My new laptop came infected with Windows 8.1
What a pain in the *
I've learned a lot of it now, but if David S. or others can help you with having Win8 mimic Win7 when you are finally forced to make the change, I'd go that way. Eventually, we may all have to learn Win8, but I'm in hopes that 8.2 will remove some of the most annoying "features" whenever it comes out.