8.1 is a better version of Windows 7. All a person has to do is set it up to use the desktop by default.
I am a little jaded with every other release being betaware OSs. It started with ME...Vista...8. So my expectations are pretty low and probably biased.
XP was great and no complaints with Win 7. Win2k was good. Win 98 was good.
Anyway, good luck running Win 8 on an 8 year old computer. Heck, good luck with a 5 year... 4 year old computer.