Playing Minecraft on Windows 8.1 in 2022…

In today’s video we’re going to be installing windows 8.1 on my low end gaming pc so far on my channel i’ve played minecraft on windows 11 from windows 7. i’ve played minecraft on mac os i’ve tried linux but the one thing i haven’t tried is windows 8.1 so yeah

We’re going to be revisiting it today seeing what it’s like to use in 2022 and we’re going to be trying to install minecraft and do some gaming on there if you’re new around here make sure to leave a like on this video and subscribe down below now i actually have a windows

8.1 disc which we’re going to be using to install also let me know in the comments if you want me to try arch linux i know a lot of people in the comments have been telling me to do this so maybe i’ll get my act together and

Get on and do it look out for that in an upcoming video so yeah let’s go ahead and get switched over to my low end pc and install it windows 8.1 originally came out in august of 2013. windows 8.1 was the successor to windows 8. windows 8.1 improved over windows 8

In many ways such as the start screen so you now have a start button rather than nothing on windows 8 so that was a big improvement at the time overall windows 8.1 got a much more positive reception over windows 8. however still got a lot of criticism through metro apps which

We’ll be looking at in this video official support for windows 8.1 ended in 2018 and the extended support is set to end in january 2023 i remember at the time windows 8.1 was used quite a lot on touchscreen laptops which were just starting to emerge lots of tablets that were laptops and laptops

That were tablets however for a desktop pc user windows 8.1 wasn’t as intuitive just didn’t really feel natural navigating some of the menus using a keyboard and mouse as of right now only 2.83 of pcs in the world are actually running windows 8.1 so microsoft did a pretty good job in

Getting everyone to upgrade to windows 10 mainly by making the upgrade free from windows 7 and windows 8 we’re going to take a look at all of that in this video so yeah let’s go ahead whip out my disc and get this installed on my computer

Alright guys so here we are on the windows 8 setup screen and yeah it’s a pretty standard windows install if you ever installed windows before it’s pretty much like that it’s going to be a little bit slower because we are running off of a disk so the setup might take a

Little while it actually feels weird using windows 8 after all this time i’ve been using windows 10 for absolutely ages now and honestly windows 8 feels a lot like windows 7 really a lot of uh similar elements but yeah we’re going to go ahead and

Install it on my main drive here i think this had ggos on it before so yeah let’s just go ahead and do a nice partition wipe and uh get it installed so yeah i’ll be back once it’s installed like i said it’s probably going to take ages because we’re running off an

Optical disk oh wow that actually went quite quick there all right and here we are on the windows 8.1 setup screen so first thing we need to do is pick a color so this is pretty cool you can like personalize your pc let’s go for a

Gray nice notre dame colors there we go and yeah you can just go ahead and either customize or use the express settings you know what these settings are pretty good as they are so let’s just go ahead and do that oh wow they don’t actually phone home by default that’s actually pretty cool

Okay i lied advertising id that can go windows location okay some of this stuff can go and that’s it windows 8.1 is set up that’s actually pretty easy i thought it was going to take a lot longer than that let’s see our windows 8.1 desktop all right here we are on windows 8.1

First of all it has opened up the start menu which is full screen on windows 8. we can go ahead and go to our desktop here and yeah this is pretty much where you want to be basically you don’t really want to be on your start menu with all

Of this it’s pretty annoying good thing about windows 8.1 over windows 8 is there’s actually a start button here i remember on the original windows 8 there was nothing here it was all very kind of touch screen focus so if you didn’t have a touch screen computer you’re pretty much screwed but

Yeah it’s good that they made some improvements in windows 8.1 but yeah let me know in the comments down below are you a fan of this windows start menu yes or no i think it’s quite cool but just not really for desktop pcs if you’re using a keyboard and mouse it’s

Quite difficult to use and navigate and yeah it just doesn’t really feel as intuitive in terms of pre-installed apps we haven’t actually got that many surprisingly so we’ve got some just standard apps here like calculator calendar camera mail all of this stuff but there’s no like candy crush or

Pre-installed bloatware like there is on windows 10 so yeah it’s just everything you kind of need really if we don’t want skype i think we can yeah we can just go ahead and uninstall it which is quite easy and straightforward maybe if we’re not interested in finance

Yeah we can just uninstall it which is really easy none of this stuff is permanently here although i think oh wow really it’s not going to let us uninstall internet explorer but yeah for a low end pc would i recommend windows 8.1 uh it’s hard to say let’s go ahead and

Get minecraft installed on here and see what the kind of performance is like but yeah there’s lots of like windows 7 style stuff like these icons here straight out of windows 7. it’s pretty much like if windows 7 met windows 10 and it’s quite interesting actually some

Of the design we obviously don’t have a dart mode or anything like that so it’s going to be pretty bright if we go ahead and look at our specs here here we go 4th gen i5 8 gig of ram like i said this is my ebay gaming pc which we’re going

To be trying it on today if we hover over here we’ve got some quick shortcuts like search little share menu start menu devices and a quick little settings toggle here which is quite good it’s just it’d be a lot better if it was easier to get to

