LakotaRising, Welcome to the discussion. I've been using various versions of Windows 8 since the Developer Preview, and honestly my own experience has been far from heavenly; I won't be buying Windows 8 if I can avoid it. I do my work off the Desktop. I got tired of having repeatedly to make a conscious decision NOT to put the mouse pointer in the lower left corner, lest the Start Menu pop up unwanted, and NOT to put the pointer in the upper or lower right corners, lest the Charms bar spring out unwanted. These distractions interrupted the flow of my work. I found that the Start Screen didn't offer me anything I wanted that the Start Menu already does. But worse, the Start Screen takes over the whole monitor, which makes it harder to follow complicated instructions in Internet Explorer or a help or program window. The Start Screen just gets in the way of everything. My oher dissatisfaction with Windows 8 is esthetic in nature. I look at my screen all day long, and the Win8 environment is so much less visually appealing to me. The 3D effect is gone, everything has a flat look; the glass effect in windows is gone; and dull pastel colors dominate throughout. Some folks might actually prefer that, but then in Vista and 7 you could disable the eye candy and go with a dull Home Basic-type look if you wished. Windows 8 removes that choice -- and the lack of user choice in Windows 8 is what really bothers most of us in this thread. Ultimately, the concern is that Microsoft will expand this lack of choice and remove the Desktop altogether in a future version of its OS, so that we can only work within the "Metro" interface, which allows you to have at most two applications open at the same time, with one limited to a smaller area of the screen. It depends how you use Windows: if you never show more than two windows on the screen at a time, you might be OK with that limitation; but if you often need to have three or more windows of the same size open and showing at the same time, you will find the Metro UI to be a crippled, confining experience. For many of us, the beauty of Windows has always been the freedom to customize our environment and experience to suit our individual needs and preferences. The concern is that, with Windows 8, Microsoft is signaling an intention to channel and restrict the way that we interact with our computers. My hope is that even folks who like the "Metro" interface will understand that problem, and let Microsoft know it. --JorgeA Well, you could always give Start8 a shot. Or an app similar. But in my opinion, if your going to go to that extreme, you might as well stay on Win7.