What is the difference between a DOS laptop and Windows 8 laptop? A DOS laptop means that it is practically unusable since the OS is is more than a decade old.You have to remove that OS and install a usable one like the recent version of Windows/Ubuntu.This is the reason laptops that come with DOS are cheaper comparatively. Both DOS(Disk Operating System) and Windows 8 are operating systems. DOS doesn't have any graphical user interface i.e. you have to type command for everything , even for something as simple as opening a file, which was a big headache for users.
Then graphical user interfaces started coming. The last GUI operating system that was built on DOS was Windows Me and it was a huge disaster. It was bad in just about every way.
Concurrently, Microsoft had the NT OS in production, mainly targeting business users. NT stood for "New Technologies" . NT OS turned out to be a huge success since it wasn't limited like MS DOS .Windows 2000, XP, Vista, 2003, 7, 2013, 8, 10 are all built on Windows NT.