> That's really the thing here to me, as a geek. What does Windows 8 have to offer me to impress me and make me happy as a user? The ability to partition seamle

> That's really the thing here to me, as a geek. What does Windows 8 have to offer me to impress me and make me happy as a user? The ability to partition seamlessly; the ability to force a partitioning over errors if I want to; the ability to reinstall seamlessly as many times as I need to, to burn reinstallation software as many times as I need to; the ability to easily and directly configure boot parameters, and to make a boot sturdy and permanent for all users on a machine running multiple partitions with differing encryption levels; finally, direct manipulation of inodes/indexes. These are all things which are still, so far as I can tell, flatly impossible within the context of Windows; and where any of them is possible, it's only with the help of expensive software. Whereas a person with a free, burned copy of Knoppix on a disk can do all of them in five minutes with any computer she choose. Then use Knoppix. Seriously. You just described yourself in the top 1% of computer geeks, and geeks are not part of Microsoft's core market anyway. You want to directly manipulate indexes and inodes?!?! Come on; Microsoft has no time for you, nor should it. Of course things like different encryptions for different users of the same machine might make sense (although probably not, since that is pretty enterprisy, so probably happens on a server), but low-level disk partitioning is not the right way for Microsoft to handle them, even if they chose to handle them at all. > Maybe some of them can answer this; I know they're reasonably intelligent. Do any of you know why Windows won't offer these things? And what we're supposed to do in a world where more and more operating systems do? 1) They don't want your business. 2) You're supposed not to use Windows.