Absolutely, it's much less of a hog on system resources, occupies about half the disk space Vista did, it's easily at least five times as fast at startup and shutdown, and it does have a desktop, you don't have to use that idiotic monkey tile interface or any of the useless apps that come with it, you can even uninstall them, which surprised me. But there's no Start button on the Win8 desktop, MS's view is that the tile interface is a Start Page, so whatever you want available from the desktop you have to find in the directory tree and drag a shortcut out for it. The more stuff you install the bigger that start page gets, mine is now up to three full screens that scroll off to left and right. That's because every link an installation creates becomes a full sized tile, there's no hierarchy of tiles under tiles the way there is with shortcuts under the classic Start menu list. The Classic Shell program I referenced earlier, for instance, creates four links, for a Help file, Windows Explorer settings, IE settings, and Start Menu settings. With a Start button you click Start - Programs - Classic Shell, and you get that list of four items in a little flyout menu. On the tile interface they're all full sized tiles on the page at the top level, which seems to be the only level, there's no Classic Shell tile with sub-tiles under it.
Windows 7, from what I've seen of it, is just as much of a pig as Vista, and I believe MS has announced the end of XP support for about 18 months hence, so I bought two copies of Win8 when Best Buy had them on for $69.95, for my laptop and desktop. Haven't installed it on the desktop yet, I'm using the laptop to learn how to beat it into shape and make it do what I want before I put it on my main system. There's way too much stuff that Win8 hides from me, in the default setup I don't even own my personal files, the system owns everything via hidden user names, TrustedInstaller and Creator/Owner. Even if you create your own user name with administrator privileges, you don't have full access to things, so I'm figuring out, with some success, how to wrestle control of the machine away from Microsoft, starting with the Classic Shell.
