Windows 8

[La literatura]

Well, who has made the switch? Is it worth the time and $40 for the upgrade? Will my life becoming better with it?

[Pushead2]

I'm thinking about upgrade but to be honest, I'm waiting for a "sold" moment where I'll be like - okay I'm in.

[htismaqe]

Originally Posted by Jive Ass

Did you do a clean install on a separate partition or do a Windows upgrade? I'm only curious because so many people have had trouble with the straight upgrade, and perhaps that influenced the speed of the operating system. I assume you did a separate install, but I figured I'd ask.

Clean install on a separate HDD that had previously been with wiped all 1's and formatted NTFS as part of the Win 8 install.

I was using Consumer Preview (I believe the build was 8250, but can't recall for sure).

[htismaqe]

Originally Posted by MoreLemonPledge

I've actually read quite a few positive reviews, much more so than negative ones.

I enjoy it quite a bit. Yes, there's a learning curve, but once you get past the fact that it's different, you'll see that the changes actually make sense for the most part. The switching between Metro/Start and Desktop can be a bit jarring initially, but it's really not that bad. It should work really well on a tablet.

I should admit that I have a Windows Phone and Xbox 360, so this Metro styling is quite familiar to me already. Regardless, once you get over the fact that it's different, you can begin to appreciate the innovations.

That's really my complaint.

On a tablet or touchscreen, it would be great.

On a regular desktop, Metro is completely superfluous. It doesn't really make anything more convenient at all.

And if you're using an app that isn't written for Windows 8, you have to drop out of Metro to desktop anyway.

[Braincase]

I'm going to get a tablet, I just need to wait on the Windows 8 Pro systems to ship next month. I still have a thing for the ASUS TaiChi.

[MoreLemonPledge]

Originally Posted by Braincase

I'm going to get a tablet, I just need to wait on the Windows 8 Pro systems to ship next month. I still have a thing for the ASUS TaiChi.

Get the Surface. It's a pretty nice piece of hardware.

[HC_Chief]

Originally Posted by Jive Ass

Did you do a clean install on a separate partition or do a Windows upgrade? I'm only curious because so many people have had trouble with the straight upgrade, and perhaps that influenced the speed of the operating system. I assume you did a separate install, but I figured I'd ask.

I did an upgrade and it is smoking fast... faster than W7.

Lenovo W520, i7, 16GB RAM, SSD

[htismaqe]

Here's something interesting.

All of you guys that are saying it's faster than Win 7 are running Intel-based platforms, mostly I7, with quite a bit of RAM. Are you running 64 or 32-bit?

I only had a copy of 32-bit Windows 7 Enterprise to test with so I was running 32-bit Windows 8 consumer preview on an AMD Athlon dualcore platform with only 4GB of RAM.

Windows 7 was definitely faster by a small margin.

[HC_Chief]

Originally Posted by htismaqe

Here's something interesting.

All of you guys that are saying it's faster than Win 7 are running Intel-based platforms, mostly I7, with quite a bit of RAM. Are you running 64 or 32-bit?

I only had a copy of 32-bit Windows 7 Enterprise to test with so I was running 32-bit Windows 8 consumer preview on an AMD Athlon dualcore platform with only 4GB of RAM.

Windows 7 was definitely faster by a small margin.

64-bit OS EntEd
32-bit Office 2010 & 2013 Pro

[htismaqe]

Originally Posted by HC_Chief

64-bit OS EntEd
32-bit Office 2010 & 2013 Pro

Hmm...kind of what I expected. I wonder if the increase in speed you guys are seeing is just the evolution of the OS, aka it's newer so it's better optimized for higher-end hardware and more RAM.

[HC_Chief]

Originally Posted by htismaqe

Hmm...kind of what I expected. I wonder if the increase in speed you guys are seeing is just the evolution of the OS, aka it's newer so it's better optimized for higher-end hardware and more RAM.

Probably; also helps that the interface is greatly simplified so fewer resources needed for the GUI.

I LOVE the desktop search functionality. Much better than a start menu (or any menu, for that matter). It is so nice to be able to start typing and it lists your apps.

