The new start menu was enough for me to flush Classic Shell, and be "trained" into the new way, the metro way. All it means is that you are now farther away from a bigger start menu, if you just boot straight to the desktop, as you do. I run it on an iMac with dual monitors, and it's blazing fast as a VMWare image. The only thing is that some frameworks are not supported yet, so apps like Mindjet 2012 won't install. Besides that, a nice update. love it.