between the two worlds.

I’m still happy with Windows 8, it has taken my old PC and granted it a few more years of life. But the whole metro bit.  Waste of code and memory. In fact, I’m waiting for a hack that will unload all this and squeeze even more performance out of this thing.  And perhaps get the Start button back too.