The Desktop drives me nuts. I do not like having a Start screen and a Desktop. I don't get why it was done that way; especially since you cannot "skin" your OS to one or the other, exclusively. At least is is easy to switch: hit Windows key or click/swipe in left corner.

[Fish]

Originally Posted by htismaqe

Hmm...kind of what I expected. I wonder if the increase in speed you guys are seeing is just the evolution of the OS, aka it's newer so it's better optimized for higher-end hardware and more RAM.

Win8 uses a different boot method than Win7. It's a sort of hybrid boot that incorporates a lot of hibernation behavior instead of the traditional cold boot. The kernel isn't completely closed at shutdown like in previous Windows versions, it's actually in a hibernation state.

Now here’s the key difference for Windows 8: as in Windows 7, we close the user sessions, but instead of closing the kernel session, we hibernate it. Compared to a full hibernate, which includes a lot of memory pages in use by apps, session 0 hibernation data is much smaller, which takes substantially less time to write to disk. If you’re not familiar with hibernation, we’re effectively saving the system state and memory contents to a file on disk (hiberfil.sys) and then reading that back in on resume and restoring contents back to memory. Using this technique with boot gives us a significant advantage for boot times, since reading the hiberfile in and reinitializing drivers is much faster on most systems (30-70% faster on most systems we’ve tested).

It’s faster because resuming the hibernated system session is comparatively less work than doing a full system initialization, but it’s also faster because we added a new multi-phase resume capability, which is able to use all of the cores in a multi-core system in parallel, to split the work of reading from the hiberfile and decompressing the contents. For those of you who prefer hibernating, this also results in faster resumes from hibernate as well.

More: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2...windows-8.aspx

Win8 also uses EUFI instead of BIOS on EUFI capable mobos. If you have a EUFI supported mobo, that alone will reduce boot time by quite a bit.

EUFI: http://gcn.com/articles/2012/10/31/s...ello-uefi.aspx

[htismaqe]

Originally Posted by KC Fish

Win8 uses a different boot method than Win7. It's a sort of hybrid boot that incorporates a lot of hibernation behavior instead of the traditional cold boot. The kernel isn't completely closed at shutdown like in previous Windows versions, it's actually in a hibernation state.

That seems to imply that booting up, in particular, should be much faster on Windows 8.

That's the opposite of my experience actually.

Even after going into the user controls and removing the mandatory login, etc., the off-to-usable time on Windows 7 is about 10% less.

[Fish]

Originally Posted by htismaqe

That seems to imply that booting up, in particular, should be much faster on Windows 8.

That's the opposite of my experience actually.

Even after going into the user controls and removing the mandatory login, etc., the off-to-usable time on Windows 7 is about 10% less.

Well in my experience, Win8 does boot faster on a wide variety of machines. And that seems to be the overwhelming consensus from everywhere else too. Googling Windows 8 boot time shows just about every link reporting faster boot times. There are even reports that running Win8 on a SSD boots so fast that you only have 200ms to hit F8 if you want Safe Mode, and it's not enough time for most people to catch it. That's part of the reason MS introduced the Boot Options within the OS.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Mic...ons,15738.html

[HC_Chief]

Originally Posted by htismaqe

That seems to imply that booting up, in particular, should be much faster on Windows 8.

That's the opposite of my experience actually.

Even after going into the user controls and removing the mandatory login, etc., the off-to-usable time on Windows 7 is about 10% less.

Could be crap in the startup slowing you down. Once you're in W8, launch Task Manager and switch to the Startup tab. Disable the crap you don't need at startup there. It can make a HUGE difference in boot times (this holds true for W7 as well)

[htismaqe]

Originally Posted by HC_Chief

Could be crap in the startup slowing you down. Once you're in W8, launch Task Manager and switch to the Startup tab. Disable the crap you don't need at startup there. It can make a HUGE difference in boot times (this holds true for W7 as well)

Yeah, I hadn't done any real tweaking. Does that mean that by default, Windows 8 has more "crap" in startup?