On Sun, 27 Jan 2013, Ryan Coleman wrote: > Microcenter had win 7 as of three weeks ago. I bought a factory refurb laptop there just before Christmas. The "problem" with the refurb laptop was that it would come with Win7 instead of Win8. No problem for me -- I installed Ubuntu and deleted all of it. I'm not sure that was the best plan, but maybe. I could have made it a dual-boot machine. The SD drive and HDMI aren't working in Ubuntu, but I'll bet they would have worked in Win7. I'll want to fix those issues one of these days. I bought an Acer laptop for my daughter, it runs Win7 and everything works, including HDMI and SD. (That was the best deal I've ever found on a laptop -- 14 months ago for $250 with 4GB RAM, 500GB HDD, HDMI, VGA, SD, three USB 2.0, but no DVD drive.) I use nothing but Linux for work, but in the Windows world where I sometimes must venture for various reasons (a couple of programs won't run in Linux), Win7 has looked pretty good to me. Compared to earlier Windows versions, I have found nothing that was worse and a lot that was better. I'm disappointed to hear that Win8 is possibly worse than Win7, but it's hard for me to tell from the initial note if Jason just couldn't figure it out quickly enough for his satisfaction, or if it really is hard to use. I found it hard to figure out what the screen resolution was on Win8 laptops on display. It took a little while to get the hang of it, but then I was able to do it quickly. Mike