I like pretty much everything about it, except for the fact that it has Windows 8, but I'll get by. It's a Toshiba Satellite with these specs:
-6gb RAM(Expandable up to 16gb)
-Dual-core processor
-586gb harddrive
-AMD Radeon HD 7520G graphics with 3gb memory
-1600x900 display

All in all, I'm happy with it, it should be perfect for me.

Very cool! I find that 586GBs for an HDD to be rather odd.

I've got 16GBs of RAM in my computer and nothing can choke it. It's amazing - but I also rarely require all 16GBs unless I'm doing 3D rendering. What processor do you have?

AMD A6-4400M APU, 2.70GHz

Lemme convert this into a tl;dr version: "Congratulations! My Computer is way better, but yours is cool too, kinda!"

The HDD may be 600 GB (not so odd) and have some recovery partition taking up 14 GB.

I was under the impression that it was advertised with 586GB's but that does sound appropriate.

Actually, the HDD is 586 GB with 560 GB available.

Sounds like a nice laptop. I have some suggestions based upon your opinions.



Switch to Linux. Either that, or get a Windows 7 'downgrade'.

Windows 8 isn't terrible, it just takes getting used to. And the under-the-hood improvements (appreciably faster boot..) are worth dealing with the silly UI changes.

I got into the habit of simply hitting the windows key and typing when I want something from the start menu, so that workflow hasn't changed at all (just that the start menu is fullscreen). Beyond that, you can always hit Win+D to drop to the desktop from anywhere, so it's pretty easy to treat it like Windows 7 with a silly fullscreen start menu.

I'd second that. I do have my Start screen with a couple of items, but I usually do a WinKey and type when I want something from the start menu. And being able to log in with a cloud account is also quite nice. The only thing that I had to get used to was that links to particular folders such as "My Computer", "Control Panel", and "My Documents" are no longer on the Start menu, but you can easily find them by running File Explorer.

I found a program called Classic Shell and am using that, it gives me back the old start menu and file explorer(Among other things) and lets me skip the start screen, so it works fairly decently.

In that case, I can't really see the benefits of using Windows 8 over Windows 7 at all. It would seem to me that any slight performance improvements that 8 carries would be nullified by the overhead of those UI-reversion tools.

Not really because that isn't how those UI-reversion tools work. Its more like running a different window manager on Linux. Instead of dwm.exe its using the Classic Shell one. You'll still get all the benefits of faster startup and improved scheduling.

I think "shell" is probably too strong - if it's anything like Start8 (which is what I'm using) it's "just" an app that sits in the task bar and doesn't really do anything until you click it.

Things like bypassing the metro UI really just means it hooks into boot to switch modes - slightly slower startup possibly, but not much else.

But yes, Windows 8 sucks and is not better than 7 unless you need/want things like the networking or system tools upgrades.