Am I the only one who hates the old Start Menu?I didn't hate it, but in Windows 7 I found a better alternative that almost made it redundant.
I have found myself pinning the 20-or-so programs I most often use to the new-style Taskbar instead. I also use Jump Lists and various related tricks all the time. I frequently run many applications at once, I open lots of command prompts and Explorer windows, and with 4 megapixels of real estate on my primary monitor alone, I want these functions one click away a lot more than I need a few extra pixels across the bottom of my screen.
Given that easier-to-use alternative, about the only things that still make me open the Start menu on Windows 7 are searching for programs I don't use regularly and accessing control panels.
My biggest pet peeves in the Windows 7 UI are also dominated by how quickly I can get things loaded so I can start doing something useful:
1. You can't pin starting directories for command prompts the same way you can for Explorer windows.
2. Opening a command prompt from an Explorer window isn't on the context menu by default.
3. You can't pin a Control Panel icon that pops up a menu for accessing the various panels.
4. Running things as Administrator is still clunky, particularly command prompts.
5. I often want to start some combination of applications I use frequently, position their windows in the same way, and then give a specific program the focus ready to start work. This ought to be a trivial use of any operating system's scripting facilities, but it is difficult-to-impossible to set this up for access with a single click from the Taskbar without writing real code using system APIs to do it.
If Microsoft fixed these frustrations and otherwise left Windows 7 exactly as it was, I would buy Windows 9 at full price for every PC I use in a heartbeat. There are several other things they could do that would make me pay much, much more: grown-up command line tools, a robust and standardised framework for installing/updating/uninstalling applications, a more transparent and robust model for controlling access to system resources -- basically addressing the major weaknesses that Windows has relative to Linux or OS X today for power users.
In contrast, I can't imagine any development of the direction they've been going with Windows 8 that would motivate me to run it, and we actively seek vendors who will provide Windows 7 instead for our new computers at present.