Silicon Avatar wrote on Jan 2, 2013, 13:15:
http://classicshell.sourceforge.net/
Use that. It even has an option to make the OS boot straight to the desktop - and you can turn off the hot corners and charms. IOW, it looks and behaves exactly like Win 7.
If they had made that an option out of the box 80% of people would probably shut up about Win 8.
Ballmer's an idiot. I just wanted to add that in there.
It's a shame really, they had a ton of negative feedback about Metro and chose to ignore and release anyway. I'd rather live with a form of Metro that makes sense as opposed to disabling one of the few reasons to own the OS outside of forced sunsetting.
Unfortunately Ballmer keeps surviving this sort of thing because they've always got the business revenue to rely on. Google is going after them pretty hard this year though so maybe we'll see some shake ups.