Windows 8 is not that bad once it was upgraded to 8.1.
The big problem is whether you have a touch screen or not. I do not, and I got use to it. And that big problem really isn’t much of a big problem because all you have to do is know where to click to find your desktop which looks just like windows 7.
I hated Windows 8/8.1 at first. Now it’s fine, especially since they added the start menu/touch screen button to the bottom left hand corner, that was my major complaint. You couldn’t find the darn thing. Now I enjoy using the apps on the start menu/touch screen for things like eBay, email, and Netflix.
However, I would buy a new computer with Windows 8.1 not try to upgrade something that is 4 years old, like the article says.
It’s like I told someone else who was trying to get used to Windows 8.1: You have the old desktop world everyone knows, and the touch screen world everyone hates. All you have to do is learn how to flip back and forth between both worlds and it begins to become very easy.
The other part that can be annoying is if your in the desk top world, click a photo to view, it pops up, next then you realize you’re in the touch screen world in a photo app. So there are times that you’re pulled into the touch screen but if you understand that you can instantly flip back to the desktop these annoyances just go away. It becomes intuitive like anything else.
For what it's worth I upgraded my wife's 5 year old Netbook having an Atom processor and 2Gb ram to Win8. It was a relatively painless upgrade and it works great. In fact, it's quite a bit peppier than it was before because Win8 is a more efficient operating system. The one thing to watch out for on older machines is the screen resolution. You can't use the Win 8 tiles (largely worthless on a non-touchscreen anyway) or, more importantly, access the Windows store unless the screen resolution is at least 1024 x 768. Access to Windows store is necessary for upgrading to Win 8.1 so if you only have Win 8 that could be an issue. My Netbook has an external monitor port so I was able to overcome the resolution issue by hooking up an external monitor long enough to get the necessary downloads from the Windows store. There is also a regedit workaround posted online that is supposed to solve the issue, but I didn't have to resort to that.