You left off Windows 2000 which was fantastic. (yes it was in the NT family but it was a perfectly legit user OS)

Especially when it's completely counter-intuitive...

Not all change is good.

I have always hated that moniker.

Change is good. ugh

I had a manager that would say that shit all the time. Unbearable. Company went out of business after I decided I had enough of it. Guess change was good. LMAO

I'm right there with you, I think 8 is great, even with a desktop and no touch screen. 8.1 is even better.

It's not really counter-intuitive. Swiping left from right to switch between programs, not that hard of a concept to grasp.

But lets say that some of the stuff isn't obvious (heaven forbid), there is a place on the internet called youtube. why not look up a 10 minute video that shows you how to use the system. Is it really that hard of a concept.

Everyone bitches about the "NO ****ING START MENU" thing. Hello, the Metro is the start menu. Right click the tiles (if not a touch screen) and edit the start menu the way you want it. It's a hell of a lot easier than the previous versions fly out menus of a traditional start menu. Or I don't know, just type in the name of the program/file you want and it will find it for you.

You're right not all change is good, but no change can be good if one isn't willing to invest at least a small amount of effort in learning what the change was and how to use it. Quite frankly, Win 8 is fine, it's not even complicated to use if you just take 5 minutes to figure out instead of wanting to be spoon fed everything. Microsoft could have done a lot better on the delivery, and maybe a couple of actual built in tutorials, but for the most part, the issue does not land at the operating systems feet. It is a solid, stable, and remarkably fast OS.

I think Kaplin has talked me into giving it a shot. I need a new desktop & The only ones I see that have Windows 7 are more expensive. I will likely have to make the move at some point anyway.

(I'm waiting for someone to change my mind....)

Side note: Where do you guys go to buy computers? Is there a reason to go somewhere other than Best Buy? They have some pretty cheap deals on desktops right now.

Listen to yourself. You're suggesting that people should have to watch a 10 minute video just to learn how to navigate a new version of an OS that they've been comfortably using for decades. When you're used to keyboard and mouse, swiping left and right is not intuitive.

The Start menu has been a foundational component in the Windows OS for over a decade. They removed it, and didn't bother to explain why or how to easily navigate without it. It's obviously become an issue if major manufacturers are "Bringing back Win7 by popular demand". And even fans of Win8 like yourself admit that you have to watch a 10 minute video to figure it out.

There's nothing wrong with change. But it's been well over a year since Win8 was released, and still all people can say about it is that the changes suck hard. There are countless positives to Win8, but even now they've been completely overshadowed by how shitty they implemented the Metro part. That all adds up to epic fail on M$'s part.

Yeah, except for the programs that use the traditional desktop way and work in a completely different way

Listen to you, saying that having to put forth some effort and learn something new is a bad thing.

Change happens, like it or not. The "classic" windows feel was going to have to change sooner or later. It couldn't stay the same forever, and people are upset over it. I get it, but I also don't understand how it is so hard to just move on.

it's a bad thing when you are trying to sell a product and people that would have otherwise been customers are migrating to other OSs

????

Word, Outlook, Steam, Chrome, IE, Quickbooks all work the same. Please understand, there is a fantastically shitty Internet Explorer App, that by all means should be removed from the system and M$ should just beg for forgiveness on that one, but the normal desktop version of IE works just fine, or rather, as well as any version of IE has.

The apps that you get from the app store are going to be of the same caliber of software that you get from Apple's app store, meaning that it's a streamlined program, with less features and functionality. These would include all of the tiles you see when you first boot a Win 8 machine out of the box. The mail, people, social, weather, finances, music tiles are all apps, and honestly, I just right-click and unpin them. I don't like clutter on my desktop or Metro (start menu) and personally I never did and never will use stuff like that. I didn't use gadgets in Vista or 7 and I don't use those apps in 8. But if you install Microsoft Office, it will run exactly like it always has in any other version of Windows.

Please understand, I get 8's faults too, I could list half a dozen things off the top of my head that M$ did that makes me scratch my head. But the stuff I'm seeing in this thread is really just not understanding how to use the OS.

I've supported a high volume of computer users since the Win 3.1 days. I've seen huge numbers of people make the conversions from Win3.1 to Win95/NT, Win95 to Win98, Win98 to Win2000, Win2000 to WinXP, WinXP to WinVista, WinVista to Win7. Never in all those transitions, have I seen the level of frustration and disgust that I've witnessed with the transition from Win7 to Win8. It's not even close. Change happens, but we're not just dealing with resistance to change here. I've seen plenty of that before. This is simply bad unintuitive design.

You are wrong. It's very intuitive because Microsoft designed it. Idiot.

BURN!

OK, now let's take a look at my last question. Let's ignore that it's a little off topic and it might derail the whole thread. Let's all just pay a little more attention to me before this shit gets heated.

Depends on what you're looking for, and what your needs are. If looking for a gaming rig, I would build it myself, or look into some place like Digital Storm if you just need a home office type machine, Best Buy and Fry's are fine, but you might find better deals at dell.com or hp.com. If you are looking for a touch tablet interface, I would maybe look at the Surface Pro 2 (I really like it, downside is the screen is small) or the Lenovo Thinkpad Yoga.

If you (or anyone for that matter) has any questions on "how to", hit me up, I will be happy to help out.