Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I'll start by saying that I didn't hate Vista. It wasn't good, but I thought that the amount of hate that it spawned was unjustified. Windows 8 (and 8.1) are awful, and they deserve every negative comment that I've seen. Microsoft tried to treat tablets, phones, and PCs as the same product and the result for PCs has been a disaster. If you prefer using a computer with a mouse and keyboard, then you will not like Windows 8/8.1. I've been using this OS for almost a year and I don't see even one improvement over Windows 7 in terms of usability, speed, or stability. For what it's worth, I thought Windows 7 was excellent. [Update: I bought a new Win 7 PC, and I have to concede that Windows 8 does boot faster. Only slightly faster from sleep, but noticeably faster from a complete shutdown. However, the Win 7 system still wins by a wide margin on usability and stability. I also never feel the urge to place my Win 7 PC in the microwave, and I can't say that about the Win 8 PC.] You may have heard that MS brought back the Start button in 8.1. They added something, but it is not the Start button. Left clicking it just takes you to the infernal tiles. Right clicking brings up essentially a list of system tools. You certainly can't click on it and expect to easily select the Word document that you'd recently been working on. Using a PC to do actual work is more cumbersome in Windows 8/8.1 than any previous version in the last 20 years. MS seems to have concluded that they should make everything feel more like a tablet because tablets are selling so well. I like tablets and use two of them regularly. But I also think that there are certain things that will always be easier on a PC than on a tablet--primarily producing information rather than consuming it. Unfortunately with Windows 8, those things just got harder on a PC.