right i know i'm really slow to this and everything, but my macbook (used macs for years) is about to take a shit and die and for financial reasons i'm thinking i'm looking at a windows laptop.

yeah the thing is, i just saw what windows 8 looks like. like one of those fisher price laptops. i know the majority of all people are pleb as fuck but come on, they're surely alienating a lot of people with this.

will it alert me when other stuff is happening? because i use msn and when i get a new message the little msn man jumps up and down, if i have msn + chrome open on windows 8 and get a new message will it somehow let me know? THIS IS IMPORTANT

there are some laptops for sale with windows 7 but i don't even know if that's better, i haven't used windows since the XP days.