But the one thing i’m not really a big fan of on windows 8 is all these apps are basically full screen apps so if i say wanted to go on music it would open up and there’s like no close button it’s very touch screen orientated so i can’t

Like go ahead and close this and open up something else i’ve got to go back to the start menu and then go here and internet explorer is like its own full screen application as well so you’ve got a i much prefer just the desktop if i open something up here i’ve

Got the close button i can make it bigger and smaller and it’s not just intrusive full screen app i don’t think there’s any way to see what apps you’re running in the background either so if i just open up like food and drink and then open up

Weather i don’t think there’s a way to see the background apps so i think as soon as you go to the start menu it closes it or does it run in the background it’s so confusing oh here we go task manager yep here they all are and there’s no way to close out

Of them apart from just uh going in the task manager and ending the task real quick as for background processes and stuff like that we’ve got about 11 here which isn’t too oh wow it’s just gone to eight it’s actually pretty cool i don’t know why stores always open i don’t know if

We can get rid of that oh we can maybe i just had it open but forgot to close it so these are all the background processes here we’ve got 23 windows processes which is actually really good like this is basically like stripped-down windows 10 kind of level

In fact i think it might even be less yeah i’m actually pretty surprised by this but yeah bear in mind this is a fresh install of windows 8.1 so if you are going to be using this as your daily it’s probably going to fill up but i

Mean 1 2 cpu usage 14 memory zero percent disk i could get behind this this is this is really good it definitely feels really snappy as well all right guys so i’ve connected to my internet and we’re gonna go ahead and install firefox all right so i’ve just installed firefox

Here we could use the included internet explorer but microsoft has sadly discontinued it very recently everyone just used it to install google chrome with anyway so it never really had that kind of purpose so yeah i’ve gone ahead and i’ve installed firefox here and now i’m just

Going to go ahead and install minecraft and see how it runs on windows 8.1 all right here we go and that’s it all right so here we are on the minecraft launcher now as always we’re gonna go ahead and play 1.8.9 minecraft all right and here we are finally on minecraft 1.8.9

So i did have to do a couple of driver installs in order to get this to work as you can see my resolutions now changed all the icons down the bottom have got smaller so yeah we should have our graphics drivers and we should be good to go basically

Let’s go ahead and throw 5fps put your predictions in the comments and we’re getting wow 40 fps okay i mean it’s not too bad i suppose i mean bear in mind we are on vanilla 1.8.9 no optifine let’s go ahead and turn on vsync and put that up there how many now

Still about 40 not the best really but we are on pretty high settings for this low end pc so if we go ahead and look at our task manager here as you can see not a lot really going on in the background we’ve got java here which is obviously minecraft we’ve got the

Launcher open which is not taking up any cpu usage and other than that this is pretty pretty good to be honest with you pretty streamlined so if you’ve got a low end or older pc out there but you still want to use windows i’d probably recommend checking out a stripped-down version of windows

10 like atlas os or ggos if you want to check out my videos on them i’ll leave them in the top right hand corner but hey for nostalgia’s sake windows 8 it’s not actually too bad all right let’s go ahead and throw on some realistic video settings so yeah

Let’s go ahead and turn on this setting this magic setting always improves my fps let’s go and put our graphics on fast turn off smooth lighting maybe power render distance on about five turn off clouds decrease particles here we go then if we go into full screen doesn’t seem to work

That is really weird what is going on why is my head keep turning i’m not even touching my mouse right now i’m drunk in minecraft guys yeah so for some reason full screen might work i’ve pressed in the full screen f11 and this is just not full screen i can still

See my desktop it’s pretty weird and when i go out of full screen it’s this tiny window here and i can’t control my head what is going on all right guys so i’m back and i seem to have fixed my problem so what i ended up needing to do was i

Needed to go and get my intel hd graphics driver so i just went ahead and i got that off their site and now i’m good to go basically if you have a look at my fps now look at that it’s insane it’s about 150 fps whereas before we had

About say like 30 or 40 which wasn’t so good so yeah it’s made a massive improvement to our fps and now we can play properly in full screen so yeah that’s a big bonus we’re still on windows 8.1 as you just saw there and we don’t have that weird thing where my

Minecraft couch is just going around in circles uncontrollably which is also good so yeah i’m a massive fan of windows 8.1 i do remember sticking with this operating system for quite a while before getting windows 10 eventually and despite the weird start menu and just and just the weird way it does

Things it’s still really good it’s still a really minimal operating system we’ve got hardly any background processes really so yeah end of support is coming very soon but you might be able to get a couple of months usage out of this i’m sure the community will come together

And create windows updates for windows 8.1 when it does eventually lose support but yeah vanilla 1.8.9 150 fps on my lowering computer i’m really happy with that i think that’s probably the best fps i’ve seen this computer get so far next thing we’re going to do is we’re

Going to try the latest minecraft 1.19 version and they’ve just recently bought out optifine for it so let’s go ahead and download and install it all right guys so i’ve got minecraft 1.19 and optifine installed so we’re going to create a new world here and see

How it runs on windows 8.1 now i haven’t actually used the latest version on my low end pc just yet so with the new optifine on here be interesting to see how it runs and here we are on minecraft 1.19 straight away it feels pretty laggy but yeah let’s go ahead and

