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Microsoft Announces Windows 8.1 With Bing To Sell Cheaper Devices 124

Posted by Soulskill from the borrowing-from-amazon's-playbook dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft today confirmed the rumors of a new edition of its latest operating system by unveiling Windows 8.1 with Bing. The company says the main purpose of the new SKU is to allow its hardware partners to sell lower-cost Windows devices; the first ones with the new edition will be announced next month at Computex in Tapei. Windows 8.1 with Bing is exactly like Windows 8.1 with the recently released Windows 8.1 Update, with one major difference: Bing is set as the default search engine in Internet Explorer. Users can still change that option in IE's search engine settings, but OEMs do not have that luxury."
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Microsoft Announces Windows 8.1 With Bing To Sell Cheaper Devices More

Microsoft Announces Windows 8.1 With Bing To Sell Cheaper Devices

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  • So.... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by CTU ( 1844100 ) on Friday May 23, 2014 @04:23PM (#47078811) Journal

    install the browser of choice and this only means you got a copy of 8.1 that was a bit cheaper without any real difference? Gotcha, besides not like the majority of computer users are still using IE so in truth this would only matter to the small perce=nt of users who both don't download a different browser or know/care to change the default search engine.

  • Excellent (Score:4, Funny)

    by BilI_the_Engineer ( 3618871 ) on Friday May 23, 2014 @04:26PM (#47078851)

    Google just cannot compare to Bing. I'm a rabid, frothing Binger for one reason: There is nothing that Bing cannot find! Bing found a cure for my uncle's cancer. Bing found the answer to all well-known unsolved math problems. Wherever you go, people prefer Bing over Google.

    Don't believe me? Bing it on, you insignificant insect! Luddites such as you are unwelcome in the 21st century! [slashdot.org]

  • Waiter! Can I get this without the bing?

    • Re:Waiter! (Score:5, Funny)

      by rubycodez ( 864176 ) on Friday May 23, 2014 @04:41PM (#47078997)

      well, there's bing, IE 11, widows 8.1 and bing, that's not got much bing in it

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Egg and bacon
      Egg, sausage and bacon
      Egg and Bing
      Egg, bacon and Bing
      Egg, bacon, sausage and Bing
      Bing, bacon, sausage and Bing
      Bing, egg, Bing, Bing, bacon and Bing
      Bing, Bing, Bing, egg and Bing
      Bing, Bing, Bing, Bing, Bing, Bing, baked beans, Bing, Bing, Bing and Bing
      Lobster Thermidor aux crevettes with a Mornay sauce, garnished with truffle pâté, brandy and a fried egg on top, and Bing.

    • Just as Internet Explorer is "program for downloading Firefox", Bing is "web site for searching for Firefox". Use Bing in IE once to find Firefox. Then you can install Firefox without the Bing.

      Or s/Firefox/Chrome/g in the above if that's your cup of tea. Personally, I'll have the egg, sausage, and bacon with a Diet Mtn Dew.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by sl149q ( 1537343 )

        Download chrome
        Download classic shell
        Download cygwin

        And you now have a really nice windows system. I prefer it to Windows 7!

        Very occasionally I stumble across some weird "tile" like things but one of them is labelled Desktop and that restores things to normal quickly :-)

      • Don't even do this mate!

        Your IE is vulnerable to any malware that will pop-up through an ad, so keep your interaction with IE to a minimum.

        • Open explorer (Win-E). Type www.ninite.com [ninite.com] (ninite singular, not ninites, that's a fake site last I checked).
        • Important, as soon as IE comes-up, you will need to kill the second tab before any advert loads.
        • Select Chrome/Firefox/Security essentials and whatever else you might need

        Or if you really can't remember the website's name (happens with old age), just type www.i [ie7.com]

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Richy_T ( 111409 )

        Firefox can be downloaded with FTP. No IE required.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tepples ( 727027 )

          Firefox can be downloaded with FTP.

