For me the question would be any reason TO use 8.1? As long as you keep
Windows 7 updated (just as you should with any version) there are really no problems with security.
Windows 7 is so mature that stability is not an issue.
Windows 7 also gets the free upgrade to
Windows 10, not just retail either. OEM also gets the notifications. The one exception is when the
Windows 7
computer is joined to a domain. Domain joined computers currently do not get the free
Windows 10 upgrade notice. This is by design as most large corporations do not want literally thousands of desktop end users suddenly trying to upgrade their systems - that would be an absolute IT nightmare. For corporate deployments its much better for an IT admin to download something like that once and then deploy it through many of the
Windows domain tools. Same with
Windows Updates in large networks - you don't want several thousand desktops all suddenly trying to independently download some new critical updates all at once. That is where WSUS (
Windows Server Update Services) comes into play. WSUS downloads the updates and then it deploys them to the desktops per a schedule that the admin sets.
Aside from that I personally see
Windows 8.x as a huge public beta test of the "new"
Windows OS. Also much like
Windows Vista - most large corporates never deployed Vista. They went directly from
Windows 2000 to
Windows 7. Vista was the poorly designed buggy predecessor to
Windows 7 and was pretty short lived. It was basically a huge public beta to see what was good and bad about the "new"
Windows OS of the time. That ultimately became
Windows 7 and the core of Vista is what
Windows 7 was built on.
Windows 8.x is the very poorly designed predecessor to
windows 10 that pretty much all big corporations are also skipping over. Its the "new"
Windows OS and the core of what
Windows 10 is with all the worst of the usability and functionality flaws stripped out. Most will also wait until the first service pack for
Windows 10 before rolling it out which will squash most of the initial bugs in 10 and also give the IT admins and help desk staff plenty of time to test and qualify all of their line of business applications for full compatibility and to develop their new network management methods that will be needed to properly support the new OS.
I'm pretty sure that, like
Windows 7 was,
Windows 10 will ultimately become the new "standard" for a good number of years. As far as domain joined computers getting the free upgrade I have looked into it quite a bit. So far Microsoft has been pretty vague about that scenario and what they have pretty much said so far is that enterprise customers with active Software Assurance volume licensing agreements will have a method for getting desktops upgraded to
Windows 10. Other information from Microsoft has said there are a couple of other options for domain joined computers. One thing said that domain joined computers will be able to manually get the free upgrade while another method (not terrible if you don't have a lot of them) is to temporarily remove the
computer from the domain (change it to just a workgroup) and then run the
Windows updates that trigger the upgrade icon, register for the upgrade, and then re-join the
computer to the domain.
I have our network up here at our shop setup as a
Windows Server AD domain (we run our own exchange server and whatnot) so its going to be a manual process for me as well with about 15 desktops to upgrade when the time comes... I'm already testing it on one machine now and will be checking things like drivers for our Mimaki, FlexiSign, and other applications we run prior to any sort of full scale deployment.
