Win 8 software

One of my machines came with Win8. Don't really like it, forcing myself to endure the not-Win7 (actually, the not-Ubuntu) experience. It has its merits, but overall it's suck.

Anyhow, this machine is offline. It probably won't ever go internet, since I'd like to reserve the option of using this Win8 OS on another machine in the future so I don't really want Microsoft to lock this copy onto the half-junky mobo it runs on now.

It won't play DVDs. Meh, I woulda thought the WMP would integrate it all, as usual, but nope. Any suggestions?

It won't play ancient games. Apparently Win8 comes with DX10, DX11, etc, but no DX9 components. I gotta say I'm a little tired of writing glide wrappers for each game I launch, lol. Can I install a DX9.0c (or DX9.0d) runtime or will this really mess everything up? I confess my ignorance.

Can't even get a Windows Experience Index, apparently. I realize it's an almost entirely useless metric - but still, I'd kinda like to see how things compare.

Any other "must have" recommendations I might need to know about?

I got pulled into using Win8 at the new company I work for. I have to say, I totally understand what you mean. That being said, there is a program from Stardock called "Modernmix" http://www.stardock.com/products/modernmix/ and I have to say I forget that I am on a Win8 machine most of the time. It won't help you with the whole ancient gaming scenario, but it does make things a bit easier to deal with.

As for saving the copy for another machine later.. That may be more difficult with Win8. If its an OEM copy and you "move" it to another machine, that license becomes null and void for anything other than the machine it came on. You may still have problems activating it using the conventional Microsoft Activation process. We all know there are alternate means of activation, but if you're going to use one of those, its still a pirated copy no matter how you look at it.

Windows 8 has failed me for the last time. Got slow and sluggish, increasingly unresponsive over time. BSoD, permanent restart loop, can't do a damned thing except boot a Win8 repair disk which itself refuses to run past a certain point before reboot.

Definitely no changes in software, firmware, hardware, nothing updated, nothing added, nothing moved or removed, no settings changed. No classic "oops!" file/folder deletions or RegEdits or hacks. Not a spot of malware to be found. CMOS battery checks at 3.13V. Win8 simply died because it wanted to die. Not unexpected, but still disappointing.

No data lost, just a little waste of time. Win7-64 Ultimate is the winner (for gaming mostly, lol, since I've been more and more attracted to my Ubuntu and Mandrake for anything involving brain cells).

I've seen some issues with Win 8 after a few recent updates. No reboot loop like you are getting, but some slow-ness and response issues.

Not even any updates - after the initial batch of needed components (DirectX, WM codecs, etc) this machine stayed offline forever. No network cable plugged into it. I clean and defrag and take out the trash bin every few weeks, routine bloat trimming. Died for no reason whatsoever. A momentary miscalculation, processor hiccup, or bad bit of memory written forever into OS-critical files? Even if it was an update lemon (which it wasn't), it shouldn't cause catastrophic failure, there should be redundancy, there should be manual and automated repair/rollback/restore/uninstall options.

Says a lot about an OS when you can't consider it reliable for longterm use. And when you can't recover any data off the system disk. A monolithic, bloated piece of Microsoft junk - I'm really unimpressed. Retrograding to Win7 ain't perfect either, it's actually kinda far from perfect, but at least that OS has never yet failed me in such a decisive and irrevocable (and unwarranted) fashion.

lol, Win8 even went so far as to wreck my DOS6.22/98SE/XP-SP2/Win7-32/Win7-64 multiboot. Good thing I got backups. A little dismaying that it could do such stuff to the partitions, boot sector, and MBR without ever informing me what's happening.