having been on windows 8 now for some time, dual booting with ubuntui must say that windows 8 isn't as bad as it seems,
you moan about the start menu - have you yet discovered this?
1. Right click when you hover over "start" instead of selecting start?
2. the fact that it is still called "The Start Menu"
Lol - tbh i got the windows 8 upgrade for £25 as i thought it was a no brainer - but upgrading my copy of windows 7 to windows 8 was a pain so i hunted about various sources and discovered that even with the upgrade key you can install windows 8 from a clean installation... this dramatically improved the performance and the whole os BECAME A LOT LESS BUGGY!
and the method is simple!
after finding yourself a copy of windows 8 retail disk and then installing from that - you will be in a "trial" of windows 8 and you need to then
Open regedit
Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Setup/OOBE/
Change MediaBootInstall from 1 to 0
Run Command Prompt as administrator.
Type slmgr /rearm on the command line and hit enter.
Reboot Windows now.
Run the activation utility afterwards, enter your upgrade key to activate Windows.
personally I would not install windows 8 any other way!
other things you may or may not be aware of.
Hyper-V Terminal is native in the Pro and Enterprise versions, - go to windows programs and features to install it.
though why you would want to i don't know!
and I have become very familiar with it very quickly,- Don't get me wrong when i Contridict everyone by saying this but.
Actually a lot of the changes they have made are rather practical when you know where they are it makes a lot of sense. - though i still say that they have a fair way to go.
And they have got multiple taskbars on windows 8 - and desktop backgrounds for those with more than one monitor are not the same on all screens if you have a selection of pictures it will display different ones on every screen and at that screens native resolution too.
but i will suggest that as soon as you start windows for the first time you change the Text size in the screen resolution menu same as it is in 7 right click desktop then look for the blue link.
They Set the Default text size to 125%
Why