I migrated my main system to 8.1 a couple of weeks ago, and somewhat to my surprise, once I got rid of that hideous default tiled interface and went with the classic desktop, I found it really is an improvement. It solved a couple of problems I'd been having on the home network with sharing folders and printers among Win7 and XP, and created another one with my multi-function Epson printer/scanner/copier, it doesn't have the full set of drivers for it and the slide and film scanning functions don't work, it just takes a nice image of the slide/film holder. So I installed Oracle's Virtual Box and installed XP and the Epson drivers inside it, and it works fine. 8.1 sees the virtual XP machine as just another PC on the network, I can share files and folders and control read/write access to them with 7 and 8's more sophisticated security model so I can put scanned images anywhere I want. The security's a bit irksome sometimes, I don't seem to own my files anymore and even though I log on as an administrator there are things it won't let me do that it says require administrator privileges, but I'm figuring out workarounds for that.
Two other things I noticed: 8.1 is much less burdensome on the hardware than 7, this is a 6-year old PC and Win 7 imposed some performance penalties, but with 8.1 it runs as fast as XP did, and the Windows Upgrade Advisor programs that tell you certain XP programs won't work on 7 and 8 are wrong about a few things. I was informed that Norton Ghost v12 and WordPerfect v11 are not compatible with 7 and 8, but I find they run just fine. Call of Duty 2 I was also told was incompatible, and it does have one little quirk, when you first start it up Windows keeps control of the mouse, but Alt-Tab to minimize it then clicking it back up again fixes that.
