you all are just so silly. sometimes upgrading to the newest and (supposedly) the best is not always so. It all comes down to personal experiences and what you want these OS's and browsers to do for you.

I use win7, IE8 (both 64 and 32 bit) and firefox 28 and see no reason to upgrade any of these as they do want I need/want from them. I have some disappointments with firefox regarding silverlight functions (netflix) and on a regular basis telling me that my flash is out of date and disabling it, I have version16 which I believe is current. And well there is an issue with netflix and IE that netflix blames on IE all versions, but none the less my browsing experience is fairly under my control which suits me fine.

what do you do with so many machines, one wonders?

Most folks don't spend too much time wondering that much about a redneck, they wind up getting a headache. 

I know from personal experience. 

Well, I buy cheap, resell for profit. I have a small customer base, so I just hold them till I sell them.

I have 3 gamers, a laptop, a tablet, and a netbook that aren't for sale.

I enjoy building, repairing, and tinkering with PCs.

Sold 1000.00 in PCs in Jan. in which I only had maybe 500.00 invested.

Just Finished a new machine with win 8.1 touch screen and I Love it. Boots in under 30 seconds, runs Explorer 11 and not a single problem yet.

Excuse me, RND... I'm from the IRS & I'm here to help.

Loving 8.1......no issues with IE and I would use it regularly if it was not for the crappy font bleed. Chrome is my browser of choice but you guys got me intrigued in Pale Moon and I must say I'm quite impressed so far.

With my new machine I think half the trouble is it boots too fast for the OS to catch up with itself....and locks when the MS flag starts its squirl...

...cold reboot...typically about 3 times...

..and then bang...it's up and loaded....

Of course, it's 7 and thus isn't trying to fool people like 8 does...

Terry's taken the lappy to work for a Presentation....hopefully it won't crash and burn while she's using it [Powerpoint pres].

It's a fairly decent machine...ASUS R500A i7 3610.  It's just that corny OS...

can you tell me what drives are installed external internal

512G Samsung XP941 M.2 PCIe x4 SSD [C]=Win7 Ultimate [H]=Games 

240G Corsair Neutron GTX SSD [E]=[Office + Proggies]  [hotswap]

240G Corsair Neutron GTX SSD [F]=[Games 2]   [hotswap]

3TB Western Digital Caviar Green Sata2 HD [G + D]  [hotswap]

2TB Western Digital Caviar Green Sata2 HD [I]   [hotswap]

2TB Western Digital Caviar Green Sata2 HD [J]   [hotswap]

The Samsung is the critter that's off the scale with read/write speeds ...

I'll say!!!!  With Win 8.1 loaded on my Samsungs M.2 in my AMD machine, program loads and startup speeds are through the roof... rig boots fully in under 6 seconds.

And no, I'm not waiting for the desktop, cursor and icons to load... ALL are available the moment the desktop lights up.

Had a similar Problem.
One of mine was related to a power issue of an external drive.

The other time this happend was either due to a pending windows update or because of the hybrid shutdown.
Once i used shutdown /s /f  /t 0  the flag whirl did not pause for a couple of seconds without doing anything. 

Nope...not the same issue at all....it's more correctly Win 7 doesn't understand DDR4 and the PCIe type of SSD....one that is not even attached to a PCIe slot...but to a M.2 socket.

Things that did not exist when 7 came out...