          From which host? I thought releases.mozilla.org was HTTP- and HTTPS-only because Mozilla's CDN doesn't support anonymous FTP, and ftp.mozilla.org didn't let anonymous visitors download the high-traffic main releases. (Source: MOTD of each FTP server)

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Richy_T ( 111409 )

            My information may be out of date. I have definitely done it once or twice in the past though.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Richy_T ( 111409 )

            Just got from ftp.mozilla.org. Username: ftp, password: email address (anything with an @ in it often works)

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Richy_T ( 111409 )

            Oh, ISWYM. Hmm. Just get an older release and update. If your aim is to sidestep IE, that should be close enough.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Richy_T ( 111409 )

      And get the machine that goes "Bing"!

  • I want a "Windows Gaming Edition".

    Why is Windows so expensive? I'm trying to build a low-cost gaming PC (Celeron G1840, GT 640, etc) and the cost of the Windows license is greater than the CPU and the motherboard combined!

    • To elaborate, I don't need things like a text editor, printer/scanner/digital camera/tape backup/etc drivers, minesweeper and who knows what else comes with Windows these days.

      Also, why is there no lower-cost upgrade path for Windows XP users? "Got a Windows XP license? Here's Windows 8.1 for 50% off" or something.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by 0123456 ( 636235 )

        Also, why is there no lower-cost upgrade path for Windows XP users? "Got a Windows XP license? Here's Windows 8.1 for 50% off" or something.

        Many Windows XP users are still using it because the alternative is Window 8.

        • Others, because it still works and they have no reason to waste money on a new machine. I know at least two such people. Me? I have WinXP Pro in a Xen DomU, just in case I need something windowsy. It's always on, and I connect to it using RDP over an SSH tunnel. Sure, I rarely use it, but it's there should I need it and it's a better solution than having a XP VM on each of my Linux machines.

          At work I have a Win7 VM in VirtualBox, it is horribly, horribly slow. The XP VM on the same VirtualBox host, i

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Hadlock ( 143607 )

      Have you tried installing Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 (which is FREE), and then back in to it? It doesn't come with anything except powershell, task manager and a set of network drivers and features like NIC teaming, Storage Spaces, etc. and of course the Hyper V role installed.

      As an exercise in futility I managed to get bbLean installed (explorer.exe shell, since the OS doesn't come with one), which allowed me to get Google Chrome and Steam installed, before I ran out of interest trying to get

      • I don't know. I'm running KVM on Debian 7 with DRBD replicating all my guests to a backup VM host server. When I looked at Hyper-V, I found out that to replicate my set up would cost me roughly $10,000, and that's before I even buy the actual physical servers.

        If I'm going to be using the CLI to manage virtual machines, I stick with libvirt's toolset.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      steam!

  • Bing == FAIL! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by whoever57 ( 658626 ) on Friday May 23, 2014 @04:41PM (#47078989) Journal
    I tried the "Bing it On" website when it was being heavily advertised on TV. Guess what: the Bing results failed to load (server problems). Utter failure.

  • Can you upgrade (Score:4, Informative)

    by rossdee ( 243626 ) on Friday May 23, 2014 @04:43PM (#47079017)

    Can you upgrade it (for free) to Win 7 and Seamonkey?

    You'd have to pay me a lot to use Win 8.x

  • Hint: In 2 years I have yet to see a Surface "in the wild" nor has ANYONE asked about a Surface.

    • Re: (Score:1, Troll)

      by edremy ( 36408 )
      Flip side: our department has bought a bunch and will be buying more in the future. For developing online learning materials, a Surface + Camtasia simply blows away everything else out there- a full PC capable of running all Windows software + every bizarre web thing out there, with a high resolution pen and OneNote. You can even edit the resulting video directly on the machine.

    • Is a Surface a lot like the British half-penny, where the users didn't want to part with them because they were useful for leveling furniture?

      • Did you know a British 2 pence piece weighs 1/4 of an ounce a penny an 1/8th and the half pence coin a 16th of an ounce?

        Wieghing coins is probably still quicker than counting them but those 3 coins were especially useful :)

         

  • Wait a second (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Isn't this essentially MS admitting that Bing is a search Engine you should have to be compensated for using?

