Any reason to avoid windows 8.1?

[luxlunae]

I'm using 7 home, but I found out at christmas, after receiving more memory, that windows 7 home can only use 8 gigs. I've been having out of memory crashes running 5 rifts a LOT now, so it might be time to bite the bullet and upgrade. Are there any pitfalls I might not be aware of?

I multibox Rift and Wow and might be trying non-boxed FFXIV later this week.

[Ughmahedhurtz]

Personally, I'd still rather format and start over with Win7 Pro or ultimate than go to 8 yet. Then again, I'm not in OS Test anymore so I don't have that inside track on 8. As I recall talking to a friend that worked on Win8, it was only worthwhile for touch-enabled devices. And there were still limitations.

At this point, I have no plans to upgrade me or my family's machines past Win7.

[rfarris]

I'm pretty happy with 8.1. It boots into the desktop and has improved graphics drivers. I would agree with Ugh on 8.0, but 8.1 is a major upgrade and I find it better than 7.

[Lax]

I'm with rfarris on this one. Windows 8.0 was kind of a disaster but 8.1 is good. Either way there are many OS improvements over windows 7, and I would not switch back from 8.1 to any flavor of 7. I use 8.1 on several PCs at this point. I don't use Metro, the app store, etc personally -- I use it pretty much the same way I use 7.

However, if you're like my mom, stick with 7. The Metro interface confuses the crap out of her and I can't really explain to her why there are two completely different flavors of Internet Explorer, why the address bar is at the bottom of the screen because she uses the Metro IE, etc.