I have to say that although i voted for windows 7 that windows 98 was amazing. It was my first operating system which may mean there is considerably bias in that opinion. But it was so fast, it is from a bygone era of clicking a button and getting an instant result and user interfaces that were created with functionality at the forefront with flashiness being more of an afterthought. I had some good times with that OS playing games like RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 ,SimCity 2000 and StarWars Rouge Squadron. Such nostalgia.
Well, can't change my poll vote, but it's now 7. Fuck Windows 8. Start screen is rubbish. Online login is rubbish. It's bugged and broken. And 8.1 fucked up 3 times before I decided to go back to 7, which works just fine. Windows 8 broke the SetPixel WinAPI function as well. The only good thing about Windows 8 was the incredibly fast boot speed.
You can speed up windows 7 boot times quite a bit if you are willing to put a bit of time into it. Needless to say you wont get near Win8 boot times but you can make things a good deal faster by disabling unnecessary things using msconfig. There are also things that will make any OS boot faster such as telling your motherboard not to show a splash screen image on bootup. By default windows 7 boots up on a single CPU core but you can tell it to use more cores if you want to but it probably wont help much because you will be bottlenecked by your storage.
start screen is an opinion based thing (just because lots of people dislike it doesn't make it a fact) never had any problems with the online login stuff i think you just got really unlucky (1 computer does not equal every single other computer in the world, most people who are willing to deal with the start screen or who download classic shell or something of the sort generally find no other faults (at least not giant major ones that almost everyone gets, i'm sure there are still those small cases when 1 or 2 people will get an uncommon glitch, which is probably what happened to you)) personally i prefer the modern ui start screen over the start menu you also forget the many improvements windows 8/8.1 brings for example, windows defender is now microsoft security essentials meaning windows has a built in anti-virus (sadly most OEM's are probably going to install norton or mcafee or some shit, which will disable windows defender)
