Thread:Deathstalker666/@comment-5641163-20150522174501/@comment-5641163-20150524000022

I have to admit, Windows 7 is easily the greatest piece of software Microsoft have ever produced. It's stable, robust, visually appealing and the memory management is exceptional. My PC is on 24-7 and gets restarted about once a month (usually just to update my AV software). In that time I must've launched a thousand different games and apps and it never seems to care.

Windows 8 is just W7 with a crappy front-end. Stick Classic Shell on it and you can effectively turn it back into 7. It's still much more irritating to use (and they've changed every single keyboard shorcut from 7) but at least you don't have to suffer the god-awful touchscreen interface. I spend much of my professional life "converting" new W8 laptops into ones the users are comfortable using, and I take great pleasure in it.

That said, even my W7 has a handful of custom apps that I use to get it how I like it. 7 doesn't store window positions like all previous versions did, and since I have all my games, TV series and apps divided up into folders, I want them to open in the same place at the same size. Similarly, keyboard shortcuts for launching apps is flakey as hell in 7, so I use another app to manage that. But that's about it, it annoyed me when I first switched from XP but since then I've never been happier.

Windows 10, incidentally, has the Start Menu put back in what is, without exception, the single solitary time I've ever seen a company like Microsoft or Google actually change their mind based on user feedback. Then again, after losing all credibility and god knows how much market value after Metro I guess they didn't have much choice.

I'll stick with 7 for as long as I possibly can (I used XP until about 2011 for much the same reason, which is why you'll notice my Taskbar is set up in the XP style), but at least 10 isn't likely to be nearly so irritating as 8. And, underneath all the bollocks, the back-end still remains pretty damn good.

Incidentally, people often ask why I use IE as my primary browser. W7 is why, IE launches in less than a second, something I've never been able to get Firefox or Chrome to do, even with 3rd party apps. When you launch a browser five hundred times a day, those little delays really start to get annoying. Plus I'm experienced enough to be able to reign in IE if it gets out of hand, something I can't trust my malware-magnet clients to do! ;-)

Sorry, that ended up a bit of an essay, I guess I'm a bit of a W7 evangelist. Having to simultaneously support XP, Vista, 7, 8 and 8.1 probably doesn't help.