At best it's a waste of time, otherwise it's an inconvenience. I have long since turned the whole thing off, but I cannot figure out a case in which something like that would ever make sense. Can anyone shed some light on this?

Keyboard settings seems less usefull, although I've made my own set of keyboard settings once, and would be blown away if that magicllly became available on this hypothetical Korean PC as soon as I had logged in.

2 hours ago, Bas wrote

How does this work? Does it just set the synced language and keyboard settings if they are available, or does it actually install them? Because I can sort of see the point of the latter. If I somehow end up in, I don't know, Korea, and find a Windows 8 PC, it'd be pretty neat if I could switch between English and Dutch input languages without having to configure them first.

Input languages don't require anything to be installed anymore, they haven't since Vista. All language versions of Windows support display and input of all the languages that Windows can support. So yeah, if you log in to this hypothetical Korean PC using your Microsoft Account it should be able to have Dutch and English input languages.

UI language is a different kettle of fish entirely, however.

6 minutes ago, Sven Groot wrote

*snip*

Input languages don't require anything to be installed anymore, they haven't since Vista. All language versions of Windows support display and input of all the languages that Windows can support. So yeah, if you log in to this hypothetical Korean PC using your Microsoft Account it should be able to have Dutch and English input languages.

Right. So, yeah. That sounds convenient to me. The languages I write in don't change when I'm on different PC's, so to me it makes perfect sense that they roam around with me.

Leaving my work PC on overnight would mean a lot of fun at home with my laptop (I cannot RDP to my work PC - I know, don't ask). Of course this would hardly be an issue if I had the same keyboard everywhere, but then I wouldn't need synchronizing anyway.

Different issue with the language. What language I use depends on the task at hand, not my mood or the phase of the moon; if I happen to write an email in some language, it doesn't mean I want everything else set to that language everywhere.

Of course I can just stop synchronizing, which is what I did, but I am just curious to know what was the compelling scenario they had in mind when they designed this feature.

What you suggested about using a public PC in Korea probably would work, except I cannot remember when I used a public PC in this century, and I'm not sure I'll use one again, like, ever. Am I missing something here?

3 hours ago, Blue Ink wrote

Of course I can just stop synchronizing, which is what I did, but I am just curious to know what was the compelling scenario they had in mind when they designed this feature.

For me it was that when I installed Windows 8 on my laptop after having used it on my desktop for a while, all my settings were automagically there exactly as I wanted them.

And considering the rather convoluted language settings I use, what with typing in several different languages and having to make sure everything displays in the language I want too (now that IE also uses that same language list), that is quite a time saver.

1 hour ago, Sven Groot wrote

*snip*

For me it was that when I installed Windows 8 on my laptop after having used it on my desktop for a while, all my settings were automagically there exactly as I wanted them.

And considering the rather convoluted language settings I use, what with typing in several different languages and having to make sure everything displays in the language I want too (now that IE also uses that same language list), that is quite a time saver.

Good point.

Funny, though: you should have had the same problems I had and yet you seem happy with the setup. I wonder if I might have been holding it wrong somehow.