- Messages
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Hey guys, I am deciding of should I get Windows 8 or not, and I want to know what features are standing out most. What do you think?
My Computer
System One
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- OS
- Windows XP and Windows 7 Home Primimum
Speed. Boot, shutdown, and general speed. Everything is faster, substantially so in some places. That and the fact that focus will now be on 8 and not 7 as the months roll by.
Speed? On boot up I'm yet to see that. In Win 7 my best is 45 seconds, just tested in Win 8, a miserable 80 seconds, that's 77% longer than Win 7! Maybe it's because I have to click to go to desktop but still, very slow and especially with a SSD.
If you buy a new PC right now with 7 already on it, it's 15 dollars and usually the OEM will cover the cost for you on certain models. Otherwise, it's 40 dollars until January 31st.You can get it for $15 as well. So, I guess that's something that stands out.
So how do I focus on the desktop only and get rid of Metro?
Speed. Boot, shutdown, and general speed. Everything is faster, substantially so in some places. That and the fact that focus will now be on 8 and not 7 as the months roll by.
Speed? On boot up I'm yet to see that. In Win 7 my best is 45 seconds, just tested in Win 8, a miserable 80 seconds, that's 77% longer than Win 7! Maybe it's because I have to click to go to desktop but still, very slow and especially with a SSD.
Greg
TRIM had a lot of limitations on Windows 7. For instance, if you had a RAID array of SSD's, TRIM wasn't supported. This is supported in Windows 8.
USB 3 is available through more than just 7 series chipsets. There are third party USB 3 chips and IO cards, for instance. The point is that Windows 8 supports USB 3 natively. Windows 7 did not include support for this, and it had to be added on. This meant that Windows 7 treated USB 3 devices as if they were USB 2 devices, and the driver did the translation. This was problematic because USB 3 added a number of new features that Windows 7 did not know about, thus could not support, such as the improved power management features of USB 3.
Microsoft to provide USB 3.0 support for better battery life in Windows 8 | ZDNet
The multi-monitor support does a number of things. First, it allows you to have *different* wallpapers on each monitor. Second, the taskbar has been added to each monitor, and it can be configured to only show icons for apps that are on that screen, or it can be configured for the main screen and the screen the apps are on, or it can be configured to show apps on all 3 screens. This is a nice feature.
The improvements to DirectX are largely with new added features, which won't show up when benchmarking existing apps. You need apps that take advantage of those things. However, even so... there seems to be some performance problems with the built-in NVidia driver. Radeon's actually get better performance in Windows 8 than in Windows 7.
Where can you get it for 15$..?
It is correct that windows 8 has native USB 3 support, but at a price. USB 3 is utterly slow compared to windows 7, with present driver anyway. It might be fixed with a forthcomming driver, but for now it is only 15-25% faster than USB2 in Windows 8.