The point is, Metro is the point of Windows 8. If you dont love Metro there is no reason to upgrade from an earlier version of Windows.

Not to mention it is downright stupid to

1. Buy a new OS
2. Buy software that makes the new OS feel like the old one

A lot of money... for NOTHING.

QFT

What are the major advantages of Windows 7 over Win XP? I dont see any worth an early upgrade.

• Fancy graphics? Can have that with freeware for XP and not relevant for the performance of the  OS.
• Better security? Correct, but then 80 % of the security problems are coming from the user anway and you still need a good AV and firewall.
• Higher Direct X? No doubt interesting for gamers, altough it took ages until somebody released a Direct X game that was possible worth the OS upgrade. In any case, for the entire business market 3D performance is irrelevant. Not to mention that those machines rarely have good graphic performance anyway. 
• Higher version of internet explorer? Excuse me... no security interested person uses IE. No matter what version.

I cant think of anything more....and I use both Win 7 and XP (work/home).

Is Win 7 better than XP? Yes.... but not good enough to warrant spending money on it.

As for Windows 8.... :

Independent of if the new GUI is good or bad..... it certainly has a considerable learning curve.

Why should I annoy myself with that... when the system offers no worthy features above Win 7? Win 8 would need to have some tremendous huge advantages over 7 to be interesting, to justify both money and time loss. 

Personally I had the preview version for a while and I hate the new GUI. I see no advantage in a mobile phone GUI on a desktop system.

It is pathetic.... people have huge flatscreen nowadays.... and now you offer me an OS that would look great on a 13 inch CRT? Seriously?

As for the support end if Windows 7.... I would not take even an official press release from MS very serious currently. Some underpaid tech support person will have neither the information and most certainly not the authority to state such things.... and so I find your source most unrealiable.

If the market demands, that the support is prolonged... you can follow that demand.... or leave the market.

Proof? Win XP is supported until 2014..... and certainly not because MS likes to do that. So why do they do it? Because they have little choice in the matter. When they intended to chancel it earlier, a large portion of their userbase was still running it and had no intentions of upgrading anytime soon. Certainly, you could all piss them off..... but especially business users in that case might reconsider using Windows alltogehter. And that is something that MS cannot allow to happen.

Win 7 will likely be supported until 2020... especially as it becomes more and more clear that Win 8 will not be a success.

On being somewhat offtopic:

MS problem is partially that XP and Win 7 are both quite good OS. Everyone hated Win 98 crashes and everyone hated Vistas slowness. That makes a great incentive for people to upgrade. That incentive is not here anymore. As software does not age in the normal way (wear and tear), it gets more and more difficult to convince the userbase into quick upgrading.

There are many peoples.... who buy something because it is new. And not because it has any advantages over the old stuff.

I have a hard time understanding how Windows 8 offers any advantages to a desktop user over Windows 7.  Booting up faster seems like a non-issue (how often are using cold booting their machines)

Someone mentioned RT for game development. No, it is weak for that too.  You have to develop your game using an extreme subset of capabilities that you'd have with a normal PC game.  They could have made RT games conform to XBOX rules or something but they didn't.  Sure, my $2500 workstation machine can play angry birds but so can a Chromebook.

I haven't see anyone discuss the various achilles heel of RT.  You don't know if your app is going to finish a job if it's in the background. I don't just mean with third party apps. I have a decade of photos on SkyDrive. I assign the Photoapp to read through them. But if it's not the foreground app, it doesn't seem to do anything. That's absolutely killer. I'm not going to turn my workstation into a single purpose PC.  It's WINDOWS not WINDOW.  That scenario applies to many desktop tasks.  RT absolutely cripples multitasking -- which is fine on a light mobile device but on a desktop?

There is also the terrible UI of Metro.  On an iPad, I can turn down or up the brightness by double tapping on the home button and quickly getting to the brightness slider.  In Metro, I have to slide the charms bar out, click on settings, click on the brightness control and then adjust. That's a lot of steps.  And a lot of things take an extra step or two like that.

Managing find results is useless. If I type in the word "budget" it lists results based on...I have no idea. It's not alphabetical. It's not by date. It's not by size and there are no sorting options. 

The store can only show a couple of things in a section at a time and is inefficient to navigate (everything looks the same at a glance).

Has someone put up some actual advantages of Windows 8 over Windows 7 as a desktop OS that overcome these (and plenty of other serious problems)?  The lists I've seen have been dancing on the edge -- nicer looking (but less effective) task manager, smaller memory footprint (which is largely irrelevant on a 64-bit OS with 8 gigs of memory).  Even Explorer itself in Windows 8 is less useful because they brought in the Office-style pages into it.

If you want to see how you can have a really good full screen environment for apps that utilize it without crippling the entire experience, see MacOS X Mountain Lion.

Like being on dial up after having fiber optics.

1) (AMD)   2) (nVidia ) 3) (Who?) (NASCAR!!!)

Win8 is faster (considerably so) on older hardware (I've tested that extensively) and while that might not matter to those who can just purchase new hardware, there are those who might still be running machines like my 2005 notebook and although my notebook initially shipped with XP was then upgraded to Vista Business, Win7 Pro and now Win8 Pro it is Win8 that runs the most efficiently and smoothly.

Nicer looking but less effective task manager?  I'm not sure I understand that as in the 'more details' view the task manager provides all of the info it used to and then some.  Different and will take some getting used to (if you're like me and the first thing you ever open when your system boots is in fact the task manager) but certainly not 'less effective'.

