Microsoft Windows 8.1 Pro Reviews

A collection of improvements that add some welcome flexibility to Windows 8

No doubt lots of people will say that 8.1 is what Windows 8 should have been from the start. To be fair to Microsoft though, it deserves some real credit for listening to the complaints people made about 8 and acting on them. While this sounds like basic customer service, it's enormously rare for companies to take feedback and use it in their products. Within a year, Microsoft has taken Windows 8 from a stable and speedy operating system, into one that has far better usability. On a touchscreen device, Windows 8 makes lots of sense. We can't speak highly enough of devices like Samsung's old Slate, the Surface Pro and Dell's amazing XPS 12. On these devices, 8.1 is fabulous and the modern interface is something you'll want to use. Things still make less sense on a desktop computer, but the core of the operating system, the desktop, is better than ever. It's easy to forget that Windows 8 is a massive jump in performance for Windows. We've got some Windows 7 laptops around, and simply rebooting proves what a jump forward Windows 8 is. Don't listen to the hype about it being a disaster. Like Windows Vista, Microsoft's latest OS has been maligned by those who didn't like the change in interface. That doesn't make them right, and while we accept that Windows 8 does make things different, remember how much fuss there was when Microsoft started with the Start button? Or the move from Windows as a GUI, to a proper NT Kernel-based operating system. Those were all massive changes to the very foundation of Windows too.