I know we all hate the ribbon in Office, but I do see one use case where there could be a benefit: tablets.

If Windows 8 is intended to be tablet friendly, it can't rely too much on right-click operations for common tasks. Yes, you can right-click in Windows 7 with a click and hold, but it sucks. On a touch-based interface you either need a hardware Menu button like Android does it, or you need to be able to get to common commands directly from the file manager.

If they can just figure out a decent way to select multiple files using only the touchscreen, I can see this as potentially useful.

Apologies if this is slightly off-topic, but why doesn't this apply to politics as well? I've seen campaign ads that are a dozen times worse than anything this guy blogged about, yet smear campaigns are the status quo and I don't see anybody getting sued over that. I'm not going to comment on whether the law itself is right or wrong, but it does bother me that it doesn't appear to be applied uniformly.

Strangely energetic and enterprising words for a guys that goes by "couchslug"

I've found that people who are "PC fixers" and work for free, still tend to be better then your local paid PC repair shop or the guys at Geek Squad.

TOR! TOR! TOR!

Hrmm, you're right, it isn't working.

Well, you have correctly identified all the hardware bullshit that people have had to suffer through over the last two decades.

That's not really the point though, is it?

There isn't a hardware platform anywhere that has functional drivers for every Windows version outside of a virtual environment. That is in itself an accomplishment for VMWare, really. No one expects Windows 7 to run on a 386 either (or the latest Debian for that matter, though I'm sure some lunatic has tried), but it is interesting what exactly has carried over from one generation to the next and how much backwards compatibility there is.

So no, this is not a real-world scenario. Unless you have some burning desire to play Doom2 and write something in a decade-old version of word perfect (and for some reason can't bothered to spin up a VM for these nostalgic yearnings), just copy your shit off to another drive and do a clean install. Upgrades are for masochists.

Also: I dare you to attempt this with your favorite combinations of linux distros over the years and tell us how you fare. I love my linux, but lets not kid ourselves. Upgrades aren't pain-free here either.

Ha. HaHa. HaHaHaHa. Sure, some nasty Anon broke the law here. But if anybody ever had it coming, it was this guy.