I have had a few friends buy new laptops with Win8 on then scream for my help; I have never been so frustrated in my life; slow speeds, inconsistent menus and systems. Perhaps a lot of it is down to M$ allowing it to go out on systems that just arent up to coping with it, but my ancient 1.6Ghz EEPC901 running Win7/WinXP Pro is faster than some of the brand new laptops I have been asked to sort out.

That's always been a problem with below par hardware. Your average £300 laptop is always going to struggle.

I was the same with 8 for a long time. The only reasons I switched at first was for a slight boost in BF4 and the fact that a lot of people were using and I needed to keep up with it.

I consider myself a convert now though !!

That's always been a problem with below par hardware. Your average £300 laptop is always going to struggle.

 

This. To this day, I think this was Vista's main problem. I ran it on a well-specced machine (for the launch date) and it ran really well. There were a few small bugs, mostly cosmetic, that disappeared when SP1 came out. But the number of people who bought cheap Vista machines with a gig of RAM (I wouldn't even run XP on less than 2) meant it got some seriously bad press.

 

Fast forward to when Windows 7 came out, and the kind of hardware that I had (dual core, 2 or even 4GB) was now standard, so when people went and bought their Windows 7 budget laptop it was (unsurprisingly) absolutely fine and "much better than that Vista crap".

 

My work PC is pretty terrible (quad core CPU, 4GB of RAM) but it has an SSD for the OS and it runs Windows 8.1 pretty sprightly. The main problem is with Chrome, which eats all of my available RAM and slows everything else down, but the OS itself is great speedwise.

No issues with speed on my i5 processor, but the works machine is very slow on some tasks.