I am almost sorry I didn't make a pitch for Windows 8. Let me say that our two new (December 2013) Dell laptops are doing very well. Yes, they are different from what we were used to, but it turns out W8 is pretty easy to learn and it is rock solid - in our experience. It is simply a very reliable workhorse. For the record, my desktop is a W7 machine. I like having both because I support customers with both and I need to know both. And, once you get past what we used to call the GUI (graphical user interface) they are pretty much the same.
The customer mentioned above has an XP laptop now, and I cleaned and tuned it for him. It should get him through the summer. It has the same old problems most XP machines have: a slow processor and not enough RAM. His processor clains to be about 1 GHz (986 MHz I think it said), He has 1 GB of RAM and really should spend $40 for the upgrade to its maximum 2 GB, but I doubt the customer will spend the mney. "Good money after bad" or some excuse like that.
So this article I found today on pcworld.com is timely. In short let me say that W8 is rock solid and is here to stay for the foreseeable futire. Users should not shy away from it.
