Just to agree that Win 7 is faster to use, has less bloatware than Vista and Win 8, and looks good. Last week I got out from storage an older laptop which has Win 7 on it, and am so pleased with it that I am considering transferring my data from this touch
screen Win 8 laptop. I hate touching the screen, because it is more effort to stretch out your arm repeatedly than touching a mouse or mouse pad, and the screen gets finger marks on it. Now I never touch the screen and keep it clean. Touch mobile phone yes,
touch computer no.
Win 7 even looks better, because you can have the classic Win 95 window shapes and colours (yeah, I know I'm a dinosaur). MS got it right with Win 7.
You can fix the charms bar if you uncheck enable edge swipe in the mouse pad settings, as described several times in this thread. If your mouse pad driver does not show this option, you may be able to download an older driver which does.
But, even with the infernal charms bar gone, I find Win 8 still is incredibly slow to load programs. Also it seems to have lots of key combinations which do things, so when I am typing I find things popping up and windows closing or text being deleted just
because I hit a key or pair of keys by mistake.
Win 8 really is a crock.