Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I don't discount your experiences. There are different kinds of people, with different work methods, and that's why there are different products.

Running Adobe CS in a virtual instance should be possible, but would require a lot more studly hardware than I have presently. And I suspect it doesn't really solve the problem, which is having to deal with Windows. You're still having to do that, but arguably only for the apps that necessitate it, which admittedly may be an improvement.

Maybe I could get used to Windows 8. I started PCs with DOS [1] and had to deal with every single desktop version (except for Windows on Alpha) and many of the server versions that Microsoft has crapped out since then. If there was absolutely no other choice, I could learn to deal with Windows 8. But the point is, there are other choices. (Although I cringe at the thought of buying a Mac...) At some point the madness has got to stop. I just want to get my work done. I don't want to be an OS geek.

[1] I actually started *computers* with 4.1 BSD, then SunOS, and didn't switch to a PC until the eighties.

...management was born.

Mod this up! Oh, wait...

Yes, it is an important distinction. What I said was worded to be glib, but by "let's" I meant, let's have the FCC disincentivize their scummy behavior, and then let's us consumers make them redeem themselves morally, by not doing business with them, and telling them why.

I agree, having the government force a company to redeem itself morally usually doesn't end well. You only have to consider the source to see why that might not work out.

> The UI is not a *lot* worse than windows 7 because the UI is nearly the same as 7. You are not forced to use metro. You can consider it just one more of many features of windows you never need to use.

My first thought was that this statement was profoundly disingenuous, but then I realized that you may have used Win8 for awhile, put in a start menu replacement, disabled the hot corners and all the Metro stuff, went through file associations and changed every one from a Metro app to something that isn't Metro, and if on a laptop made the required registry changes to make the screen resolution and things like ACPI work correctly. You may not even remember having to do all of that. Or you may have been profoundly lucky and not had to do some of it. (The screen res and acpi issues seem to affect only laptops from certain vendors.) You may even not have a use for the control panel items that are in tablet-friendly-but-KVM-unfriendly places now. Or maybe you just put the effort in to learn all the foibles of using a touch based UI on a non-touch machine. I am not looking over your shoulder, so I don't know.

The thing about Win8 is that the "extra UI choice" is not really a choice, it's something I had to dink with every time I touched the computer. It was a Bad User Experience, and frankly, it was easier to go back to Win7 than it was to twist Win8 into something I could work with comfortably.

As to considering leaving Windows carefully, I use the Adobe creative suite extensively in my work. If it's ever ported to Linux (and runs well) I'm outta here. (I've supported Linux both server and (a few) desktops, and I'm comfortable with it.) It *is* ported to Macintosh. I'm not a big fan of Apple (their products are boutique priced and the cult-like fanbase is irritating) but they *do* run the software I need. Just sayin'.

I feel like popping some popcorn. And I don't even like popcorn.

Oh, let's make them do both.

Classic Shell solves a lot of things, but it doesn't solve the control panel items being in multiple places, defaulting to full screen Metro versions of apps, and a half dozen other things. Most (not all) of these have solutions, if you're willing to put the time in, but there is one solution that fixes everything -- boot the Windows 7 recovery disk and choose install. Then wait for Windows 10 SP1. If Microsoft hasn't a clue by that time, switch to another platform.

There are times when you don't have a choice, but then, I agree, XP is a good solution. Or the XP emulation built into 7 Pro.

I can appreciate that, for a gaming machine. My PC is my main workstation, on which I do a variety of stuff, sometimes all at the same time, and the Windows 8 gui was not worth the aggravation. But for games, sure. I bet most of your games will fit on one page of the start screen. If Windows is concentrating on being a gaming platform, then maybe it's time for business customers to look for something else.

Well, installing a different OS is a reasonable thing to do if you're relatively competent, but why would you pay the Microsoft tax once when you buy the machine, and then pay it again to install a different OS?

I have a friend who's wife has an architecture business. She does most of her work on the laptop (Windows 7). The laptop hard drive failed, so she decided it was time to upgrade, bought a Dell. Tried to work with Windows 8 for awhile, and sent the laptop back. Customer service was apologetic and understanding. (I wasn't there at the time, but I do wonder why they didn't just offer to ship a machine with Windows 7.) She made the decision to fix her old laptop. I helped her husband install a solid state drive and get the machine back up again. She's back online on Windows 7. Hopefully, by the time she's forced to upgrade, there will be something reasonable to upgrade to.

A *lot* worse UI. And since the UI is what the user touches more often than anything else in an OS, it is significant. I'm buying another copy of 7 just in case, and intend to wait until OS 10 SP1 (to give it a fair chance) before deciding whether I'm going to continue with Microsoft or not.

At work, management has already given employees a choice between Winders and Mac, and there is a growing community here of enterprise mac users. I don't think that's for me, not really an Apple fan, (my last Mac was a G4 -- I went back to Windows about the time Apple and Adobe got into a pissing contest) but I tried Windows 8 (my copy is now collecting dust on the shelf) and that just isn't happening.

...but there are applications where I don't care about backup, and Raid 1 is enough. Moreover, I can build from there, to Raid 5 (or 10) with commercial grade plug-and-play enclosures, using hot swap hard disk as offline backup (because, as noted previously, disk is cheap) for a majority of the features of an enterprise storage setup, at a tiny fraction of the cost.

> Is that really what you mean? Do you mean that when you ask your local IT for space, you get jack squat?

That would be hyperbole, but, essentially, yes. In a time when 4 terabyte drives can be had for less than $200, (wholesale, but any PC builder knows where to get them) trying to get larger than a 40 Gbyte share or virtual drive is like pulling teeth, and you pay a monthly price for the storage for which you could more than buy the storage outright every month. Now, mind you, a lot of this pays for "enterprise" drives, enclosures, storage admins, and your storage supplier's profit margin. I understand that. But it does leave a developer in a situation where getting enough for a reasonable virtual instance, even just for sandbox work not intended for production, is like pulling teeth, whereas, hey look! I have a terabyte right on my PC! And Sam next to me, he has a terabyte on his! Maybe we can do something with that.

I support apps on a mix of servers, and the most often issue I have to deal with is full partitions. (Not the hardest, but the most numerous.) This is because we're trying to squeeze an app server into too small a space. It's a double whammy -- buy really expensive enterprise grade storage, and *then* try to cut corners by doling it out in Bumble quantities. Exactly the opposite of your suggestion.

So, like you said, that's their own bad decisions.

Take daily full snapshots of your 3 TB system? You'd reach a petabyte in less than a year.