deliberately unreliable and insecure, yet not one of thousands of employees at MS, many of whom no longer work there, have leaked memos from darth balmer stating to make it such? Also the whole argument is begging the question. Strange how my PC is never unreliable and insecure, must be some kind of voodoo magic how I can leave auto-update enabled and not download fakeav.exe crap.

Just like that time I caught a cold from being around people, then I moved to Antarctica and stopped being around people. No more colds! Hah!

That's what I was thinking. While it's nice to be able to upgrade CPUs, and I know some people are enthusiast about that, I personally just use one cpu with one motherboard, and would prefer better performance. Boost to AMD and ARM are unlikely imo, as usual with tech doom and gloom, it will be an order of magnitude more talk than action.

I love the obtuseness on this sentiment, which is very common. The 'standard' was changed after it was discovered that MS was going to enable DNT by default, in that sense, it's part of the standard, but that aspect of the standard is ad hoc and politically/financially motivated. Users should have privacy by default, period. If web sites want to make money, they should innovate to attract more users, offer more services, or require a pay wall if they can't innovate. There is no pro-user argument for DNT must be user selected, except the round-a-bout 'web sites need to track most users to make money'. In that light, DNT would be ignored any way if most users used it (since that's what the complaint of IE10 really is - that most users will have privacy, not that they want to be tracked), which makes this whole issue a farce. People here jump on as a reason to bash MS (excuse me, "M$"), in an epic show of short-sightedness that is common here. yea, yea, -1 incoming, whatever.

What is it about Linux users' jokes that remind me of the Iraqi Information Minister? ;)

I made a security guide for hardening Windows against threats, it's at http://bulletproof-windows.blogspot.com/ - it may be useful, it's not professional by any means but I think the advice there can help a Windows security newbie.

Might sound like it without a more thorough insight, but in reality it is less clicks (more specifically effort.) I've evaluated the software for months, there is a ton of FUD about it compared to what I see in my everyday use. You'd think I'd be losing my mind trying to use it as I do every day, in fact things are pretty boring, I launch all my apps/games without really thinking about it, and utilize the information I get from metro apps throughout the day and life pretty much goes on.

I'm not sure why you think that. If you run were to run DPC Latency Checker, and try streaming as much info from a bunch of drives into RAM as fast as you could, user land or not, it's going to affect Interrupt (DPC) Latency, since user land can initiate actions that require interrupt services. Email programs, well, lots of stuff that runs in the background, just exhibits that effect to a smaller degree, but it does add up. I appreciate the positive and complimentary comments on my post, though.

Never knew about that. Anyway, still doesn't sound as good, there are more issues being discussed than simply mouse clicks I just find it convenient to refer to mouse clicks generally. There's issues with navigating, reading folder names that often don't have any relation to the program name you're looking for, etc. There's the fact you can get lots of useful information from the start screen with live tile metro apps, that are highly sandboxed, which means when I go over to my mom's house (after putting her on Windows 8, and pointing her towards the app store) I should have a lot less crap to clean up on her computer. Holding down the mouse button and trying to drag the mouse doesn't seem like it'd be a comfortable way to use the mouse to launch applications, I'm pretty sure I'd prefer just 2 regular clicks.

I did not say they were not open minded, I simply said that I was open minded. Me being open minded does not preclude them from being open minded. Or does it? Hmm, I wonder.

Quick Launching, well, the usual applies. If that's all you do, what does the start screen cost you? The start screen only costs you when you use the start menu, and then there is no tangible cost because it's less clicks, with easier navigation and identification of apps. I don't know about the second part, I assume you mean when you run the users as standard user, and install a program in another administrator account (standard elevation), is this not something that group policy would rectify? And not working behind the firewall, well, it works behind my DSL router firewall. I guess your corporate firewall is very strict, well, I don't see how MS could make an app store work without net access. But even if the users can't use metro apps, they don't lose anything by using Windows 8, and since most everyone only upgrades when their old machine breaks, it's not like it will cost extra.

"Um, what? There's so much more running than what's being shown on the Taskbar that your reasoning is off by at an order of magnitude. As someone who's started pinning more items to the Taskbar about a year ago I can easily say that it hasn't affected how I know what's running at all." It has nothing to do with knowing what every program running is, what I mean, is if I have a program pinned to the task bar, in a rush, I sometimes think it is running when it is not but should be, or if I have a program running (with it's icon in the task bar), I think it is just pinned and not running when it is running but should not be. Besides, the task bar is not a good place to put a lot of items, and even if you love the idea so much, then continue using it in Windows 8 as you would in Windows 7. The comparison is really between the start menu and the start screen, because everything else is the same except the start screen is a more efficient replacement for the start menu. "Personally, I like a clean Desktop, and I can't believe that I'm going to be arguing this point. Your reasoning would be correct, if having a Desktop full of icons somehow prevented more windows being open or reduced performance in some way. But having a "messy" Desktop doesn't interfere with running any program in any way shape or form. The reason why a Desktop covered in icons isn't great is because it isn't an efficient way of launching applications. It creates a jarring experience to minimize/close all running programs to start a new program and then get "jarred" again by bringing all of the windows up again." There are multiple reasons, personally I would find that having a bunch of short cuts on the start screen and trying to copy-n-paste, delete, and manipulate the temp files I put there would be irksome. What you put forth, is just another reason it's not the best idea.

Either way, the Windows 8 start screen is either better or no worse. If she could open every program she uses on a daily basis with the start menu pinned item list, that's 2 clicks, or just pinning them all to the Windows 8 start screen is 2 clicks for all of them...

You can do that in Windows 8 as well. I mean, if you can do something just the same in both, it makes more sense to compare where it's different, don't you think?

It's two clicks for 5-10 apps in Windows 7, 3 or 4 for the rest, or a click and typing, and using just the mouse is easier, and still less effort. Windows 8 is 2 clicks for up to 60 apps (rough guestimate, I never put that many in the start screen.)