Is it a TimeWarp?

It's beginning to feel a bit like the late 80's/early 90's to me when it comes to Microsoft and hardware vendors.  It may be time for me to Time Warp back to the olden days when I built my own desktop and moved to only the PC platform from Apple due to the OS being too locked down from my POV.

Windows 8 is here and while it may be a good "consumer" grade OS, it's not a gamer's OS (heck World of WarCraft won't run on it, but it will run on Linux), nor is it an OS-centric IT tech's OS. I can't run the vast majority of my tools on it, not to mention that color explosion makes my eyes water.

I need to be able to get to a command prompt. I need to see how my machine is performing. I need a keyboard.  What I don't need is what I consider a dumbed-down UI, that's what I have my iPad for. And I like my external mouse, my fingers are simply too fat to deal with the on-board touchpad let alone a touch screen device (have you not seen some of my text messages?) ,and don't get me started on those pencil eraser styled doo-hickeys.

HP is what's triggering this potential shift back to building my own desktops.  They've recently announced that consumer grade laptops and desktops are to be left at Windows 8 and that they are not to be back revved to Windows 7. For those of us who've been around long enough, we recognize that this latest version of Windows is nearly pre-destined to be a "bad" version, and one to be skipped in our larger environments. Makes me wonder what M$ is doing on the backside in terms of licensing with the OEM vendors. I had the "oh-so-wonderful-joy" of dealing with licensing M$ on OEM hardware when we also sold an OS2 version of our solution. 

We're just starting a big Windows 7 roll out at my new gig, I can't imagine the headache if we get forced into Windows 8.  Just thinking about it makes my head hurt! Will someone please pass the Excedrin?

ComputerWorld has a good article on this:
HP to consumer customers: don't downgrade new PCs to Windows 7