Windows 8 was apparently created because Microsoft decided there was lots of money to be made in notepads and other miniature "social connection" devices for children and possibly for a the majority of semi-adults who don't really want much of anything that a traditional desktop computer can do.

These devices are handy for some, and Microsoft (and others) have made lots of money off of them.

Unfortunately, these "new" toys are NOT COMPUTERS and can't handle what I've been accustomed to doing on my desktops.

Touch screen is fine on something you can carry in your pocket, and for what you can do on that kind of machine. [In grade school, I did lots of finger painting (and a few samples my mother saved still look as good as most Picassos, and I didn't have to lie to get into art class like he did). It was fun in 2d grade but I never considered those "real art" even then.]

It is quite likely that Win8 is a fairly good OS for laptops as many people use them although even a laptop is a poor substitute for a good desktop workplace for serious work. Some people claim to do real work on a laptop, but I've never been very satisfied with one for anything serious.

WinXP was (and for some still is) arguably the best OS Microsoft has produced up to its time, but "advances in the business of malware" have resulted in it being "patched to death" and still in need of continued security maintenance in order to remain viable. With limited mainenance available soon, invulnerability to malware is unlikely to be sustainable.

Win7 claims better protections from malware than WinXP, OOB (Out of the Box), and it must be assumed that Microsoft will keep it reasonably safe while it remains "in support." Claims that Win7 has "better stability" are difficult to substantiate. I get "Internet Explorer has stopped working and will be closed" about once every week or two, but in most cases it is able to reopen the same 'net pages I had up when it stalled. Recoverability is definitely better, for some programs than in prior Win versions.

Running Win7 with 8GB RAM (the max my current machine's BIOS can handle - a limit NOT SHOWN in the builder's specs before purchase) I still get frequent "out of memory" balks, but work up to the point of choking usually is recovered in the couple of programs where this happens.

Attempting to use two separate Windows Explorer windows (renamed "File Finder" in Win8?) in order to jump files from one drive to another results in "Windows Explorer has stopped working and must close" about one time out of three. There is no automatic recovery. As long as only a single pane is used, this isn't a problem, but may require lots of scrolling and clicking to move from one drive to another and select from a few thousand folders on each.

In Win7 Windows Explorer "Classic View" it is possible to click/highlight a folder on the left without getting an update of the list of files in the folder in the right pane, and if you paste a file, assuming you know where it will go, it sometimes goes somewhere else. Sometimes it goes back to the last folder you visited, but sometimes it goes to where the program that made the file made its last save. Sometimes it goes to somewhare apparently randomly chosen by Windows.

Windows7 "Search" in Windows Explorer has NEVER PRODUCED A USEFUL RESULT for me. Initial transfer of "document" files from the previous computer main HD automatically tagged everything for indexing. Since indexing is a "background process" it took a little more than THREE WEEKS to finish indexing. Every search produced about 3,000 to 8,000 "hits," none of which had anything to do with the search term entered. Connecting a portable external USB drive and copying a couple of weeks worth of changes to it for backup resulted in a 5 to 15 hour "indexing" before the USB drive showed "okay to disconnect." (The Safely Remove and Eject function showed "Device in use, try again later" until the background indexing was finished.)

I've turned off "Index Files for faster seach" everywhere, and have a .bat file in each major folder that runs DIR *.ext /S > List-ext.txt (ext is the file extension for what I want in each list.) The *.* > List-all.txt lists all the files on my main backup drive or in a "main" folder. For my main bakcup drive, the file is about 16,000 pages, opened in Word; but it is searchable in Word so that I can find any filename on the drive, and what folder it's in.

Some of the problems I see with Win7 probably are due to my use, with 3 TB on two internal HDs and 1TB in a "permanently connected external USB drive." (Each about 60% full.) Two 1TB externals, for alternate backups, are sufficient at about 80% filled for now, although I use a couple of 500GB externals and one 1TB for separate (redundant) backup of some "special subjects."

The couple of "legacy" programs that refused to run normally in Win7 work just fine if opened to "Run as Administrator" without the need for a "virtual WinXP" setup, but YMMV.

One of the somewhat pleasant surprises has been that the newer ABBYY OCR (64 bit Win7 compatible) that came with my scanners is very much more accurate than previous programs I've used, although it failed pretty miserably on my scan of The Dictionary of Egyption Hieroglyphics (Unicode has no "Egyption Heiroglyphic" character set, so far as I can tell, so I suppose it's not surprising.)

My conclusion is that Microsoft may satisfy the "users of toys" with Win8 and its direct successors, but still needs to provide a separate OS for desktops used for "productive purposes." Until something comes along, I can make do with Win7, and it does seem a to have some advantages over WinXP - despite a few new annoyances.

If "upgrading" to Win7, it should be noted that the "Home Premium" version has quite a few features not in "Home Basic" and probably has most of what serious users will need without going to one of the "$uper ver$ion$."

John