Care to share postive experiences ?

Yea, in UK you'll need to spend some GBP 70 for Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 OEM (Amazon or Scan)

In the US it's around $92-$100 (Amazon or Newegg)

 

I was able to get Windows 8 Professional 64-bit for free through the Microsoft Dream Spark program at my university that I attend. But even having the free copy I doubt I will upgrade to Windows 8 at least maybe not until 2014. Even if do I upgrade, I most likely will use a good Start Menu replacement and disable the Metro components entirely.

 

Been running it for a couple weeks now on my new desktop I built.
Comp is an i5, 8GB Ram, Intel board, two 500 GB drives and nVidia 620 w/ 1GB own memory. Graphics is the weak point in the system but way more than I'll ever need. I had the drives and the Ram so all I needed to buy was the cpu, board, case and cheap video card. Cost about $275.00 total. Found some really great deals.

Windows 8 Professional 64

Anyway, I hated Metro at first but now I have grown used to it. To be clear about it, I do not use any live apps or any other apps for that matter. I've no need for them. I uninstalled all of them except the Microsoft Store app because who knows, I may need it someday, but I highly doubt it!

I had only 2 problems early on. The first was when I installed the latest graphics drivers from nVidia. On restart, I could not get to the login screen. It seems Windows 8 does not like those drivers. I had to use System Restore. But the new driver is being used.

The other problem was installing the Creative drivers for the SB Audigy sound card. Windows wanted to keep using its own drivers for the card. After an uninstall of the device I was able to then install the drivers and software for the card. I need to use the latest Creative drivers because this card has a digital out port which I use with my 10 year old Boston Acoustics speaker system, and the Creative software allows me to best adjust the sound to my liking.

I successfully installed the following programs with no glitches, except for a couple latent alerts from Windows that said, "This program may not have installed correctly...blah blah blah." I just checked the buttons that say, "Yes it did. "

Office Standard 2010 (no Outlook because I really hate Outlook!)
Microsoft Games that are part of Windows 7 (Chess Titans, Solitaire)
VLC Media Player because Windows 8 has no native DVD playing
Audacity (audio editor)
Avidemux (video editor)
Handbrake (video conversion, rip, utility)
DVDDecrypter (doesn't always close properly after using it)
Paint Shop Pro 7 (no problems as long as you manually copy the required DLLs for plugins to the system dir)
Photoshop CS2 (no problems at all)
Malwarebytes & Superantispyware
nMap
Wireshark
WinPcap (must be installed in Win7 compatibility mode)
Chrome
Firefox

All in all. I like Windows 8. But to be honest, the majority of that feeling comes from the speed and efficiency of this new computer I built. My previous desktop had a shorted motherboard so for the last 2 years I've been using an older HP workstation for my desktop needs. It has 32 MB video memory. I dual booted Windows XP & Windows 7. It was painfully slow! So this new system is day and night difference. And my laptop, which is still very good, is still what I do the majority of my work with, but I find myself "wanting" to use the desktop more and more.

 

On Windows 7 64 bit systems one may have needed to change the installation path for Adobe CS2 products. The install path should be:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\
but to get it to correctly install use the DOS path:
C:\progra~2\Adobe\

I had planned on having to do that for Photoshop CS2 on Windows 8 but I didn't have to.

 

Well, with a little luck I have now made the change

After testing Start menu replacements (see my article: Missing the Start Menu in Windows 8?) I went with Start8, so I don't have to look at any of that "kiddies" menu cr@p.

Array networks finally updated their VPN software so that now works with Windows 8 too, that was about the last real hurdle for me.

I did do an upgrade from Windows 7, as a full clean install would probably have cost me two days. At least I got the upgrade & tweaking done in about 10 hours.

 

I told you so....LOL

It's been 3 months since I got Win 8 computer and I have to say I'm totally happy with it.

 

Any man that can swallow a beating snake heart will be totally happy with Windows 8! (obscure reference to video at broni's Website)