Personally, I'd advise going with Windows 7.

I've had Win 7 for a year and it has been a solid OS.  The Windows Explorer is crap but even then, there are some add-ons out there that make it a more livable experience.

I took a gamble and tried Windows 8.  After spending some time with it, I rolled back to Windows 7.

I agree that the windows apps are more efficient, even "File Explorer" is improved and the ribbon thing actually isn't as bad as I thought it would be.

The Start Screen felt, to me, like an intrusive thing floating on top of the desktop.  All of the Metro Apps run full screen and the taskbar is obscured.  If you could care little for the Microsoft products and services (Sky Drive, Windows Mail, Internet Explorer, etc) then the Screen feels pretty worthless and you wind up with a RSS/Atom Feed tile, a weather tile and clock or somesuch.  You might as well be using desktop widgets if you want those things.  You can add shortcuts to your programs on the start screen but loading them drops right back to the desktop so it feels even more pointless... Why not just use the desktop to start with?

I was dissapointed also that the only thing you can really customize is the appearance of the window frames but it all comes out looking rather "fisher-price".  You cannot set fonts, font colors or anything else without editing the registry.  In fact there's no classic theme mode at all.  The only way you can really change the colors is to go high-contrast mode and that just makes everything look kind of strange.

I personally found that most of my apps loaded slower than Windows 7.  It just didn't feel "snappy" at all.

I think you would get much more out of Windows 8 if you have a touch mouse or a touch screen just because dragging shit around is how it's set up. :)

Multiple monitor support IS greatly improved over the previous editions of windows though.  You can span multiple monitors with the taskbar and set different background images.  However, even then, we already have several free and pay-for solutions for that already.

I still have my Win 8 Pro upgrade disk and I"m setting it aside for now.  Maybe the future will be brighter... Maybe I'll just have fun with Linux... Who knows? :)

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