It's sad that a lot of people listen to trash talk of windows 8 without checking the sources of their information, most of which comes from sources owned or paid for by competitors.

Windows 8 is intended to pave the way for tablets becoming as powerful as laptops and eventually desktops in the near future. It is a little disconcerting seeing all those icons all over the Start Screen, but after you realize what is going on there is really little difference between it and windows 8. It also runs lighter than Windows 7 and has lower minimum requirements to run.

There are 4 important things to realize when switching to windows 8:
1) You are not required to have a touch screen! Though if you are using a laptop and like to use the touch pad, you can use the touch pad as if it was the screen for navigation.
2) The Start Button from previous incarnations of windows is gone and has been replaced with a Start Screen. All the programs you used to see in the Button are now on the Start Screen.
3) The Shutdown button has been moved to the Charms.
4) Click on your Desktop icon to get to the desktop. You will see little to no difference here from previous versions, other than the missing Start Button. You can freely drown it in links like most people do anyway and never need to use the Start Screen.

What I don't like about windows 8:
-The App version of Internet Explorer sucks monkey snot. Good thing I tend to use Firefox or Chrome.
-It requires you to have a Microsoft email account and to log into the computer with it in order to access the Skydrive features. It's a peeve of mine when anything requires you to log in using an Email account as those are easily found and then all hackers need is to guess/hack your password. Much better when they have to guess your login name as well.
-Converting to Windows 8 from an older version removes the icons from pre-Office 2010 documents. It's as if they are trying to convince you to convert to 2010... But easily fixable if you re-install your older version.
-One of the patches sent it into an infinite patching loop on reboot. Good thing the built-in imaging worked great so I could restore.

In summary, the changes compared to Windows 7 are insignificant, though if you never used 7 in the 1st place, whatever fears you had about going to Windows 7 are probably still in play. If you are a Mac user, please don't lie to people in an attempt to scare them. Those of us who actually know how to fix computers and try to genuinely help others with them know that 99.9% of Max users would find a way to electrocute themselves if they tried to dust out the inside of a computer.