Last year I bought a asus n-550jv with win 8.1 and after a few months started having problems with wifi, the keyboard, bluetooth and a general slowdown. Now eveything I tried only yielded minor results... So at one point I decided to try linux for the first time, I installed Ubuntu 14 and voila! Half my problems were gone, and over the next few months I was able to fix most of the other problems as well. On the other hand, I still havent been able to do anything meaningfull with windows.
I don't see how many people have so many problems with windows. I use a clean install on just about anything and it pretty much always just works and does so for months.
Stay away from anything Broadcom, AMD, Radeon and pick a decent SSD (Samsung 840 pro here) it's bomb proof.
The only playing around you have to do is on hardware that is way newer than the windows version and the network interfaces aren't supported.
So what you're saying is... Windows works fine if you shop hardware from known good vendors and nothing too bleeding edge? That sure sounds like what people said about Linux a decade ago. ;)
Actually it works on anything out of the box but you might have to source some drivers for network cards so you can get to windows update for everything else.
The best bit is on my older X201, it installs all the Lenovo official drivers as part of windows update. You install windows, wait about 15 minutes, then reboot when it tells you to and bam, sorted.
