Microsoft has lunched windows 8, 1 before 3 years. They have done lots of improvement in the OS. At the start it was having lots of concern, like it used to get hanged in timely manner. Microsoft provided lots of patches in a span of one year to fix all those.
With the latest build it’s really stable and efficient. The look and feel of UI is improved a lot from their earlier version. File search functionality is also very very fast now. Apart from all those they have added lots of inbuild facility to cross verify the application while user try to install a outside software.By any chance OS finds any concern with the file, it notifies back to the user. You can safe guard your files and registry with new features by adding administrator previlage to them so that any of the outside application can not hamper them at run time,
With RAM as low as 2GB you can easily go ahead and keep on surfing or doing some task in Windows8.1 very efficiently.