^6 install classic shell. It's free, gives you a real start button and hides the metro interface and charm corners forever.
I find 8 runs better than 7, like the new task manager and on laptops with a built in recovery partition, I hate wiping that out to put a different OS on. The recovery is so easy, drivers already installed, etc.
Up to you, but I couldn't be bothered to find that drivers that probably aren't updated, buy a copy of 7, etc, etc. Install classic shell and windows 8 will look just like windows 7.