Throw up our fps here and wow i’m actually surprised at that 80 fps is pretty good it’s going to full screen here now a lot of people tell me off for using the debug menu so let’s go ahead and enable the fps through optifine there we go and yeah this is the fps

We’re getting 1.19 optifine on windows 8.1 on my low end pc so yeah it does feel quite choppy when i’m loading in chunks here but just flying around oh we got to about 27 there i was going to say we’re staying above 60 but it is

Fluctuating a little bit if we look at my video settings here this is what we’re working with let’s turn that down put this simulation and render distance on the same thing and for some reason i’ve got fog on so we’ll turn that off as well hey there we go into the hundreds now

That is actually really good for my low end pc yeah i could definitely play the latest 1.19 version with optifine on this computer i mean yeah it’s it’s a little bit choppy when i’m loading in chunks but once i’ve loaded them in again solid 120 fps which is really playable

Now ideally on the latest version of minecraft you’d be using something like sodium or fabric and that’s how you would get the most fps out of this thing but i’ve used that before and it’s pretty difficult to understand really i need to get some of

You guys to help me out in the comments to use that effectively but for now i’m glad that optifine have come out with 1.19 support and the fps and performance on this computer is pretty good actually it’s definitely an improvement over when i first got this pc when i got scanned on ebay

So yeah if we look at our background processes again we’ve got opengdk which is minecraft i’m guessing we’ve got this which i’m not too sure what that is oh it’s probably ace has installed some drivers or something i’ve got an asus motherboard in here minecraft launcher intel hd graphics

Store just keeps opening up i don’t know why that always has to be in the background it’s quite annoying but yeah i’m pretty impressed with windows 8.1 in terms of background processes and stuff here’s our start menu love it or hate it now that i’ve connected to the internet i get kind of

Like adverts and live tiles which probably uses up a lot of cpu when it’s open so it’s probably not the best but yeah like i said you’d probably be using the desktop anyway and i think when i used to use windows 8.1 i use start is back and that basically just

Removed this start anyway so it’s basically just like windows 7. all right so here we are on hypixel this is going to be the big test oh wow they’ve actually changed the hub that’s pretty cool all right so let’s do a hypixel lobby test here we’re currently in the duels

Lobby you can see my fps on the top left hand side and yeah we’re just walking around doing our thing there’s quite lots of there’s lots of big buildings and structures above us that are just loading in and as and when and our fps is really smooth considering all the

Stuff that we’re loading in and we’re on high pixel lobby let’s turn on players as well we might as well okay that’s dropped to fps quite a lot we’ve gone down to 30 here turn them off been about 90 to 100. all right let’s hop into a classic duel

And be on my low end pc i think that’s pretty cool yeah let’s do some duels here on 1.19 yeah i wonder if you have to okay so you can spam click on 1.19 on high pixel you’d have to wait for your sword to recharge i’m pretty bad

All right so here we are on a high pixel duel we’re using 1.19 this is going to be really weird i don’t think i’ve ever pvp properly on minecraft 1.19 i know i’m so bad feels so weird i kind of want to wait for my sword to recharge before i hit

People but nope i’ve got a they’ve disabled that on high pixel and you’ve got to spam click your mouse come on 1.19 pvp hey there we go gg so yeah on high pixel duels we’re getting about 150 fps the maps are pretty flat not a lot to load in really

Well apart from this one this one’s huge but still our fps is holding up really well and performance is quite good oh what how did he win that it must have been on like half a heart there a while so yeah would i recommend windows 8.1 i mean it’s definitely worth trying out

It’s pretty lightweight for a windows operating system i mean probably not as lightweight as something like windows 7 but then again with windows 7 you’ve lost all kinds of support updates are basically stopped now and uh yeah it’s just a neglected operating system really as sad as it is

But yeah like i said there’s no pre-installed bloatware or adverts or anything like that which is good to see there is quite a lot of microsoft apps but as you saw before you can just right click and uninstall them background processes are pretty minimal and on a low end system like this it

Runs really well like i said let me know in the comments section if you do like the start menu on windows a i kind of like it but at the same time i’d much rather just use the standard desktop modes that guy actually hit a 360. credits him

So yeah let me know what you want to see me do on the low end ebay pc it’s been quite a while since i’ve done a video on here and i’ve pretty much run out of all ideas to try on here i’ve upgraded it i’ve tried all kinds of operating

Systems on here i’ve tried optimizing it so we’ve basically done everything we possibly can but i just use it now as a computer that i can just test operating systems on and not have to install it on my main pc so it’s pretty good for that

And i might use it as a streaming pc in the future i have actually got my old graphics card that i could try put in here and see what fps we get i reckon we could probably get about a thousand if i put in my old gtx 1060 but we’ll have to see

So let me know in the comments down below if you want to see a video on that so yeah thank you guys all for watching this video leave a like if you enjoyed and leave a comment down below it’s been quite a hard video for me to

Do this week because my voice is currently dying i think i might have covid so uh that kind of sucks but yeah thank you guys all for watching leave a like if you enjoyed and i will see you in my next video peace