I'm sure it's been discussed somewhere, but kaplin's sig is utterly mesmerizing. I wanna be friends with it.

I managed to get my hands on a Windows 8 machine and wow is it bad. Maybe it's the hardware (it's an Acer laptop and the build quality reminds me of my old Asus 4G Surf) but I kind of doubt it.

Things that are nice:

- The ability to sync settings across multiple machines
- The weather app
- searching for apps works well, but just looking for "windows update" didn't return anything
- I like the design direction on a lot of the typefaces. The minimal presentation sure looks good on a mockup, but doesn't seem to work as well in reality.
- Anti-aliasing seems to be different, but that could be the screen. Sublime Text looked pretty good right out of the box without any tweaks.

Things that suck

- All the crap that Acer pre-loaded
- "Your internet connection isn't fast enough to download this app"
- Window management in Metro
- having to sign up for a Windows account so you can attach a Gmail account to the Mail app

Things that are completely unexplainable

- If you move the mouse to the bottom corner to show the start icon (or whatever it's called) and move the mouse a pixel away to click on the actual icon it disappears.
- No one unified set of settings and preferences
- No progress bar or status of app installs from the store (that I could see)

I'm going to pull an image of this thing for science and then send it along. Like Vista, this is an OS that I'll hopefully be interacting with through my forensics tools instead of using it.

Getting a new laptop today with W8. I already feel as if I'm going to hate it and I'm not even a big computer guy. I didn't even really hate Windows vista.

Its a well known fact that every other Windows OS sucks. 7 was great so I don't understand why people are surprised that 8 isnt.

I prefer Classic Shell.

I really like windows 8. One ty out know how to use it it works better than 7.

If you do any sort of Powershell scripting, check out the Powershell ISE in Windows 8. One of the single best features ever.

Start8 rocks. Their full-blown add-on is very interesting.

I'm getting used to it. It's actually not that bad.

Looks like they ripped off PowerGUI.

Now that people have used it for a while, what's the verdict.

I recent came into some RAM, so I'm going from 4 GB to 32 GB. Was in Win7 x32. So I have to decide between Win7 x64 [already have] or Win8.

No touchscreen, single 24" LCD. i5 2500K w/32GB, Invidia GeForce 9800

Primary uses

AV stream/viewing/listening
internet
CAD/Office/Adobe, plus an array of engineering/mathematic programs [Matlab, PSpice, ModelSIM, etc], photograph tweaking, storage, and sorting.

Have an AVG 2014 license already.

So are the performance, stability, security, or other aspects related to my primary uses, advancements worth the change?

Stick with Windows 7

I got my daughter a new laptop with Win8. Hated it, her and I. I grabbed a free program that changed it to look like 7 and it's fine.

I think that's the one I used.