Bluescreen are nearly always caused by failing hardware or bad drivers. If you get a lot of Bluescreens, it's very rarely Windows' fault. The last time I got a repeated BSOD was caused by my Crucial M4 and that turned out to be a well known bug in its firmware.

I think Microsoft undeservedly receives a lot of flack - I'm not a fan of all their business tactics but Windows 7/8 is leaps and bounds better and more stable than their Windows 9X predecessors and while those operating systems were unstable for real, it's no longer the case, really.

I've read of a couple early apps that return Start Menu functionality, and I'm sure there will be a load of them within the year, some good, some not.

Where was I going with that? Oh yeah. Is there a boot.ini or somesuch setting that simply starts Win8 to the traditional desktop automatically each boot?

Blu ray was preferred because HD DVD players were too cheap to produce. The cost of producing HD DVD players when it premiered was below 100 bucks.

Configuring Language in Windows 8 is a little "messy" and rather buggy. Basically you have first to decide which language you want the "Metro" apps to be in, add this language, then under this language add the keyboard scheme you plan on using (no matter if it's totally different than the language you selected).

For example I have US English has my main language but under it Swiss French as my keyboard.

Of course that only works for "basic" language scheme, if you use something fancy like the Japanese IME then it's somewhat more complicated.

Yeah, that's a bit messy. And the IMEs for East Asian languages is probably just as bad as it has been in Windows 7. I'm not sure why they don't give us Wubizixing support, that Pinyin method they use is really inefficient. But, that's fairly common and I don't believe that MS is the only one that does that.

So... I thought I'd do a follow up now that I have spent more time with the OS... funny thing is that most of the original problems were largely due to the Laptop being fucked up out of the box. Once I took that god awful HP back & got the Gateway that I have now, I can honestly say that the OS is starting to grow on me... mainly due to the speed. I can boot the computer up & be on the internet within roughly 30 seconds (from boot).