[jambo]

I've never really been a fan of this "skin it so it looks like the old one" approach.

I remember people skinning XP to look like 2000, skinning 7 to look like XP, and now we're skinning 8 to look like 7. If you don't get on with the OS at all then I can see this, and where you've got a corporate roll out it can save a huge amount on retraining staff. For you, me and anyone else I rather enjoy playing with a new interface. I spend about 2 hours annoyed that things aren't where I expect them to be, and then start using it in the way it's meant to be used. Generally it's at this point I start seeing the improvements over the last version. And when you're googling for help, having a fairly vanilla interface helps out.

Either way, if your hardware can run it, I'd go for Windows 8, but then I've rebuilt a lot of PCs by getting bored and putting alpha releases of an OS on them and watching the thing brick itself, so I'm not the best voice of restraint on these things.

Jambo