And he was never heard from again....

Windows 8? Yeah, good luck with that. Well each to his own I guess.

Leo. get the best browser    Ice  DRAGON  http://icedragon.comodo.com  HAS ALL  THE  SECURITY you  want  plus all Firefox ADD- ONS Farst to works grate on w8 & w81  too

H8rs...gonna be H8rs, what ya gonna do?      

Leo, I agree with everything you said except for #2.

To me, it's refreshing and enjoyable to play with something new after 7...................plus all the Stardock apps are great add-ons and compliment the whole OS from both the 'eye candy' and productivity points of view. 

Yeah, and I still have 7, so, if I ever change my mind.....

Now why would yer wanna go n' do that?  Silly man!  All that work to set up Win 7 and all the proggies again?  Just to find it's slower and more cumbersome?  Silly, silly man!!!  Ya knows which side yer bread's best buttered... and when yer on a good thing, stick to it, my good man, stick to it.

How much is MS paying you?

Yep, Starkers..........Everything flies faster on 8 on my rig...........No complaints here.

Not enough 

What!!!!  Nothing! 

5-4-3-2-1.... End of Communication.... Disengage.

Pleased to hear it.  It's like I've said to a few people, give it a fair go and you might find you actually like it.  I mean, if you set it up right, it is no different to Win 7... just faster and crisper to use.  I have a nephew who kept bitching about Win 8 a and what a pig it is, so when he was here last I let him have a dabble on my spare rig with Win 8.1 installed.  I soon had hime eating his words.

"Now that's more like it," he exclaimed: " a decent OS with a decent start menu. See, I told you you'd go back to Win 7."

After he'd been on it a while and had sung it's praises over Win 7, I said: "Adrian, press the Windows key and see what happens."

Yeah, well, the Metro Start Screen popped up, didn't it.  Hehe, I had him back-pedalling and making all sorts of excuses to worm his way out of it.  As it so happens, Ady has installed Win 8 on his home PC and is loving it.  Hehe, all that hate for nothing.

Yeah, orright, dual booting with Win 7 is okay if you need it [skinning, etc], but I don't need it so just have 8.1 on my rig, and 8.1 on my 2nd rig, but I still have my copies of Win 7 if ever I need to install it.  Anyhow, you're probably aware that I was just fooling around with you, so I won't apologise or grovel on the ground and beg your forgiveness.

Well, if it makes you feel any better, I have 8.1 and 7 dualled on my main rig, 8.1 and 7 dualled on my AIO Touchscreen Dell rig, and only 7 on my laptop.

Oh, and since I run 5 monitors, I have VMWare installed on the main rig and I sometimes run Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8.1, and Ubuntu all at the same time, one on each monitor, all from the same PC.

It is cool, if unnecessary as hell.

Interesting that you 'turned' your nephew, Starkers..........My two IT guys were 'nay sayers' a few weeks ago and they got a a couple of licenses and now you'd have to break their arms to take 8.1 off them............

Jim...........sounds like you are running the Star Ship Enterprise with all those rigs 

The second sentence is describing just one rig, with 5 OSes.

I can't imagine why anybody would want to run that many OSes at once... and XP fer crying out loud.  I used it, but I never really liked XP that much.  I couldn't stand that Fisher Price look that kind of made it look like a kids toy.  Without WB and Iconpackager to dress it up it was almost intolerable to look at. I think that's why I welcomed Vista with open arms... could run it without window dressing.

As for dual booting, I have done it in the past, but I have no need to do so anymore.  These days I stick with Win 8.1 on my main rig and that's it. If I ever needed to Run Win 7 I could put a machine together for it from the various spare parts I have.  However, I have built an XP rig for gaming. Some of our games do not like anything much after XP, so I put this one together to connect to a 42" HDTV.  I'm not worried that XP will be dropped by MS later this year, it's perfectly functional as is and won't be connected to the net anyhow.

Yeah, the look on his face was priceless... as was his being lost for words when he was faced with the blunt reality that he'd been using and enjoyed Win 8.1, an OS he professed to hate, for the last 20 minutes. I had my rig set up so that it was obvious I was using Win 8.1, with the Metro start panel making several appearances while he was dissing to OS with every breath.  Anyhow, when he asked if I had a Win 7 machine he could use, I directed him to the Win 8.1 rig upstairs and let him have at it.  He had no idea what he was using because I had disabled the lock screen and had it set up with Start 8 to mimic Win 7... so it hit him like a ton of bricks when he was confronted with the "oh shit, this is Windows 8.1"

My windows experiences so far are that after any fresh install windows starts up quickly. This goes for windows XP, windows VISTA, and windows 7 which I currently use.

After a year it's a lot slower.

I bought an SSD to get rid of the 1 minute startup time. (which in the beginning was like 10 seconds, with a HDD).

Once windows 7 is running, there's no problem of course, the system is fine.

Is windows 8.1 any different from its predecessors in this respect? Will it still start up quickly after 1 year of use?

Simple....testing skins. As a skinner, I like to know if my work works on the OSes used.  Ubuntu, of course, is excluded from my skinning.

Reason #2....because I can. Most people can't understand why I run 5 monitors plus a 32 inch LCD HDTV.

Because I can.    As for XP, yeah, yuck, but I did buy IconX, and Right Click, and Tab Launchpad, which still work fine on XP. As well as Hyperdesk, choke...cough...

I still have the first Stardock Podcast, in which the speaker talks about Rogue Proton Gold, and how it's not a daily useable skin, you'd run it when you want to show off to your friends as to how "damn cool" your computer could look.

My friends are amazed when they see me running 5 OSes at once from one PC.

It is cool, even if it is unnecessary.

Sorry for the off topic, Leo. 

After a year, I still boot from desktop to desktop in about 45 seconds, with 8.1 and an SSD. Cold boot, or reboot, takes about the same amount of time.

It still amazes me how someone that has never tried something can tell someone else it is no good. I did not want to go with Windows 8 because I was happy with 7 and the fear of the unknown was a deterrent. Then my laptop gave up the ghost so when I was doing my shopping the store had already got rid of the 7 machines so I had little choice but to buy a laptop with 8. Like Leo I had to get use to it. I then did the free upgrade to 8.1 and had some issues but I believe those were my own doing. I went back to 8 to correct them and now I am back on 8.1 again and everything is working fine. No problem with software including any Stardock software that is installed. The way my system is set up now looks very much like Windows 7 and I believe runs even a bit better/faster then 7.

All the naysayers can stay naysayers but just remember what happened when Windows 7 came out. Many said  that they would never install Windows 7 but are now running it and like it.

As for running multiple systems I do not do but I do enjoy running Virtualbox from time to time just for the fun of it. I have 3 OS installed on it and in full screen mode works quite well.