Not as far as I'm aware. You can use the registry hack above to disable Metro in the Dev, but in the Consumer Preview this method doesn't work. You never know though, for the final release of Windows 8 Microsoft may allow users to chose whether they want to enable Metro or not.

Out of all the MS operating systems I will list my favorites in order:

DOS 5. Small, efficient and ran great. DOS 6 was merely "ok"
Win 3.11 for workgroups. It's windows, with 32-bit drivers for my old VLB IDE and VLB Number Nine grpahics cards

Windows 98SE - All the goodness of OSR2 and speed of 98 rolled into one OS. It ran good on most home machines. I still have it in a VM and on old P2 laptop just for kicks.

Windows NT 4. There will always be a special place in my heart for this OS. Fast and stable. I still have my mint condition boxed copy on top of my desk.

Windows 2000. Now were talking. Faster than NT4 with the driver base support of 98SE and it looked real nice too

XP SP3 - Mainly because it runs on *****Expletives removed by Moderator***** near anything. Other than that I would pick 2K over it.

Windows Vista - I loved the UI. Once SP2 came out it's actually a pretty decent OS and far more secure than XP.

Windows 7 - It's Vista, but with turbochargers. I am seriously loving this OS. It's super fast, super stable, looks great and it runs legacy programs too.

Something very surprising happened to me recently. I bought a Dell Latitude E4200 a couple weeks ago. The sole purpose of this little laptop is to minimize my travel weight, and so as soon as I received it, I ordered a 4-cell battery, and removed the WWAN card, several unused wires and the extra RAM module. Since then I have been running Vista only with the 1GB onboard RAM, and it's still very snappy.

That being said, I have been using Windows 7 more in the past few months and have to admit it has grown on me. I also noticed that Windows 7 takes up several gigabytes (~5GB I think) less than Vista. So, I now probably like 7 and Vista equally.

Why would you downgrade the RAM?

Like I said above: "to minimize my travel weight".

Ok.

Sorry for my confusion but unless the RAM card is made out of lead or some other dense material it cant weigh more than a few ounces as well. It's not that I don't believe you, it is that in my years and years of doing computers, IT, and in general being a geeky type person I have NEVER heard of anyone removing a stick of RAM due to weight. Are you on some NASA Shuttle where every pound (including air and human waste) must be accounted for?

I am sure your reasoning is valid, I mean hey its your life. It's just not something you hear all that often.

I weighed several laptop RAM sticks a while ago and found that each weighed about 0.015 lb. It just makes me feel better to know that my laptop weighs 2.57 lb rather than 2.585 lb.

I have heard of people using one module instead of more to reduce power consumption. In fact I do that for my desktop computer at home.

I voted for vista for one simple fact. It's approx equal to Seven except for one thing, it cost 80% less. If they were free I'd take seven, I use seven on most of my high-end machines, but vista is so under rated that it's not even funny. I hear a lot of people ranting about how horrible it is and I suspect either they never used it, or they tried it for a week and downgraded to XP because someone suggested they should. The fact is it's a great operating system.

In my opinion Vista is lightyears beyond XP and I can't really find one thing that makes me think it's worth paying several times the price to get Seven.

Where is Windows 8?

Windows 7 was vista, with fair requirements. Windows 8 is the complete version

I voted for Vista as well. I too am sick of hearing people bash Vista, as much as I am sick of non-Windows users bashing Windows. 7 does have the advantage of taking up 3 to 5GB less on the HDD, and benchmark tests did show that 7 performed 5 to 20 percent faster than Vista. But such benchmark differences translate into virtually imperceptible differences in real use performance.

My institution upgraded most of its thousands and thousands of computers from Vista to 7 last year, probably because people had complained how slow these computers were. Guess what, after the upgrade, they felt pretty much just as slow. "Bravo" to our IT people for spending so much money and time to accomplish absolutely nothing!



I tried the Windows 8 Release Preview (http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/wind ... se-preview) on my Gateway NX860X laptop just last week. I didn't mind the start screen as much as the last time I tested Win 8, but for some reason the screen flickered a lot and also I could no longer adjust the brightness of the screen (both were probably driver issues). So I was forced to go back to 7.

I made this thread/poll in June 2011, months before even the first Developer Preview for Windows 8 had been released into the wild.

I don't mind Vista, it's OK, I prefer 7 though.

Windows 98 because there was a desktop around the house which survived for quite a while and we never bothered to upgrade until I eventually butchered it some time in 2008. Oh the days that have gone by since it was still fresh, beige box and all. Where we'd have to wait several minutes for it to start up and now I'm getting impatient with my X220t taking 2 seconds too long to boot. And yes I did get told off by my parents for killing it (Still had some of their old files on it when I ripped the hard drive for its magnets. hey, I was 12 at the time!)

