I left apple a bit over a year ago because I wanted to get a laptop with some serious GPU power (I was doing lots of sequence alignments that took hours to do on my old laptop and hours to upload to / download from my university's compute cluster). The computer performed fabulously at this task, but my experience with the Microsoft ecosystem has been absolutely dreadful. Now that I no longer need the GPU power, I will gladly pay a few hundred dollar premium to get a mac laptop for my next computer. I would probably pay a 2x premium if Apple asked it.

-------- OS Installation: The Horror Story --------

* Reinstalling the OS is a 4-5 hour manual slog through serial numbers and a dozen drivers that must be manually installed in the correct order, not a 1-hour fire-and-forget process like in the Mac ecosystem. (hours of my time vs minutes of my time).

* The bundled "backup solution" works neither for imaging nor for incremental document recovery. "Time Machine" this is not.

* MSE antivirus was dreadfully slow (Just downloaded an installer? It'll wait 30 seconds before launching 5 copies of the .exe corresponding to the 5 times you clicked on it).

* I got a 30gb SSD as a boot volume and put Windows on it, then linked ("junctioned") the "Program Files" directory to my HDD (I'd done similar on my mac without trouble). Big mistake, none of the applications would launch. They didn't launch after I copied them back either (yes, I looked up permission-resetting instructions and followed them to the letter). I had to reinstall.

* I looked up a Microsoft support document explaining how to properly put programs on a different HD (and also that it was unsupported). It involved registry edits and DOS-fu from the system restore disk. The next time Windows Update ran, it broke my system so that no program would launch (DLL error every time). Rolling back the updates didn't work, of course. I had to reinstall. Gave up on the 30gb SSD.

* I tried to upgrade my Win7 install to Win8. Big mistake. The installer took 2 hours to give me an unhelpful generic error message. After hours of searching through forums I found out that it scans your installed Win7 drivers+programs one by one and barfs if any of them aren't compatible (but it doesn't tell you that, of course).

* I tried a fresh install of Win8 on a new 250gb SSD I got on black friday. It froze every time I woke from sleep. Oh, and it would boot to an I/O error bluescreen unless I booted into Win7 first, touched a file on the SSD, and rebooted (yes, touching a file was necessary). Two firmware updates and a handful of driver updates later and I had the same symptoms.

* On a hunch, I switched the SSD from SATA slot 2 to 0. This broke the bootloader, and Microsoft's instructions to fix it didn't work, giving a generic error message that many people on the support forum seemed to experience but that nobody had a fix for. There were 2 Microsoft employees with unhelpful non-fix "solutions," though.

* I nuked the Win7 HDD install and reinstalled Win8 afresh on the SSD (now slot 0). It seems to be stable so far.

* There was a 4-month period where Dell's GPU drivers had broken OpenCL compatibility and the manufacturer drivers would silently fail to install unless I ran a 3rd-party sketchware wiping program first and disabled signature enforcement on every boot.

* Audio drivers occasionally fail to wake from sleep (no audio till reboot). No, updating them to the manufacturer version didn't help. No, reinstalling Dell's recommended drivers didn't help either.

-------- Small Gripes --------

* No decent UNIX command line. Cygwin starts slowly and is poorly integrated with the system.

* I can't get decent 2-finger scroll without a 3rd party program that is occasionally broken by system updates.

* I can't remap capslock without downloading a 3rd-party program to perform registry edits.

* I can't shut off the screen without installing a 3rd party program to do so.

* In Win7, all allowed keyboard layout switching shortcuts were combinations of modifiers that conflicted with productivity apps like Illustrator. Also, the layout would occasionally become "stuck" and failed to respect the GUI switcher. In Win8, they added a no-conflict key combination for switching layouts but it doesn't work in fullscreen apps.

* Metro. It looks slick, but it doesn't have any of the options you regularly need to access. Fortunately the old menagerie of Windows utilities is still there, just moved around.

* No standard install system that lets you inspect the installer's logs, scripts, or contents.

* The intimate connection between my computer account and Microsoft cloud account creeps me out.

* The full-screen force-quit mechanism is insane (ctrl-alt-del, open Task Manager, press Windows to reveal the Launch Bar, click on the arrow to see all system tray icons, right-click the tiny Task Manager icon (a gray box), enable "Always on Top", highlight the program in the task manager, hit "End Task", wait, hit "End Task" on the dialog box that pops up, and finally decline to send a bug report to Microsoft)

* I can't use the keyboard to navigate directories that contain a mixture of files and folders because in Mircrosoft-Land "Alphabetical Order" means "Sort folders first, then files."

* The sub-HD preloaded desktop backgrounds (yes, really).

-------- Small Victories --------

* Cheaper, better hardware (not remotely cost effective, given the hassle)

* I can manually tweak virtual memory settings (not that I should have to tweak it, which I do, but I think it's terribly cool that I can and that there's a GUI for it)

* Compatibility

* The super-handy "superuser menu" (Win-X)

* The ability to roll-back updates. It has never worked when I needed it to, but I like the idea.

-------- Concluding Remarks --------

I've had better UX with linux, which is saying something, since I had previously considered linux UX to be fairly poor, or rather great -- until a mission-critical piece of it inevitably broke. Turns out the same thing applies Windows, except worse. Sadly, it sees that there is tremendous value in having a non-fragmented ecosystem.

My next computer will be a mac.

-------- My Plea to You --------

If you know how to fix any of my gripes, please speak up. I'm still a newbie. Maybe these are just growing pains. I don't think so, but I can hope.