Out of Pod Experience

Agreed. I noticed a slight speed improvement when upgrading. The metro screen is easily disabled.

^^This. I've actually re-purposed several "junk" XP laptops because they run Win8 better than they ever ran XP. Even an old Fujitsu tablet/laptop that's been sitting on the shelf for 2 years is back in circulation (with users asking if we can get more...LOL).

Tippia: disabled = I don't see the Metro interface ever.

That said, I couldn't recommend anyone upgrade from Win7 to Win8. There just isn't enough new to justify the cost or even the 5 minutes it takes to turn off the Metro interface. The differences in desktop implementations of both are so nuanced and specific that you would know if you need Win8.

But, given a choice between Win8 and XP, it's just plain counter-intuitive to do what the OP asks. And if the OP is really as tech-capable/incapable as he/she indicates, there is nothing but sadness and frustration in their future if they continue down the downgrade path.

KB

I too was upset and annoyed about the metro style interface for Windows 8. I got Windows 8 anyways due some reviews showing the performance increases. The metro style stuff really annoyed me for about a week, then I got used to it. I got my programs ordered into groups by association, hit the windows key and can launch all of my Eve stuff (Eve, Eve, TS3, Mumble, Jabber, Garpa) with very little effort, and be on my way. I see the metro screen maybe once or twice a day. It really isn't as big an issue as people are making it out to be.

As for downgrading to XP, that has got to be one of the most pants on head ideas I have heard. I ran XP until Windows 7 came out. I think most power users skipped Vista. But staying back when your OS is over a decade old and no longer really supported is not a good idea.

One other issue is that you may, in fact be unable to downgrade to a lower OS. I believe the Windows 8 laptops have the UEFI secureboot tech. That is going to preclude you from installing ANY operating system that lacks that functionality. That leaves you with Windows 8 and the bigger Linux distros.

There was an alternative in there between 98 and XP.... Windows 2000. It worked beautifully for me until I got Windows XP a couple years after it came out.

I can not agree on this, maybe I'm misunderstanding the point you're trying to make but I have no problem at all with Win8 features/stuff/my usual work programs and games (except Eve)

I have actually this one disabled (metro) and I see no difference at all in performance or whatever point you're trying to make.
Gaming benchmarks give me the exact same numbers, Overclocking bench's give me the same numbers, I'm still using Firefox and every other program I used to (professional) without a single issue, I can play even that terrible Blacklight Retribution FPS game with GC settings on top without a problem, it's just Eve that runs that bad on it for me which is not and will never be a valid reason for me to not upgrade from my previous OS.

What is exactly that doesn't run at all or badly when you disable the Metro interface? -personally I can't see the difference but I'm missing something maybe.

My point is that all the Metro stuff in Win8 has no place in the OS. It's only there to habituate users to the UI so MS can try to push more mobile appliances, rather than to improve the user interaction and usability of the OS — in fact, in rather does the exact opposite.

Metro goes far beyond just the Start Screen and Metro as a whole cannot be disabled without losing critical core services in the process. Unfortunately, all of these services are primarily designed for a (multi)touch experience on limited real-estate, where there are already a couple of conventions that are tied directly to that kind of input. In the transition to a desktop environment, those conventions are no longer applicable and many of the improvements that make the mobile implementations more discoverable have actually been lost in the process (that last bit is particularly silly: not only did they make a mobile-OS port a core part of the desktop UI, the port was incomplete so the visual language actually becomes inconsistent between the two).

None of the assumptions that drive this UI are true for a desktop, and yet they've decided to make the desktop environment a special case of the mobile one, thus retaining those mobile roots, rather than do it the other way around the way OSX has been receiving back-ported features from iOS over the last couple of releases. They chose to retain the desktop foundations and added (easily ignored) functionality that emulated the mobile experience as an optional layer on top of the standard desktop environment. The end result of this ass-backwards approach is a fundamentally schizophrenic desktop OS that is pretty much totally unsuited for its environment with no way of rectifying those problems since they're hard-coded and only available as Metro interfaces.

Worse, the stated goal is to Metro:ify everything on the platform, even though that would ruin and irreversibly remove every bit of functionality that made window-based desktop computing such a massive hit…

Windows 8, should you actually be able to hack out all of Metro… which you can't.
You can't get rid of Metro any more than you could get rid of GDI in XP.

If I recall, Windows 8 computers _must_ support Trusted Platform Module (TPM), and will not boot non-approved operating systems.

There may be a BIOS setting to disable this.

Oh yes, I'm not arguing that. XP needs to taken out back and shot in the face, burned, buried, plowed, and used as seed bed for energy forest so it can be burned again…

…but this whole “just disable Metro” knee-jerk excuse annoys me. Metro needs to meet the same end as XP, but unfortunately, MS seems to have decided to go down that old IE path again in their quest to beat Apple, so I'm fearful that we'll only get more of it in Win9.

vista, 7, and 8 are the same OS.

uuuhhhhhhh.... crysis 2 uses a version of directX that XP won't.... I don't think you're running games on full, bud.