I've been playing with windows 8 on a laptop for a week now and am actually really impressed! The memory management has improved so that background apps don't require so much memory, many services have been switched to start on demand, and stop when unused, and as for the star menu- just download "classic start menu" and its back on the desktop. Are there things I'm not crazy about-sure. But for laptops it looks great (especially older ones), and the metro interface is easy to ignore if you wish. I'm really interested in seeing how fsx and other flight sims run on it so I can decide about my sim computer- but my laptops are changing as soon as it comes out. Oh, and its only $40 for an upgrade so that helps!