Windows 7 because it seemed rather well executed and complete. Vista was nice but it felt worn to me by then and my X61 tablet became a lot nicer with Windows 7

A31, are you Vistakid?

I choose 2k and Vista. I actually love to use 2k on its own. Just the OS that is my life. Vista is second only for gaming. If BF3 worked on 2k then I would not have a reason to use anything more ever. But Vista is a fine little OS as is. If it did TRIM I would never use 7 at all.

Yeah I was Vistakid on the Computer Forum but as you know I got my name changed there.

I think a lot of people here like 2K and feel the same way about it as you do. Personally I've never really used it so I can't pass judgement on it, but when I have used it I haven't really liked it all that much.

Well, why did you not like it that much? To me it is XP minus the extra crap that I don't particularly care for or need.

I guess I was just brought up using XP and so I'm not all that familiar with the old interface, though I did use Windows 98 before XP.

ah. I love the interface and find it much easier for me to use. XP should be just as good though, if you like that interface, or need the latest stuff like flash, MP4s, or the other various stuff that requires OS modding to work in 2k.

Yeah I guess I was definitely an "XP kid", but as I grew up I saw XP get fatter and fatter and slower and slower. I guess the same didn't happen to 2K?

2k was just a repackaged version of NT. It was never fully accepted by hardware manufactures which is why XP became the landmark OS that it is, it's basically the first version of NT that was supported by almost all hardware. Vista is the first of the modern OS and it took a while to get good driver support from most hardware, not to mention some early bugs, but the major source of complaints was from the user account controls that people didn't understand.

Yeah UAC was a bit of a turn off in Vista but it was easy enough to disable, it's just people didn't.

Probably to get to a platform that is MUCH more manageable, has MUCH better network capabilities, and is inherently MUCH more secure.... all of which would have absolutely accomplished a great deal from an institutional point of view, and resulted in significant operational cost saving

Funny enough, my workplace ignored Vista like it was never ever introduced.

They just went from XP to W7 on tens of thousands PCs, almost overnight. Out with old HPs running XP, in with new Lenovos running W7.

Not that I care, but I'm pretty certain that Vista was the only OS since W95 that was entirely skipped in any shape or form...

Windows XP.

It does its job quietly and efficiently. It runs on anything.

It it wasn't for XP I would have thrown my prehistoric machines away (I've got a couple K6-3s here). They are not powerful enough to do complex tasks but they make wonderful file and web home servers and recently I started using them as digital telephone systems with call recording, ID logging and answering... they also work fine to control CNC stuff.

Any computer is a wonderful device. I feel sick when people throw working ones to the land fill. Consumerism won?

Yep we are in a consumer world where even people are commodity now. A lot of it is by design, planned obsolescent. Thinkpads even new Thinkpads can be had for hundreds of dollar not thousands of dollars anymore. As with anything, in some ways it's sad but in other ways it's good.

I agree for older hardware XP is great. For even older hardware Win 98. Lately for me it's Win 7 on anything that can handle Win 7 otherwise it's Linux on anything older.

Most businesses didn't use Vista, most just went from XP to 7.

XP is starting to show its age now, that's why most businesses have upgraded, but some still use it. The other old product businesses still seem to use is Office 2003. Not sure when support for Office 2003 ends completely, but it must be about the same sort of time that support for XP ends? Microsoft have already discontinued support for Office XP.

Windows 2000 was my favorite. It was clean, without any attempt at trendiness. Clean and simple is always best for an operating system, whose only job is to stay out of my way and let me do what I want to do.

Windows 2000 was also the first modern Windows that offered the stability of the NT platform with the plug-and play features of Windows 9x.

Windows 7 is something of a return to the purity of Windows 2000, and I am quite fond of it as well. HATED 9x, HATED XP, Vista was good, but not as good as 2000 or 7. So far, I am not impressed with Windows 8.

Some of the Plug-n-play features. It was still finicky about other things. XP improved on the compatibility, and was really the first Windows OS that was good enough for both home and serious organizations.

I disagree. XP was more compatible, but was also more flakey because of it. I stayed with 2000 until Vista came out, but tried moving to XP three times (with new ThinkPads). It was also roses at first, and then BSODs and other annoyances.

I know a lot of poeple liked XP, but I was never one of them. My only complaints about 2000 was that hibernation was slow on some laptops and that wifi wasn't natively supported.

For whatever reason, I tried to install 2000 on a brand new system back in 2004 (even though XP was already out for a while). The 2000 experience was a disaster (BSOD and other annoyances describes it well, except it was never roses, not even at firsrt). I guess each of us has his own experiences.

Based on my experience, XP is less stable than 2000, Vista and 7. I had another round of OS upgrade last month and now my only computers that are still using XP are my Toughbook CF-Y7 (XP Pro) and Inspiron 7500 (XP FLP). All the others now use Vista or 7. When I get a chance, I will upgrade the Y7 to 7 using my institution's site license.