the only thing that's missing for me is the ability to skin the OS. that should be coming soon with 3rd party addons. it feels as fast as Win 7, if not a tad faster so that's at least that. it starts and shut down very fast, but that's not a must-have feature. the best candidates for an upgrade are XP users since those users used generally older machines and will have to upgrade sooner or later. i'm glad i got Win 8 at the 40$ upgrade price. but coming from W7, i don't think i would have paid full price for it though.
In terms of functionality it's not that different from Vista and Windows 7 except for the controversial metro GUI. I've had it for 3 days and I feel positive about it, I find new OSs a stimulating change, particularly when they come with a new machine. I also like how easy it is to change/set the display language. It is definitely a keeper, my only slight disappointment is the speed, it is faster than Vista but nothing to brag about considering my new machine's hardware. I can see XP users having some problems in the beginning.
So far the results show: Most people are either TOTALLY IN LOVE WITH WIN_8 <definitely keeper> or COMPLETE HATERS OF WIN_8 <can't stand it even for 2 hours> (pretty much no people in the middle)
put me in the middle! personally, i love Linux and uses it 99.9% of the time. i just keep Windows around for one game. if it was not for that one game i would have no use at all for Windows. ---- anyway, the way this poll was done is kind of misleading. there should have been only one question: Do you plan to keep on using Windows 8? My answer is yes; as long as i need Windows i will keep on using W8. or Windows 9, or whatever. if i gotta have Windows might as well have the latest.
It lasted less than an hour actually, and that was a the consumer preview installed in a VM. I will not let it touch my computer (nor my wallet for that matter).
I came close to going full time with it during its 40 dollar offer period. I tried it on a secondary machine for a while and didn't like it one bit. I still don't after using it on a neighbors machine recently. At the time I had tossed around the idea due to the fact that if I bought a new machine, I'd be stuck with it anyway unless I loaded Linux or something. I also figure MS isn't going to back down now from its "new vision" (though with Sinofsky out of the way, that may change). But, now that I missed that window, there's no way in hell I'm paying full price for an OS I don't like whatsoever. And, if I do get a new machine or tire of Windows 7, probably Linux Mint is the next step. My two biggest Linux issues were major gaming and Java-related problems. Now that Java is long gone and will never see my system again until it's overhauled, and that I'm pretty much all but done doing things like World of Warcraft, Linux has even fewer roadblocks to keep me from adopting it.
I'm only sorry I didn't get it earlier: the very best from MS. I suspect that hardware and memory have to be reasonable in order to have the best performance.
For me, better internals compared to Win 7, but I had to tweak a lot of things for the interface, such as installing Classic Shell. I will hold on to it and use Win 10 only if I am forced to do so. Otherwise, I'll look for another OS and use Win 10 only for games via dual boot or virtual machine.
I usually upgrade to Win8.1, or WinX. However, if you're talking about Win 8.1 also, I don't see anything wrong with 8.1. Classic Shell brings back the start menu, and 8 .1 is stable, and very fast.... IF you work it properly.