Smaller memory footprint also very welcomed since as I stated Win8 Pro runs flawlessly (at least as a 'connectivity machine' and not a dev platform of course) on my 2005 Inspiron with only 2GB of RAM.  Of course seeing as it is so old the hardware only supports the 32-bit version so take that for what it is.......

Explorer again may be a tad foreign to the advanced user with the 'office-esque' tabs thrown in but I think over time (once a person weathers the learning curve) one might even find the new explorer to be faster in doing the 'usual tasks'.  I mean lets think about this, many of us have spent many years with the old explorer (and task manager etc.) it would only be fair to expect it could take some time to really give the new menus/window structures a real go.  I guess time will tell....

As far as OSX Mountain Lion goes.........I have it on a couple of iMacs.  Truth be told, until Win8 I did in fact think it was the most 'usable' of the OS's available to my family and they did seem to gravitate towards using it over the various Windows platforms also available.  Now?  Now I'm seeing the various family members 'finding excuses' to use the Windows 8 machines......just my personal experience.  Obviously that would be different in other families....

Only one point why XP is inferior to 7 ?

Simple, 1 phrase :

64bit

PERIOD

Not to speak of overall better RAM handling... My 2 GB eeePC has never run better than with 7. Big difference to crappy stone-age XP.

i agree with brad regarding the background app operation in win rt. you really never do know if the app is running or has been suspended until you return it to focus

My response to a renewal notice for Object Desktop:

Dear stardock, 

My first contact with your firm was when i bought items for OS/2, one can say I am one of your oldest customers. Unfortunately we are now in the situation where Microsoft’s visions (or lack thereof) produced the current monstrosity Windows 8. Worse is yet to come, as it’s my firm conviction Microsoft will want to implement in the not too far future a closed Apple like system where they control which applications are installed and how.

Evidently this pleases me little, apart from the hideously designed UI. To install an OS that will only serve to help Microsoft to make up for the losses they’ll incur by losing the virtual OS monopoly, which reduces my control over my desktop and will need severe hacking to  make it run somewhat to my liking is absurd.

So our ways must part since evidently your fate and that of Microsoft are linked. So a renewal is for me pointless since from now on you’ll need to focus on trying to make your products work with WINRT (and good luck with that), a system that’ll never be on my computers.

It was fun while it lasted, thanks for the great products you’ve created all these years. Let me know when you start a Linux/Android line.

Well then reply # 92, by a somewhat recognized knowledgeable individual, does seem to get to the core of the discussion. 

I do. I shut my machine off at night and cold boot it every morning. Always have.

NASCAR! Well said!

I will venture to say that many people will be in the same boat. I somehow doubt Stardock will make a Linux/Android line. It would help GNOME and KDE look better.

I concede that Windows 8 runs better on older hardware but I don't think that's the main market. On a NEW machine, Windows 7 is a better choice than Windows 8 IMO for getting work done.

It requires an extra step to get to the stuff I want to kill off. That's less productivity.

But most people with Windows 8 aren't running 8 year old hardware.  I haven't had less than 4GB of memory since the Windows XP days.  I'm not suggesting my high end setup is typical. But even your typical law office or <insert company here> is not running a bunch of ancient hardware. They've got 4GB or more.

It requires more screen space and doesn't have an option to reduce it.  The office style UI doesn't make it better at doing any common tasks (if there's on you want to specify, I'd lvoe to hear it).

I don't mind new ways of doing things. I use my Surface RT daily. I like it.  But the Windows 8 UI - explorer and Metro - are both less effective measured in terms of number of steps to complete a task and the use of space to do it.

But I want to emphasize this, RT is a terrible platform. It's not competitive. It may get better. But it's inferior in every way to Android and iOS for creating useful apps. Moreover, the fact that on a PC you don't know whether your app is doing anythign when it's not the active app is very problematic.

I had a post towards your earlier comments mentioning I consider it a superset rather than a subset (since devs can't use Visual Studio 2005 and DX9 and stuff like that and hobble my $1200 machine  )

But the browser ate it, which is kinda funny.

Nothing in RT really does anything in the background.  Some light tasks can be denigrated to the OS, but other than that they only continue to run if you move them off to the side instead of alt tabbing.

At any rate, I'm going to get some sleep...here's the stuff I'd be more interested in discussing if you give a crap.

http://arstechnica.com/features/2012/10/windows-8-and-winrt-everything-old-is-new-again/

While I don't think the market for Win 8 is the oldest of old hardware I also don't think 'new' hardware is the target for Win 8 either.  Just look at their price-point.......I'm thinking upgrading somewhat newer hardware is probably their target there.

Ok I guess if you're having to constantly kill stuff off I can see your point, but then I'd be asking what you're doing to have to kill stuff off constantly?  I mean aren't you losing productivity there already (the actions in having to kill stuff constantly)?

Again, I'm aware of that.  My test of running Win 8 on the 2005 notebook was a test after all.  The point being that Win 8 handles older hardware better than other Windows OS's of the past.

While I don't personally think it is 'better' at doing any of the common things (as yet), I have had some people comment that having explorer mimic office menus has enabled them to find options they would have otherwise missed and some people don't mind the extra screen real estate being used (many people run more than one monitor these days) if it means more things are more easily 'toggle-able'. 

Love Windows 8.  It takes some getting used to but it's awesome.

So the work-around for a clunky GUI is multiple monitors.....

That's a bit like the solution to multi-tasking is to have multiple computers....