So are most people's complaints just about the change of the UI? Should I just stick with Win7 and is Win8 better suited to portable devices?
I installed W8 on my new PC when I got it in April. Boy do I regret ever doing that. I hoped that 8.1 would unfuck-it-up, and it did to some extent. But in the end I gave up, backed up everything, and upgraded to W7.
Some people love W8, and some can put up with its deficiencies. But its bucktoothed way of doing things was actually impeding my work. Too many niggles for me to expand now. I just want to forget it TBH.
That doesn't sound very good. I don't think many people here have had good things to say about 8. I still can't help but want to try it. Maybe I'll try it in a VM before reinstalling.
RAM prices seem to be a lot higher than when I bought my computer. Another 4GB would be £14 more than when I paid for stuff :O
Have you tried reseating the RAM?
Good idea. I'll try reseating my 2GBx2 TBH!!!
So called cos he often had a masked man riding on his back.
It's a toughy. It is very geared towards touchscreens, but a lot of that can be got rid of. There's freebie start menu replacements like Start8 which make it more usable, plus there are some themes out there which look less drab and dire than Windows 8's defaults - if you don't mind swapping out system files!
Of course, a lot of the effects from Windows 7 and Aero have been removed from Windows 8, so if you like a flashy desktop, it's never going to be as flashy with Windows 8. Of course, if you're not into this, it's less of a problem.
Personally having used it, I do prefer Windows 7. It just does pretty much everything right straight away without having to install all manner of add-ons and hacked system files to fix. But then again, my Windows installation is about 3 years old and still running nice and fast (I take care of my PC!)