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[mmoy]

Those are tablet reasons for not going with Windows 8. The desktop reasons are pretty small:

Start Menu (fixed with Classic Shell)
Files opened with Modern UI defaults (download open source Windows Desktop alternatives)
Some configuration options that can only be done with Modern UI apps (I don't have a workaround for these but I'm hoping that someone will write one if it's a big enough headache)

I have not tried Windows 8 on a laptop to test battery life but I find performance better on Windows 8 compared to Windows 7 on my desktop.

I took a look at Chrome and I won't be using it anytime soon. I do not like the Cloud solution for secure information. The big news this weekend is that Evernote was hacked. I use Evernote for non-secure storage. It is really convenient for storing web clippings and notes that are bigger than 40 characters (I use Google tasks for that). Their mobile apps are great too - so you can access and update your notes from your phone, tablet or computer. But they got hacked and if they can get hacked, is anyone really safe?

There are various blog postings out there asking if you can install Windows on the Chromebook Pixel. The Pixel has very nice Intel hardware and I'd actually like that hardware if it could run Windows or Mac OS X. Apparently Google locks down the BIOS so that you can't install anything else though hackers are looking into whether or not they can flash a different BIOS onto it.

I've tried to use Android in laptop mode. It was not a pleasant experience though it could be in the future with a lot of work.