I never had 7 and things improved when I installed the Windows Shell on 8. Downloading and saving files is a bear and “script quit” is a daily problem. I will try 8.1 but my past experience leaves me very cautious.
8.1 “fixes” a lot of the Metro failures that enraged the user community. I will say, however, that the “Modern” Start Menu, as MS now calls it, is actually VERY useful once you get it set up properly.
There are some little quirks, things that aren’t where they were in XP/Vista/7, but once you get past them or create PS scripts to do what you want to do, Win8 is actually a pretty badass OS.
The BIGGEST changes to Win8 happened in the kernel. The speed at which this OS operates is incredible. With an SSD and 1 GBps network connection, this OS is a powerhouse. Feed the beast!