TBH, Metro is a little ... disturbing,
unless you actually have a touch enabled device. I have a Bamboo touch pad, and it works
really well with W8.
Some of the back end side of W8 is also disconcerting when you first go into it, but by god, that
Task Manager alone is
well worth having W8 on a computer. It looks like M$ has made good use of having Mark Russinovich on staff, finally.
Of course, being a relatively knowledgeable person about computers, I knew better than to even put it on a different partition until I worked out the details on how it was going to affect my current OS. More specifically, if you installed W7 betas on a different partition with Vista, it changed things in the MBR, which made for some very unusual errors once you tried to remove it and revert o Vista. With XP, fuhgeddabouddit, it wasn't playing nice at all. My guess was that with W8, it is (?) W7 sensitive, so if you put it on a separate partition and then want to remove it it won't hose the W7 MBR and boot partition as badly - but I'm not one to test that out on a production machine. So, I installed it in VBox.
I though about using separate physical HDs, and using my BIOS to select which HD to boot off of - since they're hot-swappable and all - but that's too much work for now. I have more than enough specs on my machine to share between the two OSs as host and guest, so I opted for the easier route. For others with limited memory, it may be more worth it to do the separate drive thing, complete with only having a certain physical drive connected when installing W8, so that each drive has its own complete boot partition, MBR, etc. Then, when you boot the computer, use the BIOS to select which HD to boot off of, and presto, a worry free W8 install that won't mess with your current OS.
Of course,
most users will never think that far ahead - they see "Beta" and think "Ooooooh, I want to see how it works!" and click yes and OK more times than they can count
without reading a damned thing.....
I feel your pain, pasta, but in this case you're gonna have to be blunt with them and 1) Show them where it clearly told them that this was an irreversible procedure, and 2) Show them that it is going to take a bit of time to revert, including all of their data and stuff, and that your time is not cheap.
(aside)
As soon as M$ incorporates a way to revert to a regular desktop
permanently, most of the complaints with W8 will go away. Unlike Vista, which simply was not cut out for machines it came installed on (or, more appropriately, the machines were not cut out for Vista), this is actually an enjoyable OS beta.
Then again, though, when Vista betas were out I was super excited at the backend changes - as in having UAC to help control admin level access to files and programs, something that XP sorely missed.
Also, FWIW:
Windows 7 is actually Windows 6.1. Furthermore, the original version (prior to SP1) was Build 7600.
So, though named Windows 7, it's not really Windows 7. That, and the fact that Windows 98 blew Windows 95 out of the water kind of nixes the even numbered M$ OS theory.
Just sayin'...
