Microsoft's marketing department is well aware of this sentiment. ;)

You probably read my posts about D2 and Win8. Cannot confirm whether the problems are present in RTM and with the final version, but the Consumer Preview and the NVidia drivers for Win7 were giving me a black screen.

You should definitely see performance improvements in games, since compared to 7, the OS uses a bit less resources. But then, maybe the drivers have not been perfectly compatible to show meaningful results?

The problem with Gothic and Gothic II is easily fixed (see the wiki entry for details), so even if this applies to the final version it doesn't stop Windows 8 users enjoying these games. GOG will probably be able to integrate such a fix into their installers at a later date.

When Windows 7 was released there were a couple of GOG games that didn't work properly, so Windows 8 users will probably want to check the forums before buying a particular game just in case, but so far it looks like almost all of them work just fine. :)

Actually when I ran the 3DMark11 (on both Win7 and 8), at first I saw some kind of performance increase in Win8, around 7% or so higher 3Dmark numbers. I thought to myself: "Heck, it seems to be true after all."

But later it occurred to me I was using older NVidia drivers on my Win7 installation, the same that my PC was shipped with. When I updated them to the same version as I had installed in Win8, I got the same speed increase on Win7, and 3DMark gave pretty much exactly the same numbers on both sides.

Maybe it can be different on some other HW? I read somewhere that e.g. AMD Bulldozer would be faster in Win8, for whatever reason? E.g.:

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/328350-10-bulldozer-windows-perfect-marriage

Anyway, as long as it isn't _slower_ on Win8, I'm find it totally acceptable.

This is my great problem with Windows 8. I mean, not the even/odd stuff, but the fact that Windows 7 is working really, really well for me, and the last thing I want to do is pay to get rid of it and install a new OS.

Well the pattern in the past has generally been [Try Something New] followed by [Fix All the Problems] which is part of the reason for the Star Trek thing. Fortunately enough people will use Win8 regardless of its quality that all of the issues can (theoretically) be fixed by Win9.

Personally my issues are with the interface, which to me is a step backwards from a desktop user perspective. As for games, most seem to work, though there are reportedly some under-the-hood changes to things like memory allocation that may cause some unexpected issues once it actually launches in full force across wide demographics of users.

What? Doesn't make much sense. :)

You don't what PowerShell and you don't want a GUI... how else are you going to manage the OS? Voice commands? :)

To think that someone has to come up with stuff like that because MS is too dumb to get its head out of its ass. Oy vey! That said, it's still good that something like this will exist.

The only way I might ever get Win8 is due to a hardware upgrade - I strictly use laptops these days - but it might very well be that the next Windows iteration will be out by the time that happens.

Dont then.Im not. Best thing since WinXP. Just keep using it til Windows 9 comes around :)

Indeed, Win 7 is solidly mediocre, but considering the other crap releases, 7 just had to be better than XP. XP itself was rather lackluster and missing a lot of features that it's contemporaries had.

If Win 8 isn't well supported by GOG it's largely going to be MS' own fault. Win 7 is perfectly fine, there's things that need improvement, but by and large everything works well. Instead they're throwing out all that progress to start over again, and including that stupid store. It seems like most of the incompatibilities I run into with games are because of MS' UI.

It's rather telling that you're already seeing companies providing free start menu replacements before the OS is even shipped.

Most gaming issues with Windows 8 are due to video drivers rather than OS changes, e.g. I couldn't run Minecraft out of the box but it turned out to be due to a flaw in the bundled ATI driver's OpenGL support. Both AMD and Nvidia now have final Windows 8 drivers, but some cards that were supported for Windows 7 are not supported for Windows 8.

The only games I've tried that had issues caused by Windows 8 itself are Gothic and Gothic II (which is easily resolved). A few other games will potentially demonstrate this same problem, but by and large the majority of GOG's catalogue will work fine without any effort on GOG's part, just as with the release of Windows 7.

As for the Start Menu replacers there are always those resistant to change regardless of whether it is better or worse. When Windows 95 launched some users longed for Program Manager (and some still hung onto the even older Norton Commander for DOS--Windows clones of this exist to this day). When the 9x-style Start Menu layout was removed (in Vista, I think?) there was a project for bringing it back; this did not mean that the dual-column layout introduced with XP was inherently worse.

For those wanting to put the real Windows 7 on a new PC rather than tweaking Windows 8 to act like it there are several ways of doing that. Some OEMs (like Alienware) have announced that they will offer a Windows 7 pre-install option (available until October 25, 2014). Another way is to buy a system that has Windows 8 Pro, which supports downgrading to Windows 7 Professional for free (all it takes is a Windows 7 install disc, the Windows 8 product key sticker on the case, and a quick call to the free automated support line to generate a valid Windows 7 Professional product key).

My advice would be to use Windows 8, with or without tweaks, rather than downgrading it to Windows 7; even if you hate Metro and do various things to hide it the end result is a sleeker, faster Windows 7 that has many welcome improvements to the desktop side of things.

What are the improvements and positives for the average user?????

Off the top of my head:

* Faster start up/shut down
* Improved printer driver model (less need to download drivers from Windows Update)
* Improved file copy dialogs
* Windows Defender upgraded to incorporate Microsoft Security Essentials; automatically deactivates when third-party security software is active, and automatically re-activates if the third-party software is removed or has an expired subscription.
* Secure Boot to prevent malicious injection of rootkits etc. (all new systems ship with this).
* System Refresh for quickly reinstalling Windows with user data untouched (faster and better than the OEM-specific implementations of the past).
* Native support for USB 3.0, mobile broadband, NFC, etc.
* Better multi-monitor support.
* Better Family Safety integration (for managing child account access to games, websites, etc.)

There are also improvements that power users will appreciate, such as Hyper-V, a virtualisation hypervisor previously only available in server versions of Windows.

These days yes that's mostly true. They've solved the DLL hell and they've gotten DirectX to coexist more peacefully with older versions. Most of my game related problems went bye bye when I ditched nVidia for AMD.

In terms of changes, they're removing the start menu completely based upon what they were told by people who don't care about their privacy. It's one thing to disable it by default and let people enable it if they want it, and another to take it away completely.

They did that with Ribbon, they infected Office with it and now it's spreading. I'm sure it works just fine for people that only want to use the functions that MS thinks you want to use, but it takes quite a bit longer to get to less used functions and I have yet to find any internal logic to where things are hidden.

I'll need to dig it up, but I remember seeing an article, by MS IIRC, explaining some changes they were making to Explorer. It pretty much made them look like incompetent wankers.

It's not just a resistance to change, it's that the main reason to keep using Windows is that you've learned the UI and it comes installed on your computer. If you have to learn a radically different UI either way, why bother. MS will just change it again next release anyways. I might as well just install Linux Mint o similar as it does the things that most people use their computer for just fine.

As much as I hate Apple, look at how they handle their OS. They made a major change in the early '80s with Lisa and the first MacOS, then they just tweaked it for the next like 15 or so odd years. They released OSX, and they've been tweaking it ever since. That's basically just 2 major overhauls or less than 1 per decade.
Microsoft is hardly the only one to make this mistake, but NFC, as awesome as it is in American football, is one of the stupidest ideas I've seen in a long time for computing. Bluetooth has become a bit of a headache security wise, but NFC is even worse.

Like I said, I can't really say that MS is any more wrong than everybody else that's doing this, but it's a solution in search of a problem. My old Nexus One could do a very similar thing with QR codes and the screen. It was wonderful in that it was a lot more secure, and still convenient.

I realize that RFID and similar have a sort of Wow effect, but they're terrible from a security stand point and ultimately the consumers pay more in order to be vulnerable.