Now, the day the new PC arrived, I had sitting next to me Windows 7 to install on the PC. I had automatically assumed that Windows 8 would be an utter failure, and any ‘playing’ I did on the system would be to humor the person who didn't really want to splurge on the cost of the OS.
Instead we used that disc to upgrade the (lone) Vista machine to 7.
I get about 40% more work done in the day since going to 8. About half of that improvement is simply due to the increased performance of the machine I'm working on. Windows 8 has drastically raised the bar for performance specs, and while it will operate on a stripped down machine, most business class machines aren't stripped down.
The other half comes from improved memory handling. I deal with a considerable amount of online content as part of my daily work. Many of those windows are massive in size, and my typical day before the new machine would be get half way through the day, and then start all over again, as I had to shut down all my windows, load them back up, and continue on. It was a huge time waster each day.
Like any business user, I do not run any metro based apps as part of my work (I do use the Music program, which has mostly replaced my Zune...) All of my work takes place on the desktop interface. And I use a combination of IE10 and Chrome (Chrome mostly for webmail interfaces, IE10 for all the company webwork.)
Here's the bad parts about Windows 8. 1) Come on, Microsoft? Can you think of a worse way of handling software updates than to shut someone down in the middle of the work day 3 days after the upgrade arrives? You need to pay attention to when updates have been downloaded, or else you'll get a surprise ‘your system is shutting down in a half hour, you may want to save your work now’ message, with zero methods to delay this time waster.
2) Logging in using a Windows Live ID... No business wants you to drag your apps from home onto the office PC, and this has got to get eliminated in business versions of Windows 8. It is nice for the home user to have multiple computers with the same apps, but that ends at the office doorway. Yep, completely solved by using a different ID for work, but that isn't Microsoft's goal.
3) An awful lot of opportunity to get distracted - from the simple mistake of hitting that windows key (and being transferred right back to the metro interface) or from taking the cursor towards the side of the screen to scroll down a page (and having the search/etc tab pop in..)
The good, however, vastly outweighs the problems, and it works very well for me. Testing others on the same system shows similar improvements for what we're doing. For what most of the rest of the world are doing? Probably wouldn't assist them. Windows XP would still work out just fine today as it would ten years from now.
So in the end, Windows 8 works for me. Would I transform the average office to it? Not in a million years. They seriously need to strip out the entire metro interface for most business installations, disable the pop-ins, and the Windows Live IDs. For a home user? I'd suggest that it would give a generally much improved experience, especially over the average Windows XP machine. Just be utterly aware that whatever mail you get on a Windows Live ID (hotmail, MSN, Outlook.com) will dramatically and immediately change the advertising you'll see on web pages.
Google might be the search king, but in having instant changes to ads aimed at the web surfer, Microsoft has your number. Then again, Yahoo has gone out of their way to make their mail utterly unusable, while Google has improved theirs.
All in all, would I pay extra money for Windows 8 at home? No. Would I go out of my way to re-install Windows 7 on a Windows 8 computer? No. But I'd sure deeply consider a touch screen over a standard monitor, and would prefer Windows 8 for a laptop than Windows 7.
If you’re really hard-core, you install 2012 Server Core.