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Progress, progress, progress!!! – YUK
Improvement rather than substitution would be much better.
If the effort put into windows 7/8 etc. had been put into polishing XP there would have been very few problems.
I have an XP netbook, a small Vista laptop and a bigger Windows 7 laptop – the latter two only purchased to replace ‘motherboard failures’ in the original XP machines at a time when XP was no longer available.
I find that the easiest to use, within its design limitations, is the XP netbook
The slowest is the Vista laptop – timed yesterday from switch-on to usable – 13 minutes! – and the most frustrating is Windows 7 which keeps failing to retain settings in various programs and in which IE8 is much less stable than IE7.
I know people want the latest gizmo, but often ‘no change’ is the best option.

Typical Microsoft – tells its customers what they can and cannot do!
Not only that, it makes sure you cannot do what you could do before – by removing it!
I must admit, though, that many 3rd party programs are better than Microsoft’s version!

I’ll try oldbamaguy’s remedy – my Vista Home Premium will ‘hang’ and on opening ‘Task Manager’ I find that sync center is hogging the processor to about 90% capacity.
Ending the sync process cures the problem.
I do not have anything that would require this service, and don’t want it: I have tried disabling the file ‘mobsync.exe’ in System32, but Microsoft has made it not-do-able.
10 minute pause – tried remedy – done – hope it works with me.

How about the ergonomics?
Having to lean forward to swipe one’s finger across the screen gives one neckache, and laying the screen flat on the desk and standing over it gives one backache.
All in all Microsoft gets better at giving one a headache!

Installed IE8 in error – it slipped in with a whole batch of updates. Had been using IE7 on Asus Windows 7 machine.
Suddenly IE was sooooooo slow – tried shut-down/restart – that was slow also.
Removed IE8, reverted to 7 BUT all previous settings had reverted to defaults! Took ages to reset everything.
Certainly not going to go to 9.

Would it not be possible for Microsoft (or some other clever fella/gal) to put in a simple command (although the programming might be complex) to be able to return to the original menu system? Surely Microsoft would only need to ‘dust-off’ the original coding and merge it?

I agree wholeheartedly with ‘dsliesse’ (above) – whoever came up with the idea of the ‘ribbon’ should be made to use it for eternity with its content changing all the time so that where an item is becomes unknown. THEN we might be able to have a ‘classic style’ option as with ‘Control Panel’.

I upgraded my Vista Home Basic machine to IE8 after being sort-of OK with IE7 for a long time, as everyone was enthusing about it. I then found that everything using IE was so-o-o slow.
I put up with this for 2 months, and now have uninstalled IE8.
My machine brings up IE and any program depending on it at least twice as fast.
IE8 – NO.
I’ll try IE9 after it reaches 2 years of experience – perhaps.

On my Vista Home Basic machine I had been running IE7 which was pretty slow – (the processor is a Celeron M with 2GB memory, so not completely unexpected).
From the hoo-hah surrounding the ‘new’ IE8, I thought things would be better with that, so I upgraded. Bad decision – now takes half as long again up to twice as long for IE to come up. There were no other changes at that time.
Seems that despite the Microsoft comments that ‘the new system will be faster and better’ I have never found it to be so – mind you I don’t do gaming or prolonged web-browsing – I target what I want and then focus.

Ribbon? No. I much prefer fixed menus with a logical hierarchy – not variable menus.

Very interesting article – perhaps designed to stretch the little grey cells, AKA wet-ware.
The picture of the UEFI screen shown looks complex, not simple, and I can see no advantage for the user over the ‘printed’ BIOS interface – what happens behind the screen depends on the programmer. The ‘printed’ word, for me, is much easier to follow – using the complex graphic interface would lead me to wonder if I had missed something when setting it up – the ‘written’ screen takes one gently through everything in some semblance of order.
Progress is not always appropriate – the new back-office functions could be related to the old front end – if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.
I don’t need great speeds on my machine – I am not into gaming or DTP,so most of the so-called improvements over the years have just increased the complexity without much improving my usage. (I could do good word-processing on my old TI99/4A)

I don’t like the way that so many Microsoft programs are ‘predictive’. If they were prophets they would be out of a job quicktime – they are almost always wrong, and I find it very frustrating having to ‘correct’ something that Microsoft Windows 7 thinks I ought to be doing.
7 also starts programs for me when I am not in the room! These can be Calculator, Thunderbird, My Computer to name but three.

I agree with ‘Just Plain Fred’
I use my machine for e-mail, on-line purchasing and word-processing, with some slight desk-top publishing.
XP was fine (and so was Word before those stupid ribbon menus – I could find what I wanted much quicker before).
The XP processor packed up, and I was unable to get an XP machine (and I didn’t want to build another one).
I have Vista and & 7 on portables/laptops, but they are not a patch on XP. Both keep going down. Everything since, for me, has just been a hassle.

Does it still show up in ‘Device Manager’ as ‘enabled’? If so try disabling it – that might prevent it showing in the Backup program.

For heaven’s sake (and your friends’/clients’ relationship with you) do not do this.
I would take it as an assault!