New laptop with not so new OS

My aging ThinkPad T61 has been on its last legs for a while now. The question was what to replace it with.

Wait for the Surface Pro? The recently announced pricing eliminated that option. The cost is more than I am willing to pay for it.

Buy a Mac? An option yes, but once more the question is whether the price is really worth it. The model I was looking at is the 15" Retina MacBook Pro. Starting price in .de: €2,279. Yeah, no. 

Looking around for a laptop offering a good bang for the buck ratio I came across the Dell Vostro 3560. I ordered it via my employer (hey, I'd be silly not to make use of rebates when they're available to me) and received it yesterday. Brief rundown of the specs:

• Core i5-3210M at 2.5 GHz
• 4 GB of RAM
• 500 GB HDD
• GPU: AMD Radeon 7670M
• 15.6" full HD (1920 x 1080) display

The latter was one of the main selling points - I loathe the 1366 x 768 screens which are standard in far too many laptops these days. I need more screen estate than that.

The laptop came pre-installed with Windows 7 Home Premium x64 in German. The former would have been ok, but the latter? No. I prefer OS and applications in English. Therefore a complete re-install was in order. Out of curiousity I booted up the pre-installed Windows anyway to see which bloat Dell had added. Well, see for yourself. (click to enlarge)

Bloat part 1

Bloat part 2

Default browser and homepage

The language issue aside I simply couldn't be arsed to de-crapify this mess. Time to get the Windows installation DVD out.

But which version?

Having dual-booted Windows 7 and Windows 8 on the ThinkPad since August it didn't take me very long to come to a decision: I installed Windows 7 Ultimate x64, together with Office 2010.

I can hear some of you groan in despair now. 'Is the guy stuck in the past? Install Windows 8 already, add Start8 if you must!' To which my reply is a simple 'Why?'

During the entire time I've had Windows 8 installed I've been using it the same way I've used Windows 7. I don't use the 'modern UI' alias Metro part at all. Instead I go straight to the desktop and use the same applications I'm using on older Windows versions. Sure, Microsoft enhanced the file explorer and tweaked the performance of the Windows 8 desktop - I'll gladly acknowledge as much.

However the improvements aren't major enough to put up with the unholy mess that is Windows 8 on a 'normal' laptop. 

What I want is a stable working environment. An environment which doesn't look like ass. Call me old-fashioned and/or superficial, but I prefer the Windows 7 Aero or even the good ol' Classic theme over the Windows 8 desktop theme.

Before anyone asks 'But what about Linux?': I've used it in the past. I know about the gazillions of usability issues it has. I know all too well how much it's still lacking on the good native apps side. I'm sure it's a great option for some of you; for me it's not an option as default operating system.

tl;dr: Experienced user decides not to go with a bleeding edge Windows version on new hardware. Film at 11.