  • Antitrust (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Nethemas the Great ( 909900 ) on Friday May 23, 2014 @04:56PM (#47079141)
    Sounds like their fishing for another round of EU antitrust proceedings.

    • Re:Antitrust (Score:4, Informative)

      by Nethemas the Great ( 909900 ) on Friday May 23, 2014 @05:01PM (#47079179)
      Err. in case the Nazis show up... "they're".

    • I was under the impression that this was part of the way they intended to compete with android. free os for small arm devices with bing as the default search and an app store.

      http://thenextweb.com/microsof... [thenextweb.com]

      • The M$ IoT cannot have storage nor local apps as they MUST make you use the $Cloud (for their business model to work)? IoT is for fridge, picture frame, thermostat kind-of stuff...

        These here are likely intended for 9" tabletoids of sort, I think, now that Surface Pro is for Pros and Business and no hear about non-Pro versions....so it's more a replacement for Windows RT (an ARM Windows so to speak)?

        But how they can still go through with this legally I do not understand...pretty sure they spend lots of $$ on

    • Sounds like their fishing for another round of EU antitrust proceedings.

      Would that be before or after Google and it's legion of allies get roasted by the EU antitrust authority for making Google the default search engine on Android devices?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Rob Y. ( 110975 )

        Does Google require that they're the default search engine on Android devices? I thought at one point Verizon was selling android devices with Bing as the default search engine. Google Play access has some strings attached, but I think an OEM can still change the launcher, etc. How about the defaults? I think Amazon and Nokia don't get Google Play because they don't want their devices to be able to run Google services - not because they simply refuse to make them the default.

        • Does Google require that they're the default search engine on Android devices? I thought at one point Verizon was selling android devices with Bing as the default search engine. Google Play access has some strings attached, but I think an OEM can still change the launcher, etc. How about the defaults? I think Amazon and Nokia don't get Google Play because they don't want their devices to be able to run Google services - not because they simply refuse to make them the default.

          I don't know does it require that? I don't really give a crap whether one can dig through a forest of configuration menus to change the default search engine on Android. I'm also pretty sure OEMs that choose to piss google off by making the Bing or Yahoo search engines default thus enabling the enemy to siphon off your personal data (and which rightfully belongs to Google) are few and far between. The EU competition authority didn't give a rats ass that you could install alternate browsers on Windows and fo

  • I know that there will be a lot of negative comments here about Bing, but when Microsoft started paying people to use Bing [bing.com], I switched. The web results seem to be just as good as Google. I can't tell the difference. The image results seem to be slightly behind, but for the ~$8/month I make, I don't mind at all. :)

  • Bing is good for rewards & zeitgeist (Score:3, Informative)

    by nomad63 ( 686331 ) on Friday May 23, 2014 @05:18PM (#47079299)
    I religiously visit bing for about 5 minutes daily, to get my points and see which celebrity is diddling which one or who had a fight with whom. Other than that, it might not as well exist. I am still unable to find something that can replace google. Tried duckduckgo but tomorrow, I am going back to google. Results are abysmal at best.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hduff ( 570443 )

      Perhaps you can write a script that will do that for you and possibly make some random clicks.

  • Let me guess, this edition is not available in the EU where Microsoft got in trouble for bundling IE with Windows XP.

  • Someone please forward the memo to microsoft. They can stop referencing BING as if it's a thing.
    It's a DEAD thing.

    [click here to have Bing translate this thing lol]

  • ... in the butt.

  • It wasn't already?! (Score:3)

    by mattack2 ( 1165421 ) on Friday May 23, 2014 @06:09PM (#47079757)

    Bing wasn't their default search engine already?

    (I guess even they like google better!!)

  • Microsoft To Sell Cheaper Devices. Sounds like HTC Samsung tactics.

  • "Bing, the discount search engine!"

  • This is indeed a smart move to seed Bing. In fact, Bing is getting better and better all the time and is a comparable search engine to Google, still catching up but with a solid tech behind. Guess what? The more people use Bing, the more data its algorithms have to operate with in order to make itself better. So seeding the search engine is very important, considering that MS has all set of competing services comparing to Google.

    Now what this change actually does? It defines what search engine is used for p

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