Survey Shows that Windows 7 is Still the Favorite
A survey conducted by a large Windows 8 forum found that Windows 7 is much more popular than Windows 8.
According to the survey by Forums Windows 8, 53 percent of respondents said Windows 7 was their favorite operating system, followed by Windows 8 with 25 percent and Windows XP with 20 percent.
While we could assume that users of a Windows 8 Forum are, in fact, early Windows 8 users, there was no information if this was actually the case. The respondent base of more than 50,000 people may have been diluted with some Windows 7 users simply looking for information about Windows 8.
On the other hand, 26 percent of respondents answered that they had tried Windows 8, so it's possible that almost the entire group who tried the new OS named it their favorite.
However, among those who had experience with Windows 8, the fast boot up feature was the most welcome improvement (56 percent or respondents chose this feature), followed by easy installation with 50 percent and IE10 with 35 percent. The touch UI came in as the ninth most popular feature with 22 percent. The least popular features were Windows 8's price (35 percent), its system requirements (26 percent), incompatibilities (25 percent), freezes and crashes (20 percent) and its two UI styles (18 percent).

Brother, I used to be in your boat. Windows 7 is where it's at. Trust me.
hasta la vista!!!!
hasta la vista!!!!
..baby!
Windows 7 both vanilla and SP1 redefined perfection.
Windows 8 vanilla will maybe be good. Time will tell. The Service Pack will be an interesting piece of software, if we are to believe the rumors.
OMG...
You know what I think? THIS.
Brother, I used to be in your boat. Windows 7 is where it's at. Trust me.
Otherwise is pure madness.
Not sure about modern Win7 with updates, but I was able to run Win7 Beta on an old AMD machine:
Socket 939 with Opteron 180 (2.4GHZ dual core)
2GB SDRAM
9800GT for the slick graphics and animations.
The OS ran very smooth.
Until 2014. Then all support, including security patches, stop.
Have fun patching your own OS.