Well as I said, I also avoided Win8 like the plague for years because of Metro, but once you hide it, you are left with an optimized Win7.
Hmm, I still have access to the BIOS !? You just have to partition your drive *before* installing W8 and tell it to install in the partition of your choice. If you use W8 installer to do the partition, it will create that extra partition. But even with that partition I'm almost certain that the BIOS is still accessible ?