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Hmmm, compare the options available via:

http://www.eightforums.com/tut...

with the options available in windows7 (and previous) in the "window color and appearance" dialog.

There are probably 4x the number of options in win7, including font selection/size changes that are simply not available on win8.

^This.

Exactly this is what's wrong with Windows 8.1. I really don't care about Modern UI, I can live with it or there are alternatives, but the weird selection of changed/removed features is what really bugs me about Windows 8.1.

Also, it seems you don't have to registry hack to switch between Public and Private networks, but the interface to do so is hardly intuitive.

I'm realize you were trying to be funny (not that you were) but just for the record: my computer boots into Windows 8 to the desktop in 8 seconds - including the time to log in. It takes longer to boot into Linux last I tried.

Windows 8 speeds up boot time by using Hybrid boot / Fast Boot. Basically when you go to shutdown, the computer will reboot, then basically at the login prompt hibrenate to disk. So 8 seconds probably isn't the time for a true cold start.

http://www.howtogeek.com/12902...

http://www.eightforums.com/tut...

Because I use legacy boot menu on my Windows 8 machine, it does not use hybrid boot. The boot time for Win8 is about the same as Win7 was, which is about what WinXP was, about 30 seconds. The problems that extend boot times isn't Microsoft, but third party vendors that insist everything must be running all the time, and not even small background daemons. Workplace IT departments seem particularly skilled at loading down the PCs with so much shit that a well specced Core i5 can take 5 minutes to become usable. The other users that suffer from this is home users that don't know how to use a computer and load as much shit as the popups on the internet tell them to.

Here

The reason why Windows 8 boots so fast is that it doesn't actually boot. When you "Shut Down" from the charms bar, it actually just kills your user session and hibernates. You can turn off fastboot and see for yourself.

Intel really needs to get its act together: It's Atom processors are a decent low power x86 solution, but as usual Intel has delivered them with a crappy 3D graphics to the point the graphical benchmarks can't even run on them, let alone any recent computer games. For the Atom Cedar Trail release they didn't even do DX10 drivers, and sheepishly back-speced it to the now outdated DX9. ARM tablets can deliver decent 3D, so why can't Intel? Even AMD can provide 3D graphics for low-power PCs. Why can't Intel? And Intel wonders why it's becoming irrelevant to the future of computing!?

No DX10 for you!
http://semiaccurate.com/2012/01/03/intel-thinks-cedar-trail-is-a-dog-reading-between-bullet-points/#.UOY58uRJNxA

Windows must live with DX9. Linux can't do anything at all...
http://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article56/beware-newest-intel-atom

Oh and did I mention it doesn't work on Windows 8.
http://communities.intel.com/message/175674
http://www.eightforums.com/hardware-drivers/12305-intel-gma-3600-3650-windows-8-driver.html
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_8-hardware/windows-8-on-intel-atom-d2700dc-graphics-driver/2a6015d3-af92-453d-b0c2-20cc56b764de

Just because Microsoft has to support PCs that don't have secure boot doesn't mean they can't force machines that do to be Microsoft only.

UEFI can't tell that Windows 7 is a Microsoft operating system because Windows 7 doesn't carry a UEFI Secure Boot signature. Therefore, end users exercising downgrade rights will have to turn off Secure Boot to use Windows 7. And the page about downgrade rights implies that downgrade rights appear to cover the last two major versions: Windows 8 licensees can downgrade to 7 or Vista, and Windows 7 licensees can downgrade to Vista or XP. So Microsoft will more than likely allow end users to turn off Secure Boot until Windows 9 is no longer available, and that page states: "Note that end user downgrade rights will be available through the sales life cycle of Windows and Windows Server operating systems, which is up to two years after the launch date of a new version." So companies concerned about the Secure Boot problem have until two years after the launch of Windows 10 to plan their migration to hardware with a drawing of a penguin on the box. This could be seven or eight years from now.

The Windows 7 downgrade option can end tomorrow

From the page about downgrade rights: "Downgrade rights are an end-user right, documented in the Software License Terms that customers accept upon first running Windows software." If the Software License Terms are in fact a contract, then they bind Microsoft just as much as they bind the end user.