I've seen a lot of ranting about how the different UI in Windows 8 makes it very difficult for someone used to older versions of Windows to use it, so I'd been wondering whether to use Windows 7 for my next laptop.

I was in the UK (where it's easy to buy decent machines - not ay all like here) for a few days recently and my ancient laptop needed replacing. To start with it's XP-based, so unable to install SQL Server 2012, and the manufacturer won't provide a BIOS for Windows Vista, let alone for Windows 7 or 8; on top of that the hard disc is much too small and too finicky to replace, it overheats now and again, it takes for ever to reboot - and half of forever to shut down; the battery is kaput - about 65 seconds life from fully charged to no power at all, and it is rather slow.

Anyway, I decided to bite the bullet and jump from XP to Windows 8 - why start of with Windows 7 when it is clearly obsolescent, and anyway there are better deals available with Windows 8 than with Windows 7.

Now can someone tell me what all the fuss is about? Please? I just don't understand what the difficulties are, in fact I suspect they were unreal problems dreamt up by bone-headed old dinosaurs who have forgotten how to adapt to new things. It's a nice slick interface, easily usable with a mouse and actually slightly more useable with a finger pad than XP is. Installing stuff is a lot less painful than XP (actually that's been true ever since Vista and knew about it because I set up my wife's system with Vista many years ago) because there's no need to go through the slow and overweight switch user dialogue to get the privileges needed for the install. The help is pretty good. It takes maybe 5 or 10 minutes for someone definitely XP-based like me to be up and running without problems.

I also switched from Office XP (or maybe Office 2003 - I can't remember which I installed all those years ago) to Office 2013; I remember all the screams about Office UI changes years ago, and again I can't see what all the fuss was about - the UI is different, some of the changes are improvements and some are not. Also from Mozilla (with Gàidhlig UI) to IE 10 (with US English UI) because IE 10 is supposedly more secure, and find that a pain (wrong language, plus I miss the detailed control over what sites can use client side JS or VBS).

So far I hit only four real problems, none of which appears to be a Windows 8 issue.

1) I forgot to check which edition of Office 2013 had what in it, discovered that the edition I had acquired didn't include Outlook, so bought Outlook form MS online. Installing it on top of Office H&S was an out-and-out pain; it hangs horribly in mid-install - just stops doing things, and at this point it has deleted Word; apparently this is an extremely common problem; telling it to uninstall Office H&S then results in the expected error - can't uninstall until the previous office install has either completed or rolled back. Of course Outlook isn't on the list of programs that can be uninstalled. But it's an MS install error; reboot and try again and if that gives the same result as before, reboot again and ask it to repair the office installation, then forget about it for an hour or two (while connected to internet and logged into MS account, but using the machine for something else - eg copying files over from old machine via nasty slow pen drives or reading stuff from SQLServerCentral). That worked.

2) Configuring Outlook is still as much of a pain as it always was, just a different pain; a long time ago I did it gradually over weeks and weeks - just fixing things (like international fonts, default encodings, keyboard shortcuts for special characters, killing off the preview pane, what happens when the current open message is deleted, and so on) as and when they annoyed me (and having to hunt through help documentation and/or MSDN to do it) and I guess I will go through the same slow and irritating process again; the UI changes don't make any difference here, as it's not stuff I'm the least bit interested in remembering and even if the UI hadn't changed I would have forgotten how to do it by now.

3) Getting files from the old machine to the new machine is a pain - it takes the old machine an inordinate amount of time to copy stiff to a pen drive; USB 1 is so slow.

4) SQLServer 2012 Developer Edition is not available from MS online store in Europe. I guess I will have to download the evaluation edition instead, and hope MS have made developer edition available this side of the pond before that expires.

Anyway, I reckon Windows 8 is super. I can install both 32-bit (eg PasswordSafe, MS Office - why does MS recommend always installing that as 32-bit?) and 64-bit (some games) software and it all runs well and a lot faster than it would on similar hardware under XP (either the path length bloat has been reduced or Windows 8 handles parallelism better than xp did), I can do most things from the desktop that I want to do from the desktop, control panel, command window, admin tools, and all that stuff are easily started and aren't much different from before, task manager is much improved compared with XP, and so on. None of the difficulties people have claimed make converting from earlier versions of Windows are real.