Best version of Windows  

I'm using 8.1 and I see a rock solid better than Win7 OS and no sign of a disaster or touch interface.

I'm with John on this one.

I love Win 7, and still run it on my second laptop. And I hated 8 with a passion at first. But I persevered with it, and basically made it work the way I wanted, and not necessarily the way MS intended. I ran all the betas, and purchased it during the introductory period when it was cheap.

With 8.1 (Pro RTM, 64-bit w/WMC), I was initially dubious, as I dislike being tied to the internet. But I was very pleasantly surprised, and, with a few 'extras' like Power-DVD and EaseUS backup added to replace things MS removed, I simply love it! And it's nowhere near as net-centric as I'd first feared.

My opinion (and don't shoot me...): Win 7 was great, and a tamed and customised 8 is just as good. But a well set up 8.1 system simply blows both away.


Wenda.

I also hated 8 but with a start menu (start8 for me) and all pdfs,images etc set to open in desktop apps, I've just got a rock solid updated version of Windows 7.

I haven't seen Metro/Modern UI since I loaded the machine up months ago.

There is a group that tried 8, didn't care for the changes, and abandoned it as a failure. There is also a group that feels it doesn't want to have to make changes to have an OS that works (Start menu, etc.). Those (not mutually exclusive) groups see 8 as a failure. Many that read what these groups had to say, and never used 8 themselves also adopted the "fact" that 8 was a "disaster".

I have not used 8, but have watched many of the power users change their opinion about it, and now 8.1. Without ever having used it myself, I now see that it is a good OS, and can be made better with some small changes. Many of the 3 groups I mentioned stopped paying attention long ago and will just carry the belief it is a bad OS. I believe Vista had a similar issue, people heard it was bad, and just adopted that, and never moved from XP (I'm not comparing Vista to 8 :)).

A Guy

I ran Vista RC1 on a Pentium 4 with only 768Mb of RAM and a TNT2 graphics card (my first foray into the world of beta-testing). I still run Vista Ultimate 32-bit on the (much more powerful) current desktop (along with XP), and really don't have a problem with it. It has no SPs installed at present (will be getting them, though), so doesn't go online, but is fast and reliable enough to be perfectly usable. Not that it gets used all that much, I'm mainly on this Win 8.1 machine.

Wenda.

Well I run 7 on my desktop and my Asus Notebook came with 8 and I upgraded to 8.1 when that came out.
To be honest I didn't miss the Start button so didn't feel the need to pay for something to replace it and I have it set to Boot to the Desktop where I have most of my most used programs either down the side or on the Taskbar.

The only thing that is different after the upgrade though is that now I have to log in everytime I start the machine up whereas before I could just go straight to my Desktop.

z3r010, post: 6528, member: 1 said:

I also hated 8 but with a start menu (start8 for me) and all pdfs,images etc set to open in desktop apps, I've just got a rock solid updated version of Windows 7.

I haven't seen Metro/Modern UI since I loaded the machine up months ago.

Pretty much the same experience for me. I still have a copy of Windows 7 installed on another SSD, but find that I rarely use it other than to keep it updated.

It's good to hear that so many are happy with Windows 8.1.
Now lets hope Windows 9 will make the masses happy using their PC's.