Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsWindows 7 is still the best since XP
Reviewed in the United States on July 8, 2013
I needed a Win7 key and Microsoft no longer sells Win7 for digital download, you can only get a physical copy. So I thought, as long as I am buying a physical copy, I might as well get it for cheaper on Amazon. I have Windows 8 on my laptop, so I can compare.
Reasons why Windows 7 is still preferable to Windows 8:
1) Win8 is designed for a world where everyone is using touch screens for computing. The truth is, we use touch screens for mobile computing frequently (smart phones, mp3 players, tablets, etc), but not on our laptops or desktops as much. It's likely that one day we will use touch screens for many more things, but that day has not arrived yet.
2) The lack of a start button is not the end of the world, but it is a pain in the ass. I still have yet to figure out how to open an app on top of my desktop (e.g. on the same screen as my desktop) rather than returning to the home screen (which is not the desktop), and opening the app from there. This was recently very obnoxious when I was trying to add a bunch of numbers together using the calculator app. I had to switch between my desktop and the homescreen to get the numbers to plug into the calculator app.
3) I don't like the centralized "app store" that Win8 ships with. While this makes sense for mobile phones, on a computer where accessing the free web is easy, it just feels like a proprietary push.
That said, Windows 8 is totally usable -- it's just designed well ahead of its time, so much so that its functionality isn't a good fit for my needs today.
