It's still 'The Champ' -

Windows 7 is still the champ when it comes to installing quickly. It beats Win-8 and the preview of Win-8.1. There's only one little problem with that these days, and that's the 150 or so updates you then have to re-install to get it back up to the present with its SP1 and security updates, and that takes hours. 

So how did I get into all that, again? Therein lies a tale - a long, sad tale.... and it all began when I prepared a freshly-formatted partition on the drive here to use for the Win-8.1 Preview. I had Windows 7 in the first partition, along with the boot, and I'd wiped the other partition of its PC-BSD and reformatted it to NTFS for Windows. But when Windows 8.1 installed, it wiped out the Windows 7 and went onto that partition instead, pissing me right off! So that got it off to a bad start with me right there. Then finding out that it wouldn't run a couple of my pet third-party programs, like the Windows 7 Logon Screen Background Changer didn't add to my joy either. And now I've spent another several hours getting good old Windows 7 back onto the drive, in the partition where that new Win-8.1 should have gone. 

Today's Question Everything therefore is: "Why can't those thumb-typers down at Microsoft get Windows 8.1 to ask which partition I want it to go on before it just goes ahead and screws up the cooking? Would that be so difficult?" And as we already know, other and better-behaved installers like that of Windows 7 are smart enough to scan the drive and discover if there's already more than one partition on it, and then ask where to go. I could have told Windows 8.1 where to go if it had asked - and now I think I know why it didn't - it was afraid to, in case I told it where to go, how to get there, and what kind of weather to expect upon arrival.

If Microsoft wants to get our approval, not to mention our undying affection, then they could start by putting a little more thought into how they package these goddamned upgrades, so that those don't end up causing more trouble than they're worth and requiring hours of extra work to clean up the mess.
And this one wasn't "free" - it cost me several hours of nail-biting and extra work re-installing something else that I already had on here and didn't want to lose just for the sake of trying out yet another half